Al Khalil, a place of central importance in Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, was excluded from the September 1995 agreement to “restore” Palestinian rule over the West Bank—but one of the Oslo Accords’ litany of betrayals. Consequently, after the 1997 Hebron Protocol, the area was further mapped, cut up, and relabelled into H1 and H2: the former ostensibly controlled by the Palestinian National Authority, and the latter by the Zionist entity known by some as “Israel.” Zionist military control over 35,000 Palestinians in H2, and its protection of 700 particularly fanatic settlers has led to huge destruction of Palestinian socio-cultural life and political economy. Here, Palestinians are suffocated by an architecture of confinement that directs and monitors them at all times: experimental facial recognition and CCTV surveils them constantly, even reaching directly into their homes. Some inhabitants have been forced to build wire cages around their own windows for protection from attacks, or climb in from their roofs because their front doors have been welded shut; that is, when it’s even possible to go outside due to curfews and restrictions on movement (all of which have worsened after 7 October 2023). The apex of Al Khalil’s economy, the Old Market, is now a maze of blocked alleyways and militarised checkpoints. Its paths, once open to the sky, had to be covered with nets, then mesh, then plastic, to try to block the piss and breeze blocks that settlers chuck down from above, under the protective eye of the IOF. 

It’s here that I saw the glazed, pioneer-peacefulness emanating from the settler women. In their floral, mid-shin missionary skirts, they strolled with brain-wiped confidence along Al-Shuhada Street, where no Palestinian may tread. A gang of fascist trad-wives. Their presence depends on hollowing out the eyes, palms, and bellies of Palestinian children who follow the occasional passersby through the now-enclosed alleyways of the old market, begging them to buy their trinkets, each one emblazoned with “Palestine”, “Jerusalem”—the names we give our hearts. 

*

Settler-colonialism—the inherently genocidal structure of land and resource expropriation—is bound inside a number of conundrums centred around the concept of childhood, and the real existence of people categorised, variously, as children. 

Many theories of child development grew alongside—and are pivotal to—colonial expansion. The story that the human develops from a pre-mature, wild, animal-adjacent creature into a self-regulating, rational, mature and therefore fully human adult has become a common sense assumption.¹ This has enabled colonialisms to inscribe their to-be-colonised subjects as child-like: ignorant, savage, technologically naive, requiring a firm hand. As Ashis Nandy has argued, “much of the pull of the ideology of colonialism and much of the power of the idea of modernity can be traced to the evolutionary implications of the concept of the child in the Western world-view.”² The colonised cannot care for themselves or their land. Nandy again: “the metaphor of childhood was mobilised to justify imperialism.”³

Sarah de Leeuw argues that children are unique reminders of indigenous⁴ continuity on the land and are therefore prime targets of colonial management. In other words, they must be captured very young:

“As embodiments of extant Indigeneity, Indigenous children were threats to settler-colonial imaginations. So something had to be done with Aboriginal children. That something occurred through residential schools and imprinted itself on the bodies of children.”⁵

The child removal policies that forced Aboriginal children into so-called residential schools in so-called “Canada” under the guise of saving them from their supposedly know-nothing child-like parents, sought to instigate a process of de-indigenisation and thus, deterritorialisation. Settler colonialism, de Leeuw continues, “relegated groups of people to a perpetual state of truncated childhood while simultaneously removing their children in order that those children mature into adults who embodied radically different cultural traits than their ancestors.”⁶ The intention was to sever children from the tender ties of knowing the particularities of their situatedness in time and space (to borrow from Laura Ann Stoler). An internal epistemicide, a severing of the self from the routes and ways of her worlds. Dislocation. 

When carceral geographies are thrust onto the bodies of racialised children, it is done to dispossess them of their historic and ongoing attachments to, and presence on, their lands. It seeks to destroy the validity of their being on these lands. These carceralities function differently in different settler colonial spaces, though the intention to amputate—both literally⁷ and metaphorically—is common. 

Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian has written extensively on how the colonial management of Palestinian children operates through an always classed, racialising process of making-demonic instead of a making-helpless. The Zionist entity captures and tortures the born-guilty instead of the born-to-the-wrong-group. The idea that Palestinian children are born with the potentiality of “terrorism” is embedded in the militarised Israeli psyche, and within the entity’s legal processes. One of “Israel”’s contemporary modes of deterritorialising Palestinian children is child incarceration in the West Bank.

Two legal systems have operated in the West Bank since 1967: civilian law applies to “Israeli” settlers and military law applies to Palestinians, including children as young as 12 who can be imprisoned, arrested and prosecuted like adults. “Israel” defines settler children as under-18, but Palestinian children as under-16, thereby creating “two different childhoods along national lines in the OPT.”⁸ Every year, “Israel” prosecutes 500-700 Palestinian children within its military courts, and approximately 13,000 children have been imprisoned since 2000. The most common charge is stone throwing. Children are usually arrested near settlements or checkpoints. Children who have been released in prisoner swap deals since 7 October 2023, or who have been arrested in Gaza, have described disturbing new levels of violence—extreme overcrowding, beatings, minimal food, dogs in cells, tear gassing of cells, purposeful beating of already injured boys—alongside the systemic use of solitary confinement and sexual violence. 

It is profitable and necessary for the Zionist entity to expend its resources on arresting and charging children for a number of reasons. Firstly, because approximately 86% of children are denied bail, they tend to plead guilty as it’s better than awaiting trial in detention which can take months to schedule. This allows military courts to report an almost 100% conviction rate, which in turn justifies the entity’s carceral apparatus: checkpoints, watchtowers, digital monitoring, cages, murders, genocide, and very existence.

Secondly, juvenile incarceration often results in further limitations⁹ on a child’s freedom of movement, thereby shrinking the space in which Palestinian children can exist. They are severed from their peers, land, community, and opportunities to actively struggle for liberation. By ensuring that imprisonment continues beyond the space-time of the prison itself, Zionism seeks to make incarceration the condition of Palestinian life. It aims to create petrified, passive subjects shrunken into ever smaller and more silent domains so as to destroy Palestinian futurity in advance of itself, and ensure settler dominance. 

This “unchilding,” to borrow from Shalhoub-Kevorkian, this “thingification,” to borrow from Aimé Césaire, attempts to exile Palestinian children from articulating, as a political demand, their desire for childhood. The making-demonic of Palestinian children exiles them beyond even the supposedly protected zone of the human, and abandons them inside the non-space and the non-time of “death zones.” Laleh Khalili observed that during the Second Intifada, the IOF’s Southern Command Unit headed by Brigadier General Zvika Fogel had “unofficially declared death zones in Gaza, where anyone entering could be shot.”¹⁰ In the death zone—not the “war zone,” not the “conflict zone” as Shalhoub-Kevorkian notes—presence means death, presence is killability: 

“The spatial implications of “death zones” are particularly relevant to Palestinian children because, by expanding the culpability of “terrorist” violence to certain areas (rather than certain bodies), children fall into the spatial category of presumed guilt. The concept of “death zones” produces a politicised space in which all inhabitants—the “dangerous” populations, the taken-for-granted enemy—threaten the colonising state.”¹¹

Palestinian children are constructed as terrorist Others who can—with legal “legitimacy”—be stolen from their lives and imprisoned; who can be shot dead in the street without consequence (at a rate of one child every two days in the West Bank since 7 October 2023); who can be slaughtered en masse; abused; disappeared. The mass murder of children in Gaza is the crescendo of over a century of Zionist violence against Palestinian children. It must be understood as being part of a continuum of organised violence across Palestine in its entirety, contra Zionist cartographies and historiographies.

The presumed guilt of the Palestinian child, and by implication, of all Palestinians, but particularly those in Gaza right now, provides the legal and literal ground for settler society to plant itself. Without even moving she is already blocked from almost all sides; the born-guilty Palestinian existing in her home/land has crossed a border into the zone of killability. 

The entity’s strategy is cartographic. The Gaza “strip” itself is an invention, its border created by what bound it: the early settlements that locked it in, then stripped it. On 1 December 2023, the IOF published a map of Gaza split into numbered zones to politely give Palestinians a guide to escape death. The map was a euphemism for there is nowhere left to run. The colonial strategy of divide and rule played out genocidally: map, zone, label, name, capture, chase, pack, objectify, cram, shoot, bomb, burn, starve, poison, shrink, annihilate. More and more people in less and less space until there is nowhere, until they are dust. Burned to death in tents. Eviscerated by chemical weapons. Disappeared into 30 foot-deep craters. After the Rafah Tent Massacre on 26 May 2024 a woman held out her palm to the camera, presenting to us a small heap of ash: My six children, world, they became the size of a handful of sand. 

*

The first space is the womb. Management of colonised territory begins inside the bodies of colonised women. If nationalisms are always gendered—the mother/land we must protect and that protects us (its children), the father/land we must make proud and that will be proud of us (its children)—then the bourgeois, heterosexual family unit is their underwriter. In an ethno-religious fascistic nation like “Israel”—which masquerades as a bastion of liberal, LGBTQ, feminist, democratic values surrounded by a sea of savagery—purity is of paramount, defining importance; and so reproduction becomes a preoccupation.

Palestinians throughout historic Palestine outnumber “Israelis.” When we see entire Palestinian lineages in Gaza being wiped from the civic register, we are also seeing the extent of Zionist anxiety to “win” the “demographic race”—an anxiety that has plagued the entity since its formation.¹² “Israel”’s pro-natalist biopolitics, its thriving fertility economy, its encouragement of Jewish people the world over to make Aliyah, and its historic coercion of the Jewish people of Iraq, Morocco, Yemen, Egypt and Algeria to emigrate to the newly formed Zionist colony reveal its foundational ontological bind. Commitment to a racially pure, Jewish-majority state means “Israel” “has two options in front of it: equality (and thus self-negation) or genocide.”¹³ While the entity has never stopped choosing the latter, its existential nervousness will never be fully soothed so long as Palestinian life continues. As Nasser Abourahme elegantly puts it: “Political orders that cannot close their moments of foundational conquest and consign that conquest’s violence to the political unconscious are vulnerable orders. They are unsettled orders.”¹⁴ Palestinian children are a constant, unsettling reminder of the unclosable moment. The management of childhood, reproduction, and demography is therefore a focal point of the settler state’s ethno-nationalist self-making. 

Chandra Talpade Mohanty described how “Third World Women” are re/produced through some Western feminist discourses:

“…as a homogenous ‘powerless’ group often located as implicit victims of particular socio-economic systems…victims of male violence…victims of the colonial process…victims of the Arab familial system…victims of the Islamic code.”¹⁵

Liberal media and academia have reproduced these ideas throughout this genocide: the image of the bereft Palestinian mother publicly mourning her children has, again, become the image of the Palestinian woman. “Israel”’s genocidal spectacle is, then, framed not only as self-defence but as a “protective duty towards women and LGBTQ people”¹⁶ and, crucially, children. The massacres of “women and children” become “collateral damage” in a “just war” against the savage Palestinian male (or: “Hamas”).

The Zionist entity has been making the claim that killing Palestinian children is unfortunate but necessary since its inception. Golda Meir, one of the entity’s first prime ministers, wrote “…we will perhaps in time be able to forgive the Arabs for killing our sons, but it will be harder for us to forgive them for having forced us to kill their sons.” The murder of women and children is used to legitimise the murder of men, which is used to conceal the fact that everyone is a target, particularly children. Everyone killed in Gaza dies at least twice. First, at the point of their own death, and second, when their death is used to justify the deaths of others. The aim is to dissolve indigenous society and presence on the land and plant the settler in its stead, “this urge to destroy, which is then followed by an idealised replacement, is the central policy of the settler-colonial rulers.”¹⁷ Fifty per cent of Gaza’s population is—or was—under 18. 

The Zionist entity’s preoccupation with children does not only speak to an obsession with social engineering, but to the fact that Palestinian children have always been active agents of, and in, resistance. This irks and troubles liberal do-gooder mentalities that would rather fix Palestinians as objects of superhuman resilience or pitiful mammalian vulnerability; that would rather line up the shoes of children in some European capital and weep about how they cannot take it anymore. But the fact is, it is Palestinian children who led the First Intifada (1987-1993), also known as “the children’s revolt,” and participated in the Second Intifada (2000-2005); it is Palestinian youth who articulated the Unity Intifada (2021); it is the youth of Beita who unsettle the settlers, turning each night bright, unsleepable, with lasers, torches and burning tyres; it is Palestinian kids who grew up witnessing multiple onslaughts on Gaza, the West Bank and beyond, who joined multiple resistance factions and are fighting today; and it is Palestinian and Arab youth all over the planet who are leading today’s global movement for and with Palestine. 

But Zionism cannot break the will to resistance, for it is identical to the will to life. This is not a poetic claim but an ordinary truth: it is not possible to pacify and petrify any collective identity forged in love and struggle. 

An 11-year-old Palestinian girl in 2013: “Israel said the first Palestinian generation will die and the next one will forget. No one could forget what happened for the last generations. My father and mother told me, and I will tell my children. We will not forget. Even if I said nothing, every place reminds you.”¹⁸

*

When I saw the video of a girl finding her mother under the rubble, identifying her by a strand of her hair curling out from underneath the concrete, I confess I entered into a slightly altered reality. It is hard to hold onto meaning there. Sometimes, I think the meaningless means some part of me, or us, is dead too. I don’t know what that means yet. It’s formless, like silence. Like waiting. Like listening. Here are some of the questions gathered by the Palestine Trauma Centre from children in Gaza: 

Do children who have their legs amputated grow new legs?

Do the Israeli pilots who bomb children have children?

Will the dogs that ate the dead bodies of the martyrs turn into humans?

After we die, will I hear your voice? 

One hears the black heralds of a reality almost entirely under the spell of the rational, “adult” world. Only a total annihilation of the conditions of these questions’ existence would be an adequate answer. 

Ashis Nandy wrote about Cecil Rhodes’ sense that “children could be dangerous.” Nandy: “The colonial ideology required the savages to be children, but it also feared that the savages could be like children.”¹⁹ In other words, children can break through, tunnel under, and fly over the logical, violent constructions that the world of “adults” has built to cage them. Palestinian children are witnesses to, and archivists of, the ravages of Zionism. They are the authors, carriers, and distributors of collective memory. Children interrupt Zionist historiography by simply existing. They discomfit liberal, humanitarian discourses by being active agents in every aspect of their lives under occupation. They study. They dance. They make light. They remember. They survive. They live. 

Perhaps the world of adults should be scared.