Excerpts from an article by Maren Montovani Via Mondoweiss
Since the beginning of 2023, Israel has killed at least 38 Palestinian children, injured almost 1000, while 160 are lingering in Israeli jails. 2280 Palestinian children have been killed since January 2000.
Beyond the shocking numbers and the painful stories behind each case, there is an evident pattern in the targeting of Palestinian children and childhood. It is not a side effect, but rather a necessary component of Israel’s settler colonial project and apartheid regime.
Settler colonialism is, by definition, a long-term project of territorial conquest that substitutes the indigenous population with a settler population. For this effort to be enduring, it is fundamental for the colonizer to eliminate the Indigenous population or at least their resistance.
This “logic of elimination” is a central element of settler colonial societies across the world and includes the genocidal elimination of the people, their expulsion from the land, and a plethora of strategies to destructure, fragment, and debilitate the indigenous society. They aim to ensure that the next generation will no longer resist dispossession and oppression, and abandon claims to their rights. With every generation of insurgent indigenous people, the focus by the colonial powers on the destruction and/or control of education, childhood, and childbirth grows.
The imposition of a regime of apartheid is an attempt to create a sustainable colonial regime by eliminating the indigenous people from certain spaces and rights.
However, decision-makers of South Africa’s apartheid system already realized that such segregation creates rebellious — not docile — future generations. When in 1976, up to ten thousand students in South Africa came out in protest, the apartheid forces killed between 400 to 600 students and started brutal repression against children and youth. Between 1984 and 1986, an estimated 11000 children, some as young as nine years old, were detained without trial, mistreated, and tortured in South African dungeons.
Zionist ideologues and politicians have always known that a strategy of elimination was necessary in order to create the state of Israel on Palestinian land.
Before and shortly after the Nakba in 1948, 75-80 percent of the Palestinian population that lived on the land, on which Israel was established, were expelled, while hundreds of villages and communities were erased. Some thought this would be reason enough for Palestinians to surrender their rights and leave. David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first Prime Minister and leader of the Labor Party, embraced the theory that time will cure all, and all will be forgotten.
Since the beginning, Israel focused on “eliminating” Palestinian refugees, including their capacity to organize the struggle for their right to return, and on delegitimizing their claims and dispersing them. This effort is ongoing.
Ze’ev Zabotinsky, the founder of the Zionist revisionist movement, which represents the ideological roots of the current right-wing government, outlined this colonial logic when he wrote in 1923 that “Every native population in the world resists colonists as long as it has the slightest hope of being able to rid itself of the danger of being colonized. That is what the Arabs in Palestine are doing, and what they will persist in doing as long as there remains a solitary spark of hope.”
Palestinian children and youth embody this hope. It is at the core of the struggle for justice.
While Palestinians continue to exist and resist, Israel is increasingly desperate and violent in its strategy of elimination and attacks on Palestinian children.
It is overdue for us to build a clear understanding of this horrific aspect of Israeli policy and build effective international solidarity to end it and hold those responsible to account.
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