the politics of unchilding palestinian children

The concept of unchilding was coined by Professor Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian in 2019, after decades of living in the Old City of Jerusalem and researching the effects of israeli occupation and settler colonialism on the lives of Palestinian families and children.

Unchilding is a practice and ideology whereby violence against Palestinian childhood becomes part of the war machine. Unchilding operates through global politics by constructing Palestinian children as dangerous entities that daily exposes them to violence and humiliation by imprisonment, maimings, killings, entrapping their parents, and so on. In a settler colonial context, children’s mere existence is criminalised. Indigenous children are regarded as dangerous, racialised others. State violence against them is normalised and their suffering is legitimised.

A report on the treatment Palestinian children face when they encounter the israeli military noted:

“It may be that much of the reluctance to treat Palestinian children in conformity with international norms stems from a belief which was advanced to us by a military prosecutor, that every Palestinian child is a ‘potential terrorist’” (Children in Military Custody, 2012).

This depiction of the Palestinian child as always already a “potential terrorist” and its continual reproduction of that embodiment through popular culture are then materially acted upon by israeli soldiers and police. Unchilding moves between various contexts, local and global, and spaces (educational, welfare, economic).

Unchilding invades wombs, families, friendships, homes, schools, hospitals; it is flexible, adaptable, and unpredictable. It operates with government policies and legal frameworks barely seen and often unnoticed, an almost lethargic violence, including educational institutions and apparatuses that intend to “civilize” and “control/surveil” the Natives or through juvenile justice institutions that “save,” “rehabilitate,” and criminalize them.

This situates the child as political capital and a captive to be unchilded, and also transforms unchilding into a major preoccupation of the settler’s racial violence. The lives and bodies of Palestinian children become ‘political capital’ and their homes and neighbourhoods become experimental playgrounds for militarised surveillance, the development of the weapons industry and acquisitive profit.

Palestinian children are not only excluded from the settler collective, but they are excluded from childhood and humanity itself, to become legitimate targets of settler state violence. In the premature, forcible removal of children from childhood, unchilding represents a form of war that aims to annihilate the future generation of the Native.

Sources

We are grateful to the work of Tanous et al., (2022), Unchilding & the Health of Palestinian Children in Jerusalem & Shalhoub-Kevorkian (2019), Incarcerated Childhood & the Politics of Unchilding, direct excerpts of which informed the content for this blog post.