Palestine/Israel is often described as a place lacking in child rights. Palestinian children, critics argue, are denied their rights and, as a result, their childhood. If only these rights were implemented, so the assumption goes, then Palestinians would be much better off. This panel seeks to problematize this prevailing narrative – to think beyond and, in some respects, even against the child rights discourse. How does this discourse contribute, inadvertently or not, to the harm and violence experienced by Palestinians? What does it overlook, downplay, and misrepresent? What alternative discourses and ways of being does it marginalize or preclude?
Tackling all these questions, this panel sheds critical light on the ways in which child rights, as a praxis and discourse, frame and affect the situation in Palestine/Israel. To this end, the panel brings together several theoretical frameworks and methodologies, including fieldwork with children and adults in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, as well as critiques of the conduct and rhetoric of both state and human rights actors.
Using these complementary lenses, the papers in this panel look at the meaning(s) of agency in the Palestinian-Israeli context and the varied ways in which children in Palestine develop and exercise political agency, both in relation to the Israeli regime and to Palestinian social hierarchies. Brought to light in this panel is Israel’s increasing co-optation of the child rights discourse as a means of legitimizing and honing its violence against Palestinians – as well as the unwitting complicity of the human rights community in this trend.
A common thread throughout the papers is the role of the child rights discourse in this regard: its romanticization of childhood, its promotion of an adult-centric worldview, its association of Palestinian children with trauma and vulnerability, its individualization and decontextualization of the issues facing these children, and, consequently, its denial or misrepresentation of these children’s agency and voice. Across these themes, the presenters bring to the fore different gaps and tensions: those between dominant images of childhood and the lived experiences of Palestinians; those between Israel’s child rights rhetoric and its use of these rights as a tool of oppression; and those between abstract rights and the specific political context.
-
Dr. Hedi Viterbo
Human rights critics repeatedly accuse Israel of denying Palestinian children their rights and childhood, and of flouting international legal norms. However, not only is this narrative premised on a romanticized and essentializing concept of childhood, it also lets the legal discourse of child rights off the hook too easily.
Drawing on critical scholarship on childhood, law, and human rights, as well as on hundreds of previously unexamined primary sources (many of which are not in the public domain), this paper sheds light on the growing complicity of the child rights discourse in Israeli state violence. I argue that this discourse, like human rights and law more broadly, easily lends itself to competing interpretations and applications, including those operating in the service of state domination.
This paper thus examines how Israel, in the name of international legal norms and “Palestinian children’s best interests,” has sought to subjugate Palestinian minds, bodies, and interactions. Far from simply denying Palestinians their childhood, Israel has in fact increasingly imposed on them a legally enshrined model of childhood that works to their detriment.
If the child rights discourse and its supposedly universal model of childhood are thus implicated in state violence, then what does this say about the role of their longtime advocates: liberal human rights actors – NGOs, UN bodies, and scholars? This paper demonstrates how the human rights community has repeatedly, if unwittingly, marginalized Palestinian children while legitimizing Israeli harshness and punitiveness toward Palestinian adults. Human rights critics of Israel, I argue, have not only failed to recognize how the child rights framework ends up harming Palestinians, but have also, in multiple ways, contributed to this harm.
From these troubling findings, this paper aims to draw lessons about the limitations and pitfalls of law and human rights, and specifically the legal language of child rights, in and beyond the Palestine/Israel context.
-
Dr. Bree Akesson
Concepts of trauma have become “a near universal set of theories and practices” (Thompson, 2009) to understand and address suffering. But humans have never neatly fit into universal theories and practices. An outsider to a political violence setting might expect trauma to be first and foremost in the minds of children and families who are experiencing such violence. Yet, my research has shown that children and families have more pressing concerns such as access to and quality of education, poverty, unemployment, deteriorating infrastructure, availability of play spaces. A sole focus on trauma tends to emphasize the negative over the positive, ignoring the sometimes mundane and sometimes joyful experiences in the midst of an “extraordinary” context. While individual stories of victimization and abuse draw attention to human suffering, such discourse often distracts from the wider context of political violence (Marshall, 2009). In this talk, I will discuss how research with children and families in Palestine can eclipse an understanding of their everyday lives where babies are being born, children are attending school, families are eating together and laughing at each other’s jokes, and parents are earning a living to support their children. In Palestine, the experience of trauma is not a sum total, but rather one part of children and their families’ whole life experience. The talk will conclude with recommendations for effective ways of engaging with Palestinian children and families to better understand their everyday experiences.
-
Conventionally defined as the child’s embodiment of free-will, “agency” is one of the critical components of the international children’s rights agenda. As an unchallenged concept, agency locks the researcher into an adult-centric worldview with a western, liberal definition of the individual. In this paper, I seek to construct a different (child-centered) set of parameters for understanding children’s agency. Instead of beginning with the question “What did the child do (or not do)?” I begin with the question “How and why did the child behave as he/she did?” The latter question begins with emotions as its launching point and formulates agency as something relative to the individual child. While agency can include outright defiance of adults, it can also include adherence to social norms, such as gaining the approval of adults. It is important to consider what the children themselves understand as agency: it can look radically different across and within communities. Thus, I focus less on ascribing agency to the individual child, and more on unpacking the meaning of agency in its respective contexts.
This paper is based on a case study of one young Palestinian growing up during the Second Intifada, a period (2000-2006) of intensified violence that came in the wake of the failed Oslo Accords. The child in this study in the throes of his normal life-course emotional formation, yet in the context of an environment that seeks his unchilding (Shalhoub-Kevorkian, 2019). He faces the additional crucible of conflicting emotional expectations about himself, his family, and his oppressor due to his unique, intersectional identity. Through the use of oral history and portraiture (Lightfoot-Davies, 1997), this paper shows how the boy develops an assemblage of survival tools, in which the conventional concept of agency is not always on the forefront of his mind. His tools are suitable for his age and based on kinship networks. While one case study does not speak for a whole generation of Palestinians, it does offer unique macro-level insights into experiences with children’s rights that quantitative research does not always catch.
-
Mr. Mohammed Alruzzi
The images of children throwing stones, demonstrating against the Israeli occupation, and taking part in political events in the context of the first Intifada and the second Intifada dominate any discussion on the Palestinian children and childhood. What is common in these images is the portrayal of the Palestinian childhood, and Palestinian children as a group, as deviant from the normative globalized and Eurocentric childhood or children. Children, in the Palestinian context, are usually presented as heroes or victims depending on the ideologically and politically charged narratives. Such perceptions, of heroism and victimhood, keep children in the arena of symbolism, through romanticizing them and their action, and exclude them from activism. Their resistance, for example, is usually overlooked in these perceptions/constructions.
This paper aims at highlighting aspects of their resistance not only to the Israeli occupation and its settler colonial practices, but also to the social hierarchical structures that undermine or overlook their role and contribution. Drawing on fieldworks conducted at different times in the last five years in the West Bank including East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip, this paper explores forms of resistance led and practiced by the youngsters. Attending to their voices, the fieldworks use ethnographies to unveil the subjective ways the children see and think of themselves and their choices and actions. Contrary to the dominant portrayal of Palestinian childhood as a homogeneous common experience, the papers showed the various ways childhood and children’s resistance manifest in Palestine, also through the lenses of gender, class and generation.
