Israel has a long history of killing Palestinian children. Since its founding in 1948, it has intentionally targeted children through the construction of a state infrastructure of erasure. What we are witnessing today in Palestine is in continuity with a history of demographic extirpation, whose aims are to reduce the number of Palestinians and ultimately erase Palestine altogether.
As an ethno-nationalist state premised on Jewish supremacy, Israel’s infrastructure of erasure is predicated on the targeting of Palestinian children. Palestinian children are institutionally dehumanised, incarcerated, attacked and the subject of racist state policy. In other words, it is deliberate Israeli state policy to destabilise Palestinian children’s lives at all stages of their lives, depriving them of their rights to childhood.
For Israel, encaging and dispossessing Palestinian children works in favour of its demographic advantage as their very existence is a hinderance to its aspiration of constructing a Jewish only state. In this vein, Golda Meir, one of the founders of Israel and a former Prime Minister, noted having nightmares at the thought ‘that there will be another Palestinian child born’. Regulating Palestinian bodies and minds and inducing trauma in their everyday lives is intwined in the formation and evolution of Israel as a state.
The institutionalisation of Golda Meir’s policies towards Palestinian lives and more generally of state apartheid towards Palestinian Children continues to unfold today, albeit in its most monstrous incarnation. In Gaza, it has been manifested in the creation of a concentration camp designed to pursue its child-focused genocidal policies through regular military bombardments and the curtailment of life-sustaining support systems. The projection of violence whether directly or structurally combined with cultural and economic strangulation undergird the conduct of Israel’s infrastructure of erasure.
Gaza’s population is some 2.3 million people, half of whom are children. Gaza has been under a comprehensive siege, reminiscent of US-UK imposed sanctions on Iraq of the 1990s but in an area the size of a small district in London. This medieval siege is the enactment of a silent war and has long deprived Gazans of life’s necessities, including freedom of movement, electricity, education, clean water, fuel and cooking gas. Gaza’s enforced food insecurity and now, in the current onslaught mass starvation, is similarly a central component of the infrastructure of erasure. Many studies have shown a direct correlation between Israel’s blockade and deterioration of the physical and mental health of Palestinian children. This deprivation is a purposeful outcome of a concerted programme of state-pursued erasure, where Palestinian children need to be comprehensively exposed to it for the greater benefit of securing Israel’s ethno-future.
Since Hamas’ military responses to the blockade on 7th October, there have been widespread calls from Israel of incitement to genocide. Hamas broke Israel’s decades in the making military and symbolic hegemony. The Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and a large class of politicians, army generals and state-promoting media have consequently referred to Palestinians as ‘human animals’ and the ‘children of darkness’. Netanyahu has also made references to biblical prophecy and other religious fantasia, effectively declaring a Judeo-Christian war against Palestinians and by extension on Arabs and Muslims. ‘Cockroaches’, ‘animals on two legs’ and ‘grasshoppers’ slurs have similarly been used against Palestinians throughout the past few decades.
With a similar goal of dehumanisation and by extension justifying the killing of Palestinian children, Israeli-state media actively promoted a fabricated story that Hamas had beheaded Israeli babies, an allegation that has not been corroborated but which was actively reproduced in mainstream US-European media. Support from components of the Israeli public, particularly its colonial-settler groups, for its government’s blanket bombing and strangulation of Gaza, implicates sections of Israeli society in their government’s genocidal policies. Celebratory acts, prolifically on Israeli social media, associated with Palestinian suffering is evidence of how Palestinians are viewed as ripe for slaughter, echoing their government’s incitement to genocide.
Such statements from Israeli political leaders are of course not new and form part of a body of language and vocabulary associated with its infrastructure of erasure. Recent statements by Israel’s political class weren’t just incitements to genocide but calls for US-European support for them, which shamefully went unchallenged. Not one utterance of disgust or rebuke at Israel’s killing fields in Gaza was made by ruling US-European political groups. Equally worryingly, calls to incitement to genocide were made by Israel for it to normalise the scaling up of its infrastructure of erasure and possibly a second Nakba.
For Israel, the only way as it sees it to regain its lost hegemony, both within Palestine and the wider region, is by exercising a world-scale theatrical performance of military power. As it had done prior to 7th October, this new performance for reconstituting its military hegemony would be exacted on women and the children of Gaza. What was a slow-death oriented infrastructure of erasure punctuated by major episodes of displays of violence was now, after 7th October, reoriented into a hyper-activated and much graver form of genocide.
With the support of the US, UK, France, Germany, Italy and Canada, among other countries, Israel has been given carte blanche support to erase militarily Gaza and by extension the West Bank in occupied Palestine. Tens of thousands of tonnes of bombs were dropped, more than the US had used in Afghanistan in an entire year at the height of its war on that country. Within the first three weeks of Israel’s war on Gaza, over 8,000 were killed, most of whom were women and children. By the end of the year, Israel would have killed more than 20,000 Palestinians since 7 October.
According to UNICEF, the UN Children’s Fund, Some 420 children in Gaza are being killed and injured every day since Israel’s onslaught. Other key threats to life brought about by Israel’s infrastructure of erasure include its attacks on hospitals and clinics, which degrades the safety of babies in incubators and threatens the lives of 50,000 pregnant women. The World Health Organisation has recorded to date 34 attacks against hospitals and health care facilities. UNICEF’s director, Catherine Russell, stated that the costs of war on Gaza will be measured in children’s lives.
The disinterest of those genocide-supporting countries to call for a ceasefire was also ostensibly a green-light for erasing Palestine, at least what is left of it after seven decades of comprehensive and totalised forms of obliteration. Echoing this rhetoric to erasure, US President Biden defended his support for Israel by making calls to defending Israeli children and politicising and weaponizing children and babies in their war machinery. Deliberate policy to obstruct and prevent the work of UN and other humanitarian organisations – effectively in this context a lifeline of support for the children of Gaza – is similarly part and parcel of ensuring the continuation of Israel’s infrastructure of erasure. We know for ever, or at least as long as we live, that those countries will be etched in memory as not only who stayed silent in the face of Israel’s war crimes but who aided and abetted its genocidal psychopathy to eviscerate an entire people.
Today, the bombardment of Gaza and the killing and injury of tens of thousands of children may seem to be evidence of cowardice. That may be true, but children are not collateral damage, however. In fact, targeting Palestinian children is central for the continuation of the apartheid state. The killing of Palestinian children is the goal of Israel. They have been deliberately folded into and continue to be processed by Israel’s machinery of death.
The Crisis of International Development 