Problematizing Law, Rights, and Childhood in Israel/Palestine

Radically challenges dominant assumptions about law, human rights, and childhood, in and beyond Israel/Palestine.

Hedi Viterbo (Author)

9781316519998, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 5 August 2021

300 pages
23.5 x 15.8 x 2.4 cm, 0.68 kg

'The book is highly original. Viterbo's analysis has the rare quality of both documenting … [previously unknown] realities … and providing eye opening and oftentimes surprising insights … His methodology is a hybrid of empirical, philosophical, and socio-legal approaches, and it is in and of itself an impressive achievement … Terms such as 'childhood' and 'children's rights,' as Viterbo persuasively argues, can be weaponised against children … Despite the focus on Israel/Palestine, this book also makes a unique and highly original contribution to the field of childhood studies in general, and especially to socio-legal studies … [This book] is an exceptional work of academic scholarship.' Zvi Triger, Child and Family Law Quarterly

In this book, Hedi Viterbo radically challenges our picture of law, human rights, and childhood, both in and beyond the Israel/Palestine context. He reveals how Israel, rather than disregarding international law and children's rights, has used them to hone and legitimize its violence against Palestinians. He exposes the human rights community's complicity in this situation, due to its problematic assumptions about childhood, its uncritical embrace of international law, and its recurring emulation of Israel's security discourse. He examines how, and to what effect, both the state and its critics manufacture, shape, and weaponize the categories 'child' and 'adult.' Bridging disciplinary divides, Viterbo analyzes hundreds of previously unexamined sources, many of which are not publicly available. Bold, sophisticated, and informative, Problematizing Law, Rights, and Childhood in Israel/Palestine provides unique insights into the ever-tightening relationship between law, children's rights, and state violence, at both the local and global levels.

1. Conceptual and theoretical foundations
2. Casting the first stone: the Israeli legal system, its human rights critics, and their approaches to young Palestinians
3. The age of governing: young age as a means of control
4. Boundary governance: amending childhood and separating Palestinians
5. Stolen childhood: voice, loss, and trauma in human rights reports
6. Sights of violence: childhood in the visual battlefield
7. Infantilization and militarism: soldiers as children, children as soldiers
8. Unsettling children: Israeli law and settlers' childhood.

Subject Areas: International human rights law [LBBR], Terrorism, armed struggle [JPWL], Middle Eastern history [HBJF1]