Hedi Viterbo talks to us about his new book published by Cambridge University Press.
This book radically challenges dominant narratives about law, human rights, and childhood, both in and beyond the Israel/Palestine context. Amongst other things, it reveals how Israel, rather than disregarding international law and children’s rights, has used them to hone and legitimise its violence against Palestinians. Also brought to light is the human rights community’s complicity in this situation, due to its problematic assumptions about childhood, its uncritical embrace of international law, its decontextualised and sometimes misinformed approach, and its recurring emulation of Israel’s security discourse. The book examines how, and to what effect, both the state and its critics manufacture, shape, and weaponise the categories ‘child’ and ‘adult.’ This study, the culmination of fourteen years of research, draws on a broad range of cross-disciplinary scholarship as well as hundreds of previously unexamined sources, many of which are not publicly available.
Initially, I had two motivations. First, legal scholarship tends to regard childhood as a self-evident fact, the nature and social construction of which warrant no discussion. Departing from this scholarly tradition, I have sought to lay bare how legal and human rights discourses and practices, rather than simply regulating or responding to pre-existing ‘children’ and ‘adults,’ are heavily implicated in the social production of the childhood/adulthood divide. In the book I also expose how child-related laws are no less targeted at ‘adults,’ including those – such as imprisoned people, soldiers, and others – who are neither related to nor directly responsible for the ‘children’ in question.
Second, legal scholarship on Israel’s military control regime has tended to focus on international law and the Israeli Supreme Court. Very little attention has been paid to Israel’s military law, including the Israeli military courts that prosecute thousands of Palestinians every year, hundreds of whom are under-18s. Breaking new ground, this book analyses hundreds of Israeli military judgments and statutes, many of which are not publicly available. Such an analysis of Israeli military legal documents (as well as various other sources) is unprecedented, both in scope and in its theoretically informed approach.
With time, other motivations also came to inform my work. Among them are: the need to bring to light previously unknown findings about the complicity of law and human rights in state violence, at both the international and local levels; the desire to bridge disciplinary boundaries and bring into dialogue previously separate bodies of scholarship; and the importance of casting light on subjects that have so far received little to no scholarly attention, such as the trials of Israeli soldiers, the prosecution of settlers, Israel’s use of child-related laws to govern and disempower Palestinian adults, and commonalities between the Israeli legal system and its human rights critics.
(The 49-page introductory chapter is freely available online)
The Israeli legal system’s handling of young Palestinians has been a subject of global debate. ... Three claims recur in such debates: first, that Israel flouts international law and human rights; second, that law and rights offer the remedies for Israel’s wrongs; and, third, that young people have distinct characteristics and needs, inherently different from those of their elders. ... For some, it is not only the well-being of young Palestinians or Israelis that is at stake, but the very survival of childhood and child rights. ... This book, while critical of Israel’s conduct, also poses a radical challenge to these and other prevailing narratives. It problematizes law, rights, and childhood – that is, it unsettles and disrupts common ways of thinking about them, about the problems each of them presents, and about the solutions to these problems, in and beyond the Israel/Palestine context.
As laid bare in [the book] ..., both law and rights lend themselves to divergent uses, including those operating in the service of state domination and violence. Further, rights and law, partly due to their reliance on abstractions and generalizations, are frequently applied without sufficient sensitivity to the context at hand. Child law (the sum of legal mechanisms relating to ‘children’) and child rights are premised on a specific abstraction: a supposedly universal and natural model of childhood, which in reality often marginalizes young people, legitimizes harshness toward older people, and suppresses valuable forms of life and thought. Combined, the malleability of law and rights, their problematic conceptualization of childhood, and their context-insensitivity often beget harm to disempowered communities, young and old alike.
Drawing on cross-disciplinary literature, this book also takes as its point of departure that neither “children” nor “adults” are merely pre-existing groups to be served, regulated, or governed by law and human rights. Rather, each is in large part a socially manufactured category, one that is delineated, reinforced, challenged, and weaponized by historically and geographically contingent forces. Key among these forces are practices and discourses relating to law and human rights, whose role in shaping the meaning, nature, effects, and uses of childhood is a central concern of this book. Also examined ... is the intertwining of law and human rights with various other forces at both the local and global levels, including visual technologies and images, the mental health disciplines, militarism, and everyday acts of resistance.
Accordingly, and contrary to allegations by the human rights community, Israel neither simply erodes childhood nor disregards legal and human rights norms. Instead, as brought to light in this book, Israeli authorities have pursued a more sophisticated course of action: deploying law, rights, and childhood in general – and increasingly embracing international child rights law in particular – to entrench, perfect, and launder Israel’s oppressive control regime. Law and rights have thus aided Israel in its efforts to subjugate Palestinian minds, bodies, and interactions; to confine Palestinians to a legally enshrined model of childhood that works to their detriment; to discipline older Palestinians through their young; to conceal and justify state violence; to portray abusive soldiers as children deserving of compassion; to expand the Jewish settlement project while dispossessing Palestinians; and much of this, supposedly, in the name of “the child’s best interests.”
Also put on trial in this book, along with the Israeli state, are its liberal human rights critics – NGOs (both local and international), UN bodies, and scholars. Not only have such critics repeatedly failed to recognize how the child rights framework ends up harming Palestinians, but they have also, in multiple ways, contributed to this harm. Moreover, throughout the [book] ..., the liberal human rights community is revealed to have much more in common than is generally believed with Israeli authorities, as well as with Israeli settlers. One commonality, increasingly shared by all of them, is the language of law and rights. Another is the way in which human rights actors have emulated or even endorsed the Israeli depiction of Palestinians as a national security risk, as well as Israel’s use of age distinctions as tools of control. The ever-tightening relationship between law, child rights, and state violence is a common thread throughout the book’s chapters. It stems from various factors, including some of the characteristics of the human rights community, specifically: its questionable conception of childhood; its uncritical embrace of international law; its ignorance, misunderstanding, and misrepresentation of crucial legal and political issues; its need to keep donors and lay audiences interested in local issues that are both complex and contentious; and, on occasion, its assessment of human rights violations in isolation from their structural causes.
Hundreds of hitherto unexamined legal and human rights sources are analyzed in this book, many of which are not publicly available. Among their institutional authors are the Israeli military, its legal advisors, its courts for noncitizen Palestinians, and its courts-martial for soldiers. I also scrutinize documents and actions of other Israeli authorities, primarily those of the government, parliament, and the state’s nonmilitary legal arms, including the judiciary (from lower courts to the supreme court), the state attorney’s office, the police, and the national prison authority. Also examined is a wide range of human rights publications by international, Palestinian, and Israeli organizations. ...
Broader contexts – local and global – are considered throughout the book. Locally, I shed new light on the Israeli control regime, its transformation over time, and its under-researched features, including: its use of childhood, uncertainty, and visual images as modes of governance; its heavy reliance on law; its hierarchization of different types of evidence; and its interconnected modes of violence against different populations in different territories. Beyond the local context, I highlight under-examined pitfalls and characteristics of laws, policies, and social attitudes, both internationally and within various countries, while drawing comparisons and connections with Israel/Palestine. These laws, policies, and attitudes (past and present) span a wide range of issues, key among which are those concerning young people, their rights, and their legal status; armed conflict and counterinsurgency; and the (mis)treatment of colonized peoples, racialized minorities, and noncitizens. This simultaneous contextualization, at both the local and global levels, yields insights beyond this book’s primary focus.