The first lesson of childhood here is not written in books. It is carved into skin, into the tightness of a mother’s grip when soldiers pass. It is the silence that suffocates the air when checkpoints loom ahead, the way our names catch in foreign mouths, twisted into suspicion before they are even spoken. Childhood does not begin with lullabies—it begins with orders: Memorise your ID number. Do not run. Do not argue. Do not forget who you are.

I remember my first lesson well. Allenby Bridge, a wound in the earth where air thickens with fear, where metal detectors stand like executioners, rifles slung across shoulders like extra limbs. I was young enough to believe in kindness, old enough to recognize its absence. My mother’s knuckles clenched around our papers, her silence a scream swallowed whole. That day, I learned what they will never teach in school: here, freedom is not a right—it is a privilege, withheld before we can even ask for it.

Childhood here is not an age. It is a negotiation, a constant recalibration between erasure and survival. We learn to play in alleyways that double as battlefields. A boy shapes a slingshot from the same rubber that scars the streets after raids. A girl builds a house from shattered bricks, stacking them carefully, only to watch them kicked apart by marching boots. We do not play—we rehearse. We are not allowed softness; we are trained in endurance before we can taste innocence.

The streets do not echo with ice cream trucks but with the low drone of surveillance, the staccato of gunfire, the wail of sirens replacing lullabies. The posters that cover our kiosks do not show cartoon characters, only the faces of martyrs, their names recited like prayers, their memories pressed into us like fingerprints. We look at them and wonder if, one day, our own faces will be printed in the same ink, framed with the same solemnity.

But we are not only grief. Our joy is resistance, etched into the walls they try to erase, woven into the songs of our grandmothers. We do not endure—we insist on living. We grip each other’s hands as if holding onto the land itself, proof that we are still here. They will not turn our childhoods into footnotes of their war. We laugh, not as escape, but as defiance. We run. We dream. Not in spite of the world, but because we refuse to be erased.

We are sharpened by our childhoods, forged in the fire of stolen homes and fractured nights. We carry the weight of land, the permanence of loss, the inheritance of a fight we did not choose but claim anyway. We carve our names into history before they can be erased. We carry grief without breaking. We build in the ruins. We exist—not as shadows, but as proof.

Here, childhood is measured in warnings. A child drops to the ground at the crack of gunfire before ever learning to tie their shoes. A boy memorises every checkpoint between here and the sea, though he has never touched the water. A girl runs her fingers over maps, not tracing journeys, but understanding where the world has closed in around her. We are not taught how to live—only how to move within the limits they have set, how to breathe without taking up too much space.

We do not ask for your pity. We demand that you see. That you understand childhood here is not just suffering, not just loss. It is fire, unextinguished. We are not just children of struggle—we are children of love, of resistance, of generations that refuse to disappear. We do not fade. We do not vanish. We remain.

One day, perhaps, we will know a childhood unmarked by curfews and interrogations. A childhood where our names are not questions but songs, where our homes are not targets but sanctuaries. Until that day, we will grow. We will fight. We will dance beneath this sky that has seen too much, and we will remind the world:

We are here.
We have always been here.
And we will not be erased.


–Ali Asfour