Beyond Statelessness Australia, New Zealand and Palestine. In all settler colonial settings, the remaining Indigenous peoples live in environments that adversely affect human health and community thriving. Every encounter between European settlers and Indigenous peoples has resulted in the natives being sicker and dying younger than the settlers in the same territory.14 The links between settler colonialism and Indigenous health have been incompletely described to date. They have focused on how settler invasion and domination has shattered the fabric of traditional societies, destroyed traditional farming and food gathering practices and ultimately contributed to epidemics of obesity, hypertension and heart disease, among other chronic ailments. While the available research concerns Indigenous peoples in Australia, New Zealand, North America, Latin America and the Caribbean, 15 Palestine — one of the most recent sites of settler colonialism — has, to date, been excluded from this literature.16 Palestinian children in Jerusalem live at the intersection of an exceptional landscape of armed conflict, settler colonialism and statelessness. They experience a particular and inadequately described set of structural, political and social health determinants on a daily basis. It is now well appreciated that the social determinants of health — those economic, political, educational and cultural factors that create the material conditions in which we live — are the strongest predictors of the health and wellbeing of a population,17 while access to medical care and its quality accounts for only 10–20% of a population’s health.18 Children, or those under the age of 18, 19 are both generally and uniquely affected by these social health determinants and the state has clear obligations to respect, protect and fulfil their rights. Under the Convention on the Rights of the Child (‘CRC’), all children have an inherent right to life and states parties have an obligation to ‘ensure to the maximum extent possible the survival and development of the child’.20 The child must thus be protected against all forms of discrimination or punishment based on the status of their parents, as well as against ‘arbitrary or unlawful interference with his or her privacy, family, home or correspondence’.21 As affirmed by the International Court of Justice in its 2004 Advisory Opinion on the Legal Consequences of the Construction of a Wall in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, Israel, as the occupying power, is bound by the CRC and other core international human rights treaties throughout the occupied Palestinian territory, including in occupied East Jerusalem.22 While many of the social determinants of health are consistent along the life course, the impacts of childhood issues have more lasting ramifications. Illness 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 Warwick Anderson, ‘The Colonial Medicine of Settler States: Comparing Histories of Indigenous Health’ (2007) 9(2) Health and History 144. Michael Gracey and Malcolm King, ‘Indigenous Health Part 1: Determinants and Disease Patterns’ 374(9683) Lancet 65; Malcolm King, Alexandra Smith and Michael Gracey, ‘Indigenous Health Part 2: The Underlying Causes of the Health Gap’ 374(9683) Lancet 76. Yin Paradies, ‘Colonisation, Racism and Indigenous Health’ (2016) 33(1) Journal of Population Research 83, 84. World Health Organization Commission on Social Determinants of Health, Closing the Gap in a Generation: Health Equity through Action on the Social Determinants of Health (Final Report, 2008) 1. Sanne Magnan, ‘Social Determinants of Health 101 for Health Care: Five Plus Five’ (Discussion Paper, National Academy of Medicine, 9 October 2017) 1. Convention on the Rights of the Child, opened for signature 20 November 1989, 1577 UNTS 3 (entered into force 2 September 1990) art 1 (‘CRC’). ibid art 6(1)–(2). ibid arts 2(2), 16(1). Legal Consequences of the Construction of a Wall in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (Advisory Opinion) [2004] ICJ Rep 136, 181 [113] (‘Legal Consequences’). 91