Beyond Statelessness Palestine.30 While a thorough examination of Zionism and its blend of settler colonialism, racism and national and religious discourse is outside the scope of this article,31 suffice it to say that these forces have shaped the Palestinian experience of statelessness in Jerusalem. Here, the city functions as a settler colonial frontier marked by multifaceted, militarised oppression of Indigenous Palestinians. Statelessness thus operates as a legal infrastructure, which is shaped by the demarcation line of who can and cannot join the settler collective. In exploring these contours, we aim to expand the new and growing field of unchilding and situate it within public health scholarship as an upstream factor that is shaping the social determinants of health for stateless Palestinian children and thus producing health inequities and disproportionately poorer health outcomes. Constraints of the post-World War II global landscape dictate that ‘the logic of elimination’ in Palestine can no longer operate as occurred in the founding massacres of the Nakba, 32 which generated vast Palestinian expulsion from their homes and lands in 1948, or as in earlier centuries in North America, Australia or New Zealand. The mass slaughter and sustained frontier violence that led to extreme depopulation in these latter states is unavailable in this globally monitored period by countries that claim to be democratic and adhere to the rule of law, one in which Israel’s self-proclaimed status as ‘the only democracy in the Middle East’ with the ‘most moral army’ in the world33 is already deeply contested and only asserted with extensive propaganda and shielding from powerful third states. Today, the ongoing Nakba in Jerusalem takes on various forms of elimination, including entrapment, enclosure, control of movement, smaller scale but persistent killings, state collaboration and outsourcing with settler mob violence 34 and the extensive use of an intelligence regime 35 on a native population that is kept in shrinking spaces to be surveilled and controlled. 36 In Jerusalem, statelessness is deployed to keep the Palestinians of the city eternally entrapped, a term we use quite literally: they cannot leave without risking permanent exile, they cannot join 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 Al-Haq et al, Joint Parallel Report to the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination on Israel’s Seventeenth to Nineteenth Periodic Reports (Report, 10 November 2019) 1; Joseph Schechla, ‘Ideological Roots of Population Transfer’ (2007) 14(2) Third World Quarterly 239, 256–62. For a discussion of Zionism and its characteristics, see Nadim Rouhana, ‘Religious Claims and Nationalism in Zionism, Obscuring Settler Colonialism’ in Nadim Rouhana and Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian (eds), When Politics Are Sacralized: Comparative Perspectives in Religious Claims and Nationalism (Cambridge University Press, 1st edn, 2021); Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, ‘At the Limits of the Human: Reading Postraciality from Palestine’ (2016) 39(13) Ethnic and Racial Studies 2252; Nadia Abu El-Haj, ‘Racial Palestinianization and the Janus-Faced Nature of the Israeli State’ (2010) 44(1) Patterns of Prejudice 27; David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on Racial Neoliberalism (Wiley-Blackwell 2009). Saleh Abdel Jawad, ‘Zionist Massacres: The Creation of the Palestinian Refugee Problem in the 1948 War’ in Eyal Benvenisti, Chaim Gans and Sari Hanafi (eds), Israel and the Palestinian Refugees (Springer 2007) 59. Haim Bresheeth-Zabner, An Army Like No Other: How the Israel Defence Force Made a Nation (Verso 2020) 4, 352. Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian and Yossi David, ‘Is the Violence of Tag Mehir a State Crime?’ (2016) 56(5) The British Journal of Criminology 835. Sophia Goodfriend, ‘The Expansion of Digital Surveillance in Jerusalem and Impact on Palestinians Rights’ (Research Report, 7amleh — The Arab Center for the Advancement of Social Media, Summer and Fall 2021); Who Profits, ‘Big Brother’ in Jerusalem’s Old City: Israel’s Militarized Visual Surveillance System in Occupied East Jerusalem (Report, November 2018). Laleh Khalili, Time in the Shadows: Confinement in Counterinsurgencies (Stanford University Press 2012) 183–210. 93