Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: On January 29, 2024, Israeli forces killed six-year-old Hind Rajab in Gaza after she had been trapped in a car surrounded by Israeli tanks. For hours, Hind's voice was broadcast over emergency calls, pleading for help as she sat alone beside the bodies of her slain family members. Her death—deliberate, drawn out, and broadcast nearly in real time—shocked the world and came to symbolize the unspeakable violence faced by Palestinian children under Israeli occupation. Yet Hind's story is not exceptional. It is part of a pattern of systemic violence that targets Palestinian childhood itself.Lived Resistance Against the War on Palestinian Children, a critical and important collection edited by Heidi Morrison, contextualizes deaths like Hind's as the direct result of militarized colonial governance, not tragic anomalies. The book reveals how Palestinian children are not only subjected to violence but are also surveilled, targeted, and criminalized—while they simultaneously develop forms of resistance, memory, and survival. It confronts dominant narratives about innocence, agency, and disposability, and its insights are essential as the global community reckons with its own complicity in the erasure of Palestinian life.The book opens with a short but powerful foreword, “Give Us Our Childhood, Give Us Our Lives,” by Ahed Tamimi and Janna Jihad Ayad (two internationally recognized Palestinian youth activists) with Lama Yahya. In their direct, emotionally resonant language, Tamimi and Ayad speak not only of what has been stolen—home, childhood, and freedom—but also of their conscious decision to resist. Their testimony challenges the reader to see Palestinian children as articulate political agents whose voices carry the weight of lived experience and moral clarity rather than as mere victims. This framing sets the tone for the rest of the book, where similar forms of testimonial resistance appear in academic, poetic, and narrative forms. Whether through digital storytelling in Gaza (Nitin Sawhney's “Invisible Lives, Visible Determination: Creative Agency as Resilience Among Palestinian Children Under Siege in Gaza”), fathers and children creating spaces for connection online (Abeer Otman's “E-Fathering: Constructing Life in Spaces of Death”), or exploring refugee belonging amid rapid neoliberal growth in the Ramallah area (Rami Salameh's “The Dialectics of Oppression: Resisting the Negation of Childhood Through Violence”), the chapters consistently assert that Palestinian children are not merely affected by violence; they actively resist, narrate, and confront it on their own terms.Youth agency reshapes these narratives by overturning the dominant image of Palestinian children as passive victims, instead positioning them as political actors, narrators, and strategists within the struggle against colonial violence. When children like Tamimi and Ayad speak for themselves—rather than being spoken for—they disrupt humanitarian discourses that frame them solely through suffering. This shift compels readers, policy makers, and scholars to reframe childhood not as a zone of apolitical innocence but as a site of embodied resistance and lived politics. Morrison, the editor of the volume, explores what agency can look like in her introduction and in the chapter “Historical Backdrop: The Right to Resist.” In “‘I Did Something Big’: Crossing Emotional Frontiers as a Palestinian Unchild,” Morrison explores some of the emotional frontiers and challenges that young people can face while navigating the maze of legal and social expectations in their course for justice. Overall, the exploration of youth agency challenges the sanitized language of “conflict” and brings urgency, moral clarity, and emotional precision to the realities of occupation, revealing how even the youngest Palestinians can be authors of their collective future.A key concept in Lived Resistance Against the War on Palestinian Children is unchilding, a process described in Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian's chapter, “The Violent Circulation of Affects and Necropenological Unchilding,” as the deliberate erasure of category childhood through state violence. Necropolitics (Mbembe, 2003) applies here to describe how state power determines who is allowed to live, who is left to die, and how exposure to death is used as a tool of power. Palestinian children are subjected to unchilding through practices that strip them of the protections they should receive under international law, rendering them instead as threats, criminals, or enemy combatants. Shalhoub-Kevorkian show how necropolitics operates not only through physical violence but also through psychological terror, emotional disruption, and bureaucratic abandonment. Palestinian children are rendered hypervisible as threats yet invisible as children, their lives governed by the constant possibility of death or dehumanization.Necropolitics operates as a core mechanism of unchilding, turning childhood itself into a site of occupation. The framework of “necropenological unchilding,” as discussed by Shalhoub-Kevorkian, finds devastating resonance in the story of Hind Rajab, the murdered six-year-old girl mentioned at the start of this review. Her death exemplifies how Palestinian children are not collateral damage in war but victims of a political order that withdraws care, denies protection, and erases their childhood. Shalhoub-Kevorkian's analysis helps us see Hind's killing as a deliberate function of state violence, where childhood is a status that can be easily stripped away when the child is Palestinian.The methodology employed across the chapters of the book is rooted in decolonial, participatory, and community-based approaches that center Palestinian children's voices and lived experiences. Rather than relying on traditional academic frameworks that objectify or distance the subjects of research, the contributors engage in collaborative storytelling, testimony, and ethnographic methods. Tamimi and Ayad's foreword is an example of testimonial resistance, where young activists speak directly to the reader about their experiences and resistance efforts. Chapters like Amahl Bishara's “A Refugee ABC: Creativity and Collage in the Face of War” explore digital storytelling and creative arts as methodologies that represent Palestinian children's agency through media and collage. Amneh Badran's ethnographic research in “Youth Discourse, Objectives, and Strategies Under Occupation: Palestinian Children's Political Activism in the East Jerusalem Village of Silwan, 2008-2015” focuses on youths’ political activism and documents their organizing strategies. Critical legal analysis and carceral studies are employed in Shahrazad Odeh's “Guilty by Default: The Legal Process of Unchilding Palestinians” and Mohammad Alruzzi, Valentina Marconi, and Yousef M. Aljamal's “Childhood Behind Bars: Palestinian Children in Israeli Detention” as they examine military courts, detention practices, and the legal process of unchilding. The view of mothers on childhood is explored in Cindy Sousa and Sara Bressi's “‘They Don't See Anything but This Kind of Treatment’: Loss and Reclamation of Palestinian Childhood Through the Eyes of Mothers,” and Janette Habashi explores when and how Palestinian children's agency is uplifted in “Subjection of Palestinian Children's Political Agency: Beyond the Family.”In the current political moment—marked by intensifying violence, censorship, and the suppression of dissent—scholarship on Palestine is needed more urgently than ever before. It plays a crucial role in documenting lived experiences, challenging dominant narratives, and analyzing the structural conditions of settler colonialism, occupation, and apartheid. Amid what Shwaikh & Gould (2019) call the “Palestine exception to academic freedom,” where scholars and students face professional and institutional backlash for engaging with issues related to Palestine, this body of research stands as a vital act of resistance.Lived Resistance Against the War on Palestinian Children is an example of how research can preserve historical memory and amplify calls for justice, decolonization, and human rights. The book offers critical insights for education researchers by foregrounding how Palestinian children engage in informal, creative, and resistance-based learning under occupation. It challenges dominant educational models that assume safety and stability, presenting children's education as a site of struggle, creativity, and political formation. Rather than viewing education as a tool for trauma recovery, the book positions Palestinian children as active knowledge producers who critically engage with their environments. For education researchers, this volume offers new ways to think about pedagogical agency and the politics of education in conflict zones.Future research building on this volume could amplify children's voices through participatory research methods and explore Palestinian childhood in the diaspora. It could also focus on international solidarity, legal advocacy, and educational activism, helping global audiences move from awareness to action. Comparative work across international contexts—for example, in Brazil, Kashmir, and the United States—could deepen our understanding of unchilding as a global phenomenon while respecting the specificity of the Palestinian case.Lived Resistance Against the War on Palestinian Children can inform the rebuilding of Gaza's education system in the wake of the deliberate destruction of educational infrastructure and opportunities—what Karma Nabulsi refers to as scholasticide (see Desai, 2024). The book's findings suggest that, rather than focusing solely on physical reconstruction, rebuilding must restore the dignity, agency, and political voice of Palestinian youth. Palestinian children, despite violence and trauma, continue to resist and maintain cultural continuity through informal education, artistic expression, and activism. Rebuilding Gaza's education system, therefore, must not only restore conventional schooling but create spaces for meaningful education that affirms Palestinian children's resilience and cultural heritage, empowering them to shape a future beyond occupation and genocide.At a moment when calls for ceasefires, genocide investigations, and international accountability are met with paralysis, politicized dismissal, and outright erasure, Lived Resistance Against the War on Palestinian Children challenges readers to see Palestinian children not as passive victims but as active agents of resistance and survival.
Source: Harvard Educational Review
Author: CATHERINE E. PITCHER
Language: English
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4414398098