From ‘Unchilding’ to ‘Childcide’: Palestinian Childhood under Settler-Colonialism
From ‘Unchilding’ to ‘Childcide’: Palestinian Childhood under Settler-Colonialism
Authors: Basma Hajir and William W. McInerney
This blog is adapted and drawn from part of a keynote speech delivered by the first author at the ‘Letters for Palestinian Childhoods’ exhibition in Oxford, UK in June 2024. Letters for Palestinian Childhoods is an online and in-person exhibition dedicated to the children of Palestine which its organisers say aims “to counter dehumanising narratives about Palestinians, showing solidarity by attending to the names, stories, experiences, dreams, and struggles of Palestinian children and the actions of the Western-backed Israeli state which are so violently shaping their lives.” At the time of writing, the travelling exhibition was at the University of Oxford displaying dozens of letters, poems, and works of art gathered from around the world.
Bearing witness to the exhibition evokes a small sense of hope in the midst of a sea of despair. It reminded us of Edward Said's words on the systems and apparatuses that control our lives. Said noted that no matter how dominating an apparatus is, it cannot dominate everything (Said, 2004). Decolonial scholar Walter Mignolo (2021) wrote that there are always cracks within the system and it is our responsibility to spot these cracks, open them and extend fissures. The organisers of this exhibition have done just that. Amidst ongoing distortions, silencing, and crackdowns on the Palestine solidarity movement, their work represents an important initiative that fosters narrative and discursive change.
This understanding of systemic cracks also connects with Patrick Wolfe’s famous theorisation of settler colonialism as a structure, not merely an event. In the context of Palestine, this structure is perpetrated by the Zionist settler colonial movement and sustained and mediated through a colonial world order and global racial politics. From the beginning, Palestine’s settler-colonialism has been enacted by the international order. Therefore, it is crucial to approach the current moment and the genocidal violence unleashed against Palestinians in Gaza in a way that traces wider continuities and connections. Ultimately, as expressed in a joint statement from genocide scholars:
“Effectively reading genocide as some extraordinary aberration from a dominant, liberal, supposedly rules-based norm has elided the systemic, embedded violence which is at that liberal order’s own heart,” (Levene and Akcam, 2021).
In this blog, we examine the violence enacted by Israel and its allies under the guise of the global liberal order on Palestine and its people. Inspired by the letters from the exhibition, we look at the devastating impact of Israel’s genocidal violence on Palestinian children in particular. We do so as educationalists and through the lens our experiences as a Palestinian scholar (Basma) and US American scholar who has worked with children in Palestine (William). Specifically, we will foreground what Palestinian scholar Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian has called the ‘unchilding’ of Palestinian kids. We will discuss why this concept is essential in understanding what is happening in Gaza and how the powerful testimonies of Palestinian children, their families, and those working in solidarity with them around the world can, and indeed must, motivate us all to upend this unprecedented violence against children. To demonstrate this point, we will end with the poetic testimony of a Palestinian mother from Gaza whose words urge us to remember, as James Baldwin famously wrote, “The children are always ours, every single one of them, all over the globe; and I am beginning to suspect that whoever is incapable of recognizing this may be incapable of morality.”
From ‘Unchilding’ to ‘Childcide’
In her book ‘Incarcerated Childhood and the Politics of Unchilding’ (2019), Nadra Shalhoub-Kevorkian shows us how politics cannot be separated from issues relating to childhood. She talks about the ‘unchilding’ of Palestinian kids; and she defines it as the “the authorised eviction of children from childhood” (p. 122). ‘Unchilding’ involves positioning Palestinian children as ontologically inferior, racializing them as innately dangerous subjects, and keeping them “captive in ever-evolving zones of nonexistence and in geopolitically (in)visible spaces of annihilation where the world bears witness yet turns a blind eye” (p. 123).
Indeed, 'unchilding' is entrenched in and mediated through historical and contemporary racial politics that continue to silence and distort the Palestinian struggle for freedom. We see this starkly reflected today in the fact that none of the horrific images, information, and reports about Palestinian children in Gaza succeeded in entering the consciousness of global leaders and policymakers. Neither the deaths of 16,500 children, nor the disappearance of 20,000 (as reported by Save the Children). Neither the remains of premature babies left to rot in the NICU nor the sight of Sidra Hasuna's mutilated body hanging from the beam of her destroyed home. Neither the pleas of Hend Rajab, surrounded by her murdered family in the car, nor the beheaded body of 18-month-old Ahmad Al-Najjar, killed in the infamous ‘tents massacre’ in north Rafah. When world leaders did something, they asked Israel to investigate itself, to absolve it of accountability and “reproduce its civility” (Shalhoub-Kevorkian, 2019, p. 138).
Echoing the multi-century dehumanisation and adultification of Black children in countries like the US, ‘unchilding’ reveals a paradox where Palestinian children are already no-bodies, their lives are uncounted nonlives, while simultaneously they need control, restraint, immobilisation, captivity, and “neutralization” (Shalhoub-Kevorkian, 2019, p. 122). A quote we found powerful in Shalhoub-Kevorkian’s book (p. 128) is from Abir, a Palestinian child participant, who wrote to Nadra saying:
“On October 27th, on my way to school, I noticed a Palestinian boy walking in the street. The soldiers stopped him, body searched him, hit him, and arrested him because he refused to take off his pants for their strip search. I challenge them when they touch me, but the way they carry their rifles is to make me feel they are about to shoot me or my classmates, and they shoot left and right and then accuse us. Every day we confront body searches, we arrive at school late, we cross military checkpoints. They are after us, in the street, at home, in bed, at school, even in the graveyard”.
This quote embodies ‘unchilding’; it shows how every aspect of the entire process that is ‘Palestinian childhood’ is subject to systemic unending violations that makes this childhood ‘unlivable’. Drawing on Shalhoub-Kevorkian's work, Henry Giroux talks about ‘childcide’ - “the destruction of both the spirit and bodies of Palestinian children” (Giroux, 2024). Indeed, the ongoing ‘childcide’ in Gaza represents the ultimate culmination and the devastating physical consequence of the violence of ‘unchilding’.
Gaza is not a politically separate category distinct from the larger structures of Israeli settler colonialism. Since and before the establishment of Israel in 1948, Zionist militia and the Israeli occupation army have been harming Palestinian children with virtually no recourse for accountability. Before the family of the first author were ethnically cleansed and forcibly dispossessed from Haifa in historical Palestine, Zionist militia attacked and burned their house at night while they were asleep. 13 members of the family were killed, including children. Palestinian children were also killed in infamous Israeli massacres in Kafr Qasem, Deir Yassin, Sabra and Shatila amongst others. Nowadays, Israel has its own colonial tactics to operationalise and legitimise ‘unchilding’ by continually producing terminologies to further articulate and justify the use of force, violence, and the wounding of children (Shalhoub-Kevorkian, 2016; 2019). Those who are murdered by airstrikes in Gaza are ‘human shields’. Those who are murdered in the West Bank under Israel’s ‘shoot to kill’ policy are ‘security threats’, those expelled from their neighbourhood in East Jerusalem and the stateless Palestinian refugee children denied their right of return ‘are ‘demographic threats’. Those uprooted and whose homes are demolished in the Naqab area in the South of historical Palestine live in ‘unrecognised areas’.
The systematic detention and killing of Palestinian children by Israel is a deliberate strategy to liquidate Palestinians as people. With their ‘lived resistance’ (see Morrison, 2024), Palestinian children embody commitments to the Palestinian struggle for freedom and liberation. By ‘unchilding’ them and subjecting them to ‘childcide’, Israel seeks to disrupt this continuity, and its effort is fuelled by global political action and inaction. By their shameful representational politics, manufacturing consent, censorship by omission, inaccurate language, and use of the passive voice in reporting violence enacted by the Israeli state, Western media perpetuate the reduction of Palestinian children to “bare biological life that can be extinguished without any moral doubt” (Abunimah, 2007). They obscure the harm done to them to avoid holding Israel accountable for its atrocities and crimes. Western media is integral to the Israeli settler-colonial structure and a crucial driver of global racial politics.
Alaa’s Words
Returning to the importance of ‘Letters for Palestinian Childhoods’ Exhibition’ and to the act of reading, hearing, and being inspired by the letters of solidarity displayed there, we want to bring one more voice into this conversation by sharing a poem written by Dr Alaa AlQatrawi, a mother from Gaza. Israel murdered Alaa’s four children: Yamen, Orchida, Kinan and Karmel. Their house was surrounded and bombed. Their bodies were left buried beneath the rubble for four months before people were allowed to retrieve them. With Alaa’s permission, we want to share her words and testimony. On mother’s day this year, after losing her four children, she wrote:
I have given birth three times.
But I had not experienced how women give birth naturally.
Every time the doctor performed a cesarean section on me.
The doctor was a professional.
After each operation, he left only a thin thread-like line of a scar.
All women were surprised when they learned that.
They often said, “it doesn't seem like you gave birth.”
Others told me that I would suffer from muscle cramps in the winter because of the cold, and that I might feel severe pain in the place of that thin cosmetic thread,
but that did not happen.
I even heard that I might suffer from the pricking of that thread in the summer because of the heat,
but that never happened.
I often forgot about it.
I didn't even notice that cosmetic thread.
But now I feel it and see it a lot.
I can contemplate it well, and it has begun to affect me.
It hurts my heart, my liver, and my soul,
it even hurts when I breathe
between inhaling and exhaling.
Women did not tell me that beforehand.
This thin thread on my body reminds me every minute.
You gave birth to a boy, a girl, and twins.
And then you are left
alone.
Alaa’s Children: Kinan, Yamen, Karmel and Orchida
We ask you, the reader, to hold Alaa’s words in your palms and to bear witness to what the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish (1973) called “children without childhoods” across Gaza. We urge you to witness the thread lines running across Palestine; to see the scars on its land by bombs built in countries like the UK and US; to see the way Palestine and its children have been carved up and cast aside; to see the scars imprinted on its people. We urge you to see these thread lines, to trace their origins, and to do something about it.
In closing, we want to emphasise the importance of raising our voices in solidarity loudly and clearly, just as this exhibition has done so poignantly and powerfully. We want to remind you to keep listening to Palestinians like Alaa, to follow their lead, to bear witness to their joys and their tragedies, to their poems and their politics, to their experiences and their expertise.
Let their words, like this mother’s, break us. And importantly, let us use the cracks made within, use this discomfort and sorrow and anger as opportunity and motivation for action and solidarity; to turn this violent fractured world into a mosaic of justice.
As a group of Polish students wrote in one of the letters in the Palestinian Childhoods Exhibition, “We will keep learning from you. We will share the stories of you and your land. You will never be forgotten.” Remember Alaa’s words; remember the thin thread; remember that she will always remember; remember the letters in this exhibition; remember the ‘unchilding’ and ‘childcide’ taking place in front of our eyes; remember it with moral clarity and conviction - and do something about it. Because they are Palestinian children, they are Alaa’s children, and as Baldwin reminds us, they are ours - “every single one of them, all over the globe.”
About the authors:
Dr Basma Hajir is a Lecturer in the School of Education at the University of Bristol. She received her master’s and PhD in Education and International Development from the University of Cambridge. Basma’s research interests lie in Education in Conflict settings and emergencies, refugee education, education for social justice, and education and settler-colonialism.
Dr William W. McInerney is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the London School of Economics Centre for Women, Peace and Security where he works on the Gender, Justice and Security Hub. His research interests include education and international development; women, peace, and security; engaging men in violence prevention; arts-based research; and arts-based peacebuilding.
Find out more about the 'Letters for Palestinian Childhoods' exhibition here.
For questions, please email cysoxford@torch.ox.ac.uk.
Childhood and Youth Studies Network (CYS), TORCH Networks
