Childhood: A Universalist Perspective for How Israel is using Child Arrest and Detention to further its Colonial Settler Project

Drawing from reports and documentation published by Israeli and Palestinian human rights and children's rights organizations, and establishing the analyses from the voices and stories of Palestinian children suffering from politically motivated abuses, the present paper examines child abuse in settler colonial contexts. Through the analyses of the various voices, narratives, and reports, the paper examines the inscription of state power over children's bodies and lives, marking the connection between biopolitics and geopolitics, as well as the resultant suffering of children. The analyses of the collected data suggest that knowledge about child maltreatment and the violations of children's rights cannot be dislocated from the history, politics, and structure of settler colonialism. The paper concludes by arguing that living a childhood situated in spaces of exterminability, as the voices of the studied children reveal, should be defined as child abuse and maltreatment.