I was nearly brought to tears yesterday when I read an article in the Baltimore Sun about the criminalization and punishment of young Palestinians in the West Bank. According to the article, more than 5,000 young Palestinians under the age of 18 have been arrested and detained by the Israeli authorities. They are tried in military courts and are given limited access to lawyers and human rights organizations. Their interrogations and trials are secret. These young people are increasingly seen as a threat to the Jewish state — because they are young, they are seen as the most vulnerable to radicalization. According to Mark Regev, spokesman for Israel’s foreign ministry, there is a “deliberate strategy by extremist jihadist groups to exploit young people and to manipulate them in a terrorist war against us.” What is sadly familiar to me is the rhetoric that young people are malleable and vulnerable–capable of great harm without even knowing it. These Palestianian youths are perceived to be capable of horrific crimes against humanity, and images of these youths abound in the national media. They have become familiar, like this one:
What seem less familiar are images like this:
But the politics of representation are tense, particularly in the midst of conflict. According to the Sun article, “a 2006 report conducted by Yesh Din, an Israeli human rights group, found that 90 percent of cases involving settler violence against Palestinians are never prosecuted because authorities claim a lack of evidence or that they cannot identify a suspect.” Violent acts perpetrated by some settlers against Palestinians is underreported, and some suggest that the Israeli state tolerates this violence to a certain extent. (For more on the human rights violations that have emerged as a result of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, on both sides of the fence, see here).
Stone-throwing, the kind of archetypal crime of conflict that we see so often represented in the media, seems to be the crime that captures Palestinians in this net of penality. According to the Sun article, Israeli authorities believe that stone-throwing has been one way that young people participate in Palestinian militancy. Yet, as shown above, throwing stones happens in both directions, and perhaps becomes emblematic of the complex and horrific violence that young people are exposed to on a daily basis in Israel and Palestine. It is strange that on the surface rock-throwing looks a bit like child’s play, but is in fact far from it, and is a deeply violent act of conflict that seems to have no end.
For me, sadly, I’m not surprised that young people are netted into this conflict. As documented by countless human rights groups, Palestinians have faced serious structural and symbolic violence as a result of the conflict–their access to water is limited, their movement restricted, and poverty runs rampant. For me, these are the conditions that lead to retaliative violence against the dominant state. Or, as the Sun article suggests, some young Palestinians who get arrested simply to “find a better life than they face at home.”
I know that I tread in dangerous waters when I speak about this conflict, and I must admit ignorance about the depth, weight and complexity of it. I also know that the violence perpetrated on both sides of the conflict has been horrific. But I also feel that the incarceration of so many young Palestinians in this conflict is a sad statement about the fears and insecurities made manifest in this conflict.
