BEYOND STATELESSNESS: ‘UNCHILDING’ AND THE
HEALTH OF PALESTINIAN CHILDREN IN JERUSALEM
OSAMA TANOUS,* BRAM WISPELWEY** AND RANIA MUHAREB***
Jerusalemite Palestinians are native residents on the settler colony’s most coveted lands. The
Israeli occupation’s precarious residency regime renders them stateless, which in turn facilitates
Palestinian dispossession from their homes and lands. Understanding the key determinants of
Palestinian child health in occupied East Jerusalem is enhanced by analysing the city as an
actively contested settler colonial frontier. This frontier unfolds within the context of ongoing
Zionist land confiscation, apartheid, prolonged military occupation and annexation, all of which
shape the social and political determinants of Palestinian health in Jerusalem. As a result,
Indigenous Palestinian children are left unprotected, racialised and ‘unchilded’ in their own city.
As coined by Professor Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, after decades of living in the Old City of
Jerusalem, the framework of ‘unchilding’ refers to the premature, forcible removal of Palestinian
children from childhood through racialised settler colonial violence. Like direct killing or postfrontier assimilation, unchilding represents another eliminatory component of settler colonial
logic and practice. The enduring structural and material violence of settler colonialism creates a
toxic health environment with downstream impacts on the right to adequate housing, education,
access to healthcare and basic safety and dignity for Palestinian children. In order to enhance our
understanding of the threats that Palestinian children face, we argue that the framework of
unchilding provides a crucial conceptual link in investigating and documenting the negative
mental, social and physical health impacts of the Zionist settler colonial frontier.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction: ‘Unchilding’, Settler Colonialism and the Social Determinants of
Health....................................................................................................................... 89
The Political and Racial Contours of Palestinian Statelessness in Jerusalem ......... 92
Jerusalem as a Settler Colonial Frontier .................................................................. 96
Social Determinants of Palestinian Child Health in Jerusalem ............................... 99
A Residency and Legal Status ........................................................................ 99
B Land and Housing ..................................................................................... 100
C Education................................................................................................... 102
D Structural Racism ...................................................................................... 104
E Armed Conflict.......................................................................................... 105
F
Poverty ...................................................................................................... 106
G Access to Healthcare ................................................................................. 107
Beyond Statelessness ............................................................................................. 109
Unchilding: Settler Colonial Entrapment as Organised Violence ......................... 109
Osama Tanous is a paediatrician and public health scholar based in Haifa and a co-director
of the Palestine Program at the Harvard FXB Center for Health and Human Rights and Birzeit
University Institute for Community and Public Health.
** Bram Wispelwey is an Instructor at Harvard Medical School and Harvard TH Chan School
of Public Health and co-director of the Palestine Program at the Harvard FXB Center for
Health and Human Rights and Birzeit University Institute for Community and Public Health.
*** Rania Muhareb is an Irish Research Council and Hardiman PhD scholar at the Irish Centre
for Human Rights at the National University of Ireland, Galway. She is a policy member of
Al-Shabaka, the Palestinian Policy Network and a former legal researcher and advocacy
officer with the Palestinian human rights organisation, Al-Haq.
*