Jewish children in West Bank settlements

There was a big news story today about a very young Palestinian boy who apparently was strapped to a suicide bomb, and the Israelis had to get it off him, a tragic example of the conflict consuming the young, for sure. There are some rumors the whole thing was staged but I don't really believe it yet. Looking around the threads at agonist.org, I happened upon one talking about child soldiers and children thrown into conflicts, where one poster found info critical of Palestinian society for putting its kids on the 'front lines' of the fighting and having kids near militants. That, and an article I read in an academic journal today, got me thinking about how the conflict harms Jewish kids forced to grow up in the West Bank (and how hypocritical it is to blame the occupied for their occupation). I responded:
(crossposted to DKos diary)

Firstly, I'd like to respond to Marquis de Sod's post about Palestinian children perched next to armed militants. Where that site imperiously claims that "the Palestinian leadership... accuses Israel of committing human rights violations... while evading its own responsibility for the orchestrated appearance of children at the front lines of the conflict," we have a classic example of blaming those darn Palestinians for being foolish enough to exist under occupation.

The front lines are everywhere, the tanks and snipers are outside the door, down the street, at the checkpoints between the city and the villages. If only the Palestinians would somehow make themselves vanish, they wouldn't shamelessly dare to place their children there.

Of course it's terrible when kids are pawned into the conflict. They are innocent, they didn't choose to be there. They should not have to throw the stones and get shot at.

But everyone forgets civilian life on the flip side of the West Bank, the hundreds of thousands of Jews living there, raising families. Many of them are actually trapped, by Israel's shaky economy and a sort of tax-incentive honeypot that ensnares lower-middle class families in War Zone Mortgages.

It is here that the fertility rate is pushed ever higher, higher even than within Israel proper. The settlements are filled with children; many hold more children than adults. It is held up as a spiritual duty for mothers to be fruitful and multiply in Judea and Samaria.

I would argue that it is grossly immoral to force Jewish children to grow up in the warped, apocalyptic atmosphere of the West Bank settlements (although I'm sure seaside Gaza is really a peach). I am appalled that my country is plunging deeply into debt to offer Israel economic assistance which eventually finds its way into reinforcing this domesticity of madness.

These Jewish kids do not have any choice about where they grow up. The Likud deliberately sets policies to paralyze their parents in Judea and Samaria. Many of them ride armored school buses back across the Green Line to school, and of course many, many have been killed, wounded and traumatized while their moral framework is bent around into a pretzel to serve messianic right-wing power fantasies.

Are the Hebrew children of Judea and Samaria destined to lead disrupted lives, never fully able to tease out the darkness they gasped in? Are they the next ones to give up on the future and turn to violence? Marquis de Sod, have you heard of the "Hilltop Youth"?

Many of the young ones raised around Hebron and Kiryat Arba are truly dangerous. They attack Arabs--actually fighting to occupy portions of Hebron's downtown city blocks--and all too frequently the Israeli police and armed forces. I can't blame them for failing to see who they are and where they are--their whole government has orchestrated an all-consuming, fictional mythos of Jewish redemption and supremacy. It's a terrible thing to do. It's murderous to steal childhood.

Today I found a stunning story in the Journal of Palestine Studies by a researcher named Tamara Neuman, who went to live in Kiryat Arba for several months, and learned how maternity becomes co-opted and absorbed into the politics of the Israeli settlement process. Maternity assumes a pre-dialectal, almost automatic position of fundamental moral authority in discourse. In particular, one woman in the 1970s snuck into the Tomb of the Patriarchs to have a circumcision performed on her son, the first to be born in the settlement. The child later died young, and upon returning from Jerusalem she marched down to where they surmised the old Hebrew cemetary in Hebron was. Using her dead baby as a political flag, she managed to inter the child. More recently, another infant being raised--through no choice of her own--in the settlement was apparently shot by a Palestinian sniper. The child, Shalhevet Pas, was not buried by her father immediately, in order to successfully expedite the political goal of reoccupying the Arab hill neighborhood of Hebron where the shots were supposedly fired from. Eventally, Shalhevet's unhinged father was exposed as a member of a Jewish terror cell.

I'm 20 years old. So many of the Palestinian militants--terrorists--suicide bombers--are my age. So are the draftees manning checkpoints in the IDF. So are the American soldiers sent to find Weapons of Mass Destruction that our president now mockingly looks under his couch for. ALWAYS, it is my age group forced to die for these absurd totems of militarism and blind power.

When you roll your eyes at the wounded Palestinian children foolish enough to throw rocks at the troop carriers, where the Israelis return with live fire, you should remember that they have known nothing but life under the occupation.

They are on the front lines of the war because Israeli settlement blocs exert "pressure" on Palestinian urban areas. Ever looked at a map of Gush Katif and Rafah in the South Gaza Strip? The "front line" where Rachel Corrie lost her life to a bulldozer is an expanding no-mans land facing the Katif bloc.

I should add that Israelis happily apply an old Ottoman land law which declares that land unused for 5 years reverts to the "sovereign" i.e. occupying power. Hence, to gain control of agricultural land in the West Bank and reallocate to settlements, build a fence and interfere with farmer access. This wipes out the future of those impudent Palestinian children before their very eyes. And then they hire Palestinian teenage laborers to pour concrete in the hilltops. That's where the children are, dumping their own futures into the ground.

Posted by HongPong at March 25, 2004 11:56 PM
Listed under Israel-Palestine .