Beyond Statelessness colonies have continued the process of elimination via forced assimilation (among other means), the ongoing frontier, reinforced by active Palestinian resistance from Sheikh Jarrah in Jerusalem to Al-Naqab, continues to render them unassimilable. In fact, as Shalhoub-Kevorkian shows, the Zionist settler colony with its racially exclusive logic has no place for Palestinian assimilation. For the ‘Jewish state’, the only logic is that of complete Palestinian removal from the land coveted by Zionism. Here, as she powerfully explicates, the removal of native Palestinian children, their bodies, families and homes operates as yet another form of Zionism’s settler colonial ‘logic of elimination’.44 As Fayez Sayegh laid out early on, even before Israel’s military occupation began in 1967, ‘[n]owhere ... has European race-supremacism expressed itself in so passionate a zeal for thoroughgoing racial exclusiveness and for physical expulsion of “native” populations across the frontiers of the settler-state, as it has in Palestine, under the compulsion of Zionist doctrines’.45 Per Hannah Arendt, ‘any state founded on a homogeneous idea of the nation is bound to expel those who do not belong to the nation and so to reproduce the structural relation between the nation-state and the production of stateless persons’.46 Israel’s 2018 Basic Law: Israel — the Nation State of the Jewish People (‘Basic Law’) thus proclaims that ‘[t]he Land of Israel is the historical homeland of the Jewish people’47 where ‘[t]he exercise of the right to national self-determination … is unique to the Jewish People’.48 The law goes on to declare that ‘Jerusalem, complete and united, is the capital of Israel’49 and that ‘[t]he state views the development of Jewish settlement as a national value, and shall act to encourage and promote its establishment and strengthening’.50 Israel’s Basic Law, and long-time policy since its founding through the Nakba in 1948, clearly demarcates the borders of citizenship, and thus the borders of statehood and statelessness for the Indigenous Palestinian people. It renders Palestinians, as ‘non-Jews’, eternally outside of the limits of the settler nation and nation-state. Alternatively, as Mahmood Mamdani argues, settlers, unlike migrants, seek a nation-state, not a homeland, and that nation-state cannot be shared: ‘all others are at most tolerated guests’.51 The Palestinian people, specifically Palestinians in Jerusalem, lie at the intersection of Zionism’s settler colonial frontier and racial exclusiveness, constantly resisting state-orchestrated expulsion and elimination. Statelessness widens our understanding of the machinery of this structural and material violence as it operates on the bodies and minds of Indigenous children to produce sickness, disability, trauma and death. This machinery of violence expands its operational market to children through a process of unchilding, where Palestinian children are expelled from the realm of childhood and humanity and the need to be cared for by the hegemonic settler society. They become ‘political capital’ in the hands of the settler colonisers and are portrayed as already, or in their fully unchilded state, ‘terrorists’ and ‘security threats’ awaiting 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 Wolfe (n 5). Fayez Sayegh, ‘Zionist Colonialism in Palestine (1965)’ (2012) 2(1) Settler Colonial Studies 206, 216. Judith Butler, Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism (Columbia University Press 2012) 100. Basic Law: the Knesset 1958 (1958) 244 The Laws Book, art 1(a) (Israel) (‘Basic Law’). ibid art 1(c). ibid art 3. ibid art 7. Mahmood Mamdani, Neither Settler nor Native (Harvard University Press 2020) 253. 95