2022 Statelessness & Citizenship Review 4(1) during childhood, along with physical and mental disorders, negatively affects educational outcomes and future employment and income, which in turn affects the health of adults and their children, thus producing a vicious cycle.23 The built environment of homes, streets, parks and safe spaces influences the pattern of injuries, car accidents and obesity, and the general wellbeing of children. 24 Here, it is worth emphasising that the World Health Organization (‘WHO’) defines health as not simply the absence of disease, but as a state of complete physical, mental and social wellbeing, which is in line with many Indigenous conceptualisations.25 Similarly, international human rights law considers the right to health to encompass ‘a wide range of socio-economic factors that promote conditions in which people can lead a healthy life’.26 State policies that shape the accessibility of early education, urban planning, affordable housing, citizenship and welfare influence to a large extent the built and social environments in which a child develops and achieves — or does not achieve — the full definition of health.27 Naturally, the social determinants of health, including impoverishment, diminished educational opportunities, racial discrimination and dispossession, are largely a function of state institutions, non-state actors and their associated structures and systems. A structurally competent approach to understanding and analysing health requires an interpretation of individual symptoms, attitudes or diseases as stemming from upstream decisions, actions and designations. 28 Deploying such an approach in grappling with the reality of Jerusalem points inevitably to a necropolitical economy of life and death that renders some lives more valuable (or more disposable) than others. Necropolitics is a concept, like genocide, that ‘is never far from discussions of settler colonialism’.29 To appropriately situate Palestinian child health determinants, we must combine insights from the settler colonialism and public health literatures, organising them within ShalhoubKevorkian’s framework of unchilding. THE POLITICAL AND RACIAL CONTOURS OF PALESTINIAN STATELESSNESS IN JERUSALEM Understanding statelessness in Jerusalem and its effects on child health requires a critical examination of the settler colonial and racially exclusivist nature of Zionism, which constitutes the Israeli state’s raison d’état of displacing, dispossessing and dominating the Indigenous Palestinian people across historic 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 Diane D Allensworth, ‘Addressing the Social Determinants of Health of Children and Youth: A Role for SOPHE Members’ (2011) 38(4) Health Education & Behavior 331, 331. Susan Kay Cummins and Richard Joseph Jackson, ‘The Built Environment and Children's Health’ (2001) 48(5) Pediatric Clinics of North America 1241. ‘Constitution of the World Health Organization’, World Health Organization (Web Page) <https://www.who.int/about/governance/constitution>. United Nations Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, General Comment No 14: The Right to the Highest Attainable Standard of Health (Article 12), UN Doc E/C.12/2000/4, 2 [4] (‘Highest Attainable Standard of Health’). Karen Villanueva et al, ‘Can the Neighbourhood Built Environment Make a Difference in Children’s Development? Building the Research Agenda to Create Evidence for Place-Based Children’s Policy’ (2016) 16(1) Academic Pediatrics 10. Jonathan Metzl and Helena Hansen, ‘Structural Competency: Theorizing a New Medical Engagement with Stigma and Inequality’ (2014) 103 Social Science & Medicine 126. Wolfe (n 5) 387; Achille Mbembe, ‘Necropolitics’ in Stephen Morton and Stephen Bygrave (eds), Foucault in an Age of Terror (Palgrave Macmillan 2008) 152. 92