The following is an excerpt from an essay I wrote in 2021 titled “Peter Pan in Gaza: the affective power of childhood in politics and war.” The sections in italics are offered as revisions, and context learned from three more years of Israeli terror culminating in a genocidal campaign on Palestinians in Gaza.
“None of them knew. Perhaps it was best not to know. Their ignorance gave them one more glad hour; and as it was to be their last hour on the island, let us rejoice that there were sixty glad minutes in it. They sang and danced in their night-gowns. Such a deliciously creepy song it was, in which they pretended to be frightened of their own shadows, little witting that so soon shadows would close in upon them, from which they would shrink in real fear.” –– J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan
Today is the 23rd June 2021, and Israeli forces are still killing Palestinians. A Middle East Eye headline reads “Palestinian child the latest victim of Israeli crackdown in Beita”. That child is fifteen year-old Mohammed Hamayel, killed at a protest against the planned illegal settlement at Beita and further annexation of Palestinian land. According to witnesses, Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) fired live ammunition at those attempting to help Hamayel. This is the “peace” that followed the “conflict”, “clashes”, “unrest” that started with the proposed ethnic cleansing of Sheikh Jarrah, escalated when the IOF attacked worshippers at Al-Aqsa, and culminated in an eleven day bombing campaign of the Gaza Strip.
Today is 12th February 2024. Israeli forces are bombing Rafah – the southernmost city in the Gaza strip after 128 days of total siege. Israel is still calling it a war against Hamas, but the ICJ has found plausible evidence of genocide. Israeli settlers are blocking aid from entering the strip, the north is starving. The IOF are also committing war crimes in the West Bank city of Jenin, where there cannot even be the pretence of fighting Hamas.
Diana Buttu, former legal advisor to the Palestine Liberation Organization and co-host of the This is Palestine podcast by the Institute for Middle East Understanding criticises the calculated use of language and particularly the passive voice in reports of violence in occupied Palestine. Buttu notes “unrest – its opposite implies that there has been rest… and as you know there hasn’t been peace… there hasn’t been a quiet day in those seventy-three years.” (Buttu) Buttu’s words return us to al Nakba (the catastrophe), the ethnic cleansing of Palestine for the establishment of the Israeli ethnonationalist state beginning in 1948. Buttu adds “the Sheikh Jarrah campaign is really, effectively, about 1948... there is not a single Palestinian family, inside or outside Palestine, that has not been affected by the Nakba.” The narrative of catastrophe continues to play out in the lives of Palestinians today, dispossessed and disregarded. Yet “as a Palestinian, it’s as though our words are never truly validated until we see these absolute extremes.” (Buttu) Until children are killed in cold blood, until families in Gaza are sleeping in one room so that if they are killed by Israeli missiles at least they will all die together.
Two hundred people lost their lives to the violence around the Gaza Strip, the overwhelming majority of them Palestinian, sixty-seven of them children. They always count the children.
Perhaps this will be labelled blood libel, an accusation that has shut down countless conversations on Israeli violence. I have learned so much about European antisemitism from the middle ages to the present, I do not know what it has to do with Palestinians. That is other than the foundational claim made by early zionists that settling in Palestine will provide refuge from it. Ilan Pappé summarises “Zionism was, in a nutshell, a movement asserting that the problems of the Jews of Europe would be solved by colonising Palestine and creating a Jewish state there.” He asserts “People are entitled to invent themselves, as so many national movements have done in their moment of inception. But the problem becomes acute if the genesis narrative leads to political projects such as genocide, ethnic cleansing, and oppression.” (Ten Myths About Israel)
The children are in fact dead — killed so that the settlers can claim the land. We have seen limbs gathered in plastic bags that never finished growing. We all heard Hind Rajab’s cry for help to the Palestinian Red Crescent, trapped in a besieged car, surrounded by her dead family.
Israel killed her and we should be unafraid to name this truth. So long as there are tears in our eyes we should cry out for the oppressed until all of the world’s tongues are coated with the slogans of unpopular causes.
It is a common misconception that the situation in Palestine is too complicated, that it is beyond comprehension, that there is no comparison. I dispute this. Plainly, what we are witnessing is settler-colonialism and a system of apartheid under the Israeli state.
“For political Zionism to come to fruition – for a Jewish state to be created in Palestine – it was necessary to carry out as large a scale as possible ethnic cleansing of the country’s unwanted Arab natives. But even in 1948, and especially in 1967, Israel was unable to fully ‘cleanse’ the land of the Palestinians. As a result, Israel’s fallback position was to implement an apartheid regime of exclusion and discrimination.” (Ben White, Israeli Apartheid, 2014)
The Palestinian situation raises the same basic questions that are the foundation of all politics: who deserves to live, and who deserves to die? Who deserves protection, and who decides?
Hind, you deserved life.
The organisation Remember These Children reports on the children killed in Israel and Palestine from 2000 to 2014. Their website, last updated in July 2014, remembers the lives of 1787 children (131 Israelis, 1656 Palestinians):
“2 July 2007 – Ibrahim Ali abu-Nahl, 16 months, died of heart disease at the Erez checkpoint, after Israel denied him entry for treatment at Ichilov Hospital in Tel Aviv.”
“10 July 2014 – Mousa Mohammad Taher al-Astal, 14, of Khan Younis, in the southern Gaza Strip, killed by an IDF missile while watching the World Cup with friends on the beach.”
10 February 2024 – Hind Rajab’s body is recovered after being murdered in cold blood by invading IOF soldiers in Gaza City.
Remember These Children uses the deeply affecting reporting to appeal to its reader to “add your voice to the call for an end to the killing of children, for a just peace in the region, for a fair resolution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.” Likewise, The New York Times ran the article, “They Were Only Children” mourning the children killed during the Ramadan 2021 fighting. The article is sombre in tone: naming the children killed, with photographs where available, and anecdotes and reflections from loved ones, intended to humanise the conflict. The mass obituary is interspersed with facts to provide context to the conflict, for example “Gaza is crowded and its population skews young, with about half under age 18.” (El-Naggar et al.) Though affecting, the article only levels surface critique of the conflict. It does not ask, for example, why the population of Gaza is so young, what is the life expectancy for Gazans? It does not consider Gaza’s population density as a consequence of the Nakba and present day Israeli state policy that does not allow Palestinians the right to return.
Returning to the basic political questions outlined previously, the underlying assumptions at work in both the New York Times and Middle East Eye articles, as well as the work of Remember These Children, is that children deserve to live, their lives are precious, and they are worthy of our protection. The lives of children are often invoked in political arguments as a moral absolute, and therefore beyond critique. A truly critical perspective would require that we challenge and investigate the very idea of childhood that children represent, the ideology and meaning of the word “child”. We should ask, are children in Gaza expected to grow old? Is there such a thing as an adult in Gaza that’s not a human shield or a terrorist –– both of which are positioned as to be destroyed?
Israeli television news broadcasts the death toll of “terrorists” in Gaza, multiplying by the thousands since October 7th.
This essay will critique the affective quality of childhood, its sociohistorical origins and its role in the cultural imaginary. I will argue that the idea of childhood is, to begin with, an exclusionary category that fails to protect young people, before developing an analysis of the relationship of childhood to imperialism and racism. First, a note from Peter Pan which has remained a cultural reference point for the idea of childhood for a century. J.M. Barrie describes, “when they seemed to be growing up, which is against the rules, Peter thins them out.” Childhood is defined against adulthood to the extent that even the potential for maturity is abhorrent to the idea of the child. The child has always to remain a child, that is, suspended in a state of perceived innocence in order to justify their remaining alive.
Hind will always be 6 years old. Some of the children killed did not live long enough to be named. Others were still in their incubators.
There is an understanding that certain horrors are only fit for adults, and that trauma is more manageable after previous experience, or an earlier trauma. Firstly this constructs trauma as that which marks the transition from childhood into adulthood. Secondly, maturity here is positioned as a fall from grace, a spiritual and physical corruption of an ideal. The latter is of course heavily predicated on Christian ideals of innocence, and the doctrine of original sin. The former is at best a naive understanding of the world, and at worst a conscious and hypocritical acknowledgement of the exclusionary nature of childhood as an idea, since every day ‘children’ suffer the worst horrors imaginable.
If it is the case that children are afforded certain international rights (in addition to their human rights), by virtue of being children, then it is clear that Palestinian young people are not considered ‘children’ by the Israeli state in practice. Human Rights Watch reports that, in violation of the The Convention on the Rights of the Child, Israeli “security forces have choked children, thrown stun grenades at them, beaten them in custody, threatened and interrogated them without the presence of parents or lawyers, and failed to let their parents know their whereabouts.” According to the report, Palestinians as young as eleven are subject to abusive arrests and interrogations by Israeli police and the militarised IOF, resulting in extreme psychological trauma. Save the Children’s 2020 report “Defenceless: The impact of the Israeli military detention system on Palestinian children” adds that “85% of children said that they have irreversibly changed after being detained.” This report also considers the utility and limitations of the diagnosis of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder in this context: “it does not take into account the fact that traumatic events are ongoing, and there can therefore be no ‘post’.”
Hind cried to the dispatcher on the other end of the phone “I’m so scared. Please come. Please call someone to come and take me.” Hind I’m so sorry we couldn’t take you away. I’m so sorry you died alone and afraid. Will you ever forgive us?
Every day there’s a new catastrophe. We’ve asked “how do we move on from this?” thirty-thousand times.
They say that war changes you, but for children – war makes you everything you are.
Imagined childhood does not protect actual “children” (young people), who cannot embody or perform “childhood” – those who act in ways that betray the idea of “childhood”. In the case of Palestinians and migrant children, the concept of childhood is betrayed by virtue of being ‘other’ in the eyes of the state. The category of the child is narrow, volatile, and unforgiving; it is not just citizenship that grants entry, and it is not entirely up to the state to decide who counts as a child. Wider society has its own role to play in constructing and reconstructing the borders of childhood. The New York Times article is evidence of that: to some degree we are able to sympathise with children deemed ‘other’ and often demonised as such, despite our social, cultural, and physical distance. However, what happens when a child from Gaza is vocally anti-occupation? What happens when they hate their oppressors and dream of becoming a martyr? Can we still see their humanity beyond their imagined ‘innocence’ as children?
Childhood reproduces the carceral binary of innocence and guilt that functions as a mechanism of death for all whom it excludes (the guilty). To be removed from the category of the child is to exist in a state of exemption, from the protection of both the law (the state) and society. It is important to consider the historical emergence of the concept of childhood and its use historically. Whereas most scholars chart the development of modern childhood from European romantic thinkers (Rousseau in particular) and the Victorians, Bernstein’s critique ties the idea of childhood to slavery and reconstructionist ideology in the United States. Considering the global application of the concept of childhood, Hyun-Joo Yoo argues that the idea of childhood is an imperialistic invention:
“To perpetuate the empire, the image of the innocent child as a vehicle for driving home the values of the ruling class must be constantly reconstructed, relived, and reexperienced each time as though it were new.” (Imperialism and the Politics of Childhood Innocence in Peter Pan and Wendy, 2020)
This ideology has not disappeared. The one word moral argument of ‘children’ is wielded uncritically all too often, and in the present it thinly veils xenophobia and islamophobia. There are very few narratives as emotive as the idea that children are in danger because it means that the very idea of innocence which orders our carceral world is in jeopardy – if children are in danger, then none of us are safe.
In reality, the lives of children are pawns to the political players. Gaza and Congo show us every day how children under threat force adults into subjugation. “Work the mines or your children will starve.” “Stop exposing the truth or we will kill your entire family.” Yet oppressed people across the world, whether veteran journalists like Wael al-Dahdouh or brave civilians with video phones, risk their lives for truth.
For truth, according to Fanon, “is the property of the national cause… it is all that protects the native and ruins the foreigners.”
Hasbara will crumble. Truth belongs to the Palestinians.
Caring about children involves caring about adults, more specifically, parents and the networks of people who form the child’s complex social reality. A reimagining of kinship and the valuation of life is essential. The abolitionist framework requires that we upend the carceral binary that encourages us to divide the world into the innocent and the guilty and instead understand that we are all implicated in the web of racial capitalist imperialism.
All of this theorising couldn’t save Hind’s life. We prayed that she would live, but the whole world knew Israel could not stand it if she survived. I’m taken back to the words that Ilan Pappé shared in our A is for Activism book club, “Israel has already lost the moral battle, the question is whether in the world we are building morality matters.” Rest in perfect peace Hind Rajab, and the five of the family members (both adults and children) killed alongside her.