Beyond Statelessness INTRODUCTION: ‘UNCHILDING’, SETTLER COLONIALISM AND THE SOCIAL DETERMINANTS OF HEALTH The concept of ‘unchilding’ was coined by Professor Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian in 2019, after decades of living in the Old City of Jerusalem and researching the effects of Israeli occupation and settler colonialism on the lives of Palestinian families and children.1 Shalhoub-Kevorkian observes that in settler colonial contexts, Indigenous children are regarded as dangerous, racialised others. She shows how, in Palestine, Zionism dehumanises Palestinian children by designating them as ‘born-terrorist[s]’.2 Shalhoub-Kevorkian's notion of unchilding takes us beyond the deployment of victimhood, trauma and innocence in the analysis of Palestinian children’s experiences to begin to understand how, in a settler colonial context, children’s mere existence is criminalised, state violence against them is normalised and their suffering is legitimised. Their lives and bodies become ‘political capital’ and their homes and neighbourhoods become experimental playgrounds for militarised surveillance, the development of the weapons industry and acquisitive profit.3 Palestinian children are not only excluded from the settler collective, but they are excluded from childhood and humanity itself, to become legitimate targets of settler state violence. 4 In the premature, forcible removal of children from childhood, unchilding represents at once an obvious yet incompletely described determinant of child health which, like direct killing or post-frontier assimilation,5 represents yet another eliminatory component of settler colonial logic and practice. By linking unchilding to some of the well-described social and political health determinants, this article seeks to explicate the links between the settler colonial statelessness of Palestinian children and their health outcomes. The colonial fragmentation of the Palestinian people and historic Palestine has led to multiple forms and geographies of prolonged refugeehood, forced displacement, dispossession and statelessness. Despite its legal designation as part of the West Bank, and thus the occupied Palestinian territory, East Jerusalem represents a case apart. Israel has illegally annexed the city of Jerusalem 6 and treats its native Palestinian inhabitants as specially designated ‘residents’, a status distinct from that of Israeli citizenship, which was accorded to Palestinians inside the Green Line following the Nakba in 1948. This residency status contributes to Palestinians’ displaceability in Jerusalem and its precariousness has been used as an institutionalised tool of dispossession.7 Inhabiting a liminal space, somewhere 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, Incarcerated Childhood and the Politics of Unchilding (Cambridge University Press 2019). ibid 1. ibid chs 1 and 6. ibid 121. Patrick Wolfe, ‘Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native’ (2006) 8(4) Journal of Genocide Research 387, 399–401. Annexing a City: Israel’s Illegal Measures to Annex Jerusalem Since 1948 (Report, Al-Haq, 2020). ‘Punitive Residency Revocation: The Most Recent Tool of Forcible Transfer’, Al-Haq (Web Page, 2018) <https://www.alhaq.org/advocacy/6257.html>. 89