Remember the lessons we learned growing up? “Don’t lie.” “Don’t steal.” “Don’t kill,” and “Respect others.” Lovely little guidelines — printed on classroom walls, preached in morning assemblies, and instantly forgotten by adulthood. It turns out they were written for the weak. The strong? They get a completely different curriculum.

By Hiba Kilany
Since 1948, Israel seems to have been enrolled in the Advanced Bullies Program: majoring in Selective Morality with a minor in Global Indifference.

The syllabus? Simple: steal land, call it self-defence; demolish homes, call it security; silence an entire people, call it democracy. And when questioned, they cry antisemitism.

The Nakba is not a footnote. It’s a lived, documented catastrophe — recorded by the UN, witnessed by generations, still unfolding under new names and hashtags. We used to say that lies have short legs. Apparently, they can run marathons when they wear the right flag.

Human rights? Those quaint bedtime stories. Civilians die by the thousands, and the world drafts “strongly worded” statements, as if adjectives could stop missiles or resurrect children. Perhaps next time, the UN can send aid instead of adverbs.

The UN Independent Commission of Inquiry’s 2025 report — a formal fact-finding mission, not an op-ed — concluded that the campaign in Gaza meets four out of five acts defined by the Genocide Convention. A legal red flag. Serious. Stark. Rare.

The UN rights office has also characterised settlement expansion and settler violence in the West Bank as conduct amounting to war crimes under the laws of occupation. These aren’t rhetorical flourishes — they’re legal definitions that obligate states not to assist or ignore such acts.

You can dress it up with euphemisms — “security operation,” “collateral damage,” “proportionate response” — and spin desks will dutifully translate wreckage into metrics and caveats.

But the documents don’t lie. They chart a grim arithmetic: tens of thousands of civilians dead, neighbourhoods erased, hospitals flattened, and food turned into a weapon of negotiation.

Those aren’t partisan slogans — they’re actionable facts.

Meanwhile, online, Zionist extremists play war games on camera — cheering bomb drops, spitting on priests, teaching children songs of racial supremacy. On the beaches of a blockaded Gaza, people are shot for breathing too close to the sea, while a few miles away, tanning tourists sip cocktails over ashes.

On the other side, the children who saw their homes collapse grow up learning a different curriculum:
“Don’t hope.”
“Don’t trust.”
“Don’t expect justice.”

And yet, somehow, they still dare to live — to study, to love, to rebuild — under skies that promise only drones. That, perhaps, is the last act of defiance in a world where the bullies not only rule the playground but also own the whistle, the scoreboard, and the principal’s office.

But let’s be generous. Perhaps the world has forgotten the basics. A quick refresher:
Lesson One: Stealing land is not a “peace process.”
Lesson Two: Killing civilians is not “defence.”
Lesson Three: Silence is not “neutrality” — it's complicity dressed in diplomacy.

The truth is painfully simple: when bullies write the rules, the dictionary's meaning changes. “Occupation” becomes “security.” “Oppression” becomes “policy.” “Apartheid”? Oh no, that’s “border control.”

We were told not to lie. Yet the biggest lie of all has been allowed to stand for decades — the lie that some lives matter less than others.

So maybe it’s time to reprint those old posters — not for the children, but for the adults who forgot:
Don’t lie.
Don’t steal.
Don’t kill.
Respect others.

Basic stuff, really. We shouldn’t need a United Nations to remind us.