In this episode of the Speaking Out of Place podcast, Professor David Palumbo-Liu and Azeezah Kanji talk with Hedi Viterbo and Dr. Jess Ghannam. This episode was recorded on Saturday the 18th of November, 2023, as Israel’s massive attack on Gaza passed the 40-day mark. Almost immediately after the deadly October 7 Hamas attack, the image of the child, both Israeli and Palestinian, began to dominate the media’s coverage, and appeals to international humanitarian law were made to “save the children.” Azeezah Kanji and I decided to create this podcast to coincide with November 20, International Children’s Day, in order to take a deeper look at why such appeals to the law must be contextualized both historically and politically.

DR. JESS GHANNAM

That idea that all children, all Palestinian children, are being radicalized is an attempt to create this narrative, this trope, this understanding, and this imposition on Palestinian children that they should accept their fate as colonized, that they should accept their fate as being slaves in a master-slave relationship, that they should accept their fate in the settler colonial project that Israel has been engaging in since 1948.

And it's an attempt to disempower Palestinian children and Palestinians in general, I might add, but it starts very young. And I'm going to come back to that in a minute, and the concept is: every child in the world should have a sense of agency except Palestinian children because if Palestinian children have agency, that gets equated with radicalization, rather than a normal attempt to exert some ability of, and as I said, agency in the world to resist all of the matrix of control that settler colonialism engages with Palestinians.

The Israeli settler colonial project and Hedi, he gave a really good example of what they did in Al-Shifa in the hospital. They took out Palestinian men and stripped them down and humiliated them. That's it's really an important point in this discussion of radicalization and what's happening to Palestinian children. And having done this work for such a long time, one of the classic Israeli, in my opinion, kind of devious psychological manipulations that they do, and we all know this, is that when the Israeli military raids a Palestinian home in the middle of the night, the structure of the assault is always the following.

They take the father of the house, they separate the father from the women and the children, and what they do with the father, they strip him naked frequently, they make him go on his knees, and they absolutely humiliate and disempower the father in front of the children. That's the structure of the night raid for every Palestinian that's gone through that experience. Now, what's the purpose of that? The purpose is to show young Palestinian children, girls and boys, that your father is impotent. That they cannot protect you. That we are the strong, and you should listen to us. We have the power. This has been going on for decades, and the negative psychological impact of the structure of this kind of assault on the empowerment of Palestinian fathers and Palestinian men has really been quite devastating over the decades.

Now there's been resistance to that, but it's part of this overall picture that has been going on for decades and decades and decades, and this is the message of the settler colonial project: You should just accept. You should just accept your fate as a slave in this settler colonial project. You should not resist. Resistance gets equated to radicalization. And that has to be broken. That has to be unpacked, that has to be completely challenged because that's been the dominant narrative of the Israeli Apartheid project, I should add, for many many many decades now, and it's very insidious.

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Well, the situation right now, and I've just been reviewing the latest statistics from OCHA, the situation on the ground in Gaza is nothing less than absolute catastrophe. It's grim. It's bleak. As of last night, the current statistics - and we hate to use numbers describing the kind of tragedy that's fallen on Palestinian children, civilians, men, and women - but over 11, 000 people have been killed. Over 26, 000 have been injured. And of the individuals that have been killed, over 4, 500 have been children. Another 1, 000 children are unaccounted for because presumably they're buried underneath the rubble. And because of the situation on the ground in Gaza right now, we can't even get equipment or people to bring the dead out of the rubble. There continues to be fuel. The water, food, and medicine blockade in the last three days, there have been no shipments of humanitarian supplies coming into Gaza. It is absolutely earth-shattering and catastrophic, the amount of malnutrition and lack of food, water, and medicine that is being denied access to people in Gaza right now.

There are over a million internally displaced Palestinians in Gaza right now. And what's really painful about that, if anybody knows the history, and most of your viewers and listeners know about the history, Gaza's already over 80 percent of the people living in Gaza are already refugees. So we're talking about individuals who are going on their second, third, and fourth displacement from their indigenous connection to the land in Palestine, specifically in Gaza.

80 percent of the hospitals are completely nonfunctional. Of the remaining hospitals in Gaza that are barely functioning, they don't have the supplies to actually do what they need to do to treat the wounded, and the sick. None of the hospitals have electricity right now, so physicians and nurses and healthcare professionals are doing procedures without anesthesia. They're using vinegar for antiseptic because there's no regular antiseptic available. So, it's very grim. It's a very bleak situation and I think for Palestinians especially that bleakness is manifested by basically world leaders turning their backs on what's happening to Palestinians.

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That's been going on for decades in the Gaza Strip and more intensely since 2006. The world of WHO and the World Food Bank have been describing the devastation of food insecurity among Palestinian children not just in Gaza, by the way, but including the West Bank. But it's more severe in Gaza, where 70 to 75 percent of Palestinian children live on less than 2 a day, which is extraordinary when you think about it. I've been doing fieldwork in Gaza and going to Gaza for over 25 years now. And what I've been able to observe over that trajectory of seeing is that with the blockade, you've seen this transition away from whole foods grown, developed by indigenous farming techniques in Gaza by Palestinians and because of the blockade, the food has transitioned to high-density carbs, processed foods, sugars, things like that. So there's this very sinister calculation that the Israelis engage with in terms of nutritional restrictions on Palestinians in Gaza. They restrict the number of calories, but the diversity of the food that's actually being allowed into Gaza has changed dramatically in the last couple of decades. So the combination of those two things for children in Gaza and in the West Bank, I might add, is this stunting that goes on for Palestinian children. When you look at the growth curves of Children in Gaza, they fall well below the world average in terms of weight and height.

Hedi Viterbo is an associate professor of law at Queen Mary University of London in the UK. His research examines legal issues concerning childhood, state violence, and sexuality from an interdisciplinary and global perspective. His latest book is Problematizing Law, Rights, and Childhood in Israel/Palestine (Cambridge University Press, 2021).

Dr. Jess Ghannam is Clinical Professor of Psychiatry and Global Health Sciences in the School of Medicine at UCSF. His research areas include evaluating the long-term health consequences of war on displaced communities and the psychological and psychiatric effects of armed conflict on children. Dr. Ghannam has developed community health clinics in the Middle East that focus on developing community-based treatment programs for families in crisis.

He is also a consultant with the Center for Constitutional Rights, Reprieve and other international NGO's that work with torture survivors. Locally he works to promote and enhance the health and wellness of refugee, displaced, and immigrant populations from the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia and has established a community-based Mental Health Treatment Programs to support these communities.

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Speaking Out of Place, which carries on the spirit of Palumbo-Liu’s book of the same title, argues against the notion that we are voiceless and powerless, and that we need politicians and pundits and experts to speak for us.

Judith Butler on Speaking Out of Place:

“In this work we see how every critical analysis of homelessness, displacement, internment, violence, and exploitation is countered by emergent and intensifying social movements that move beyond national borders to the ideal of a planetary alliance. As an activist and a scholar, Palumbo-Liu shows us what vigilance means in these times.  This book takes us through the wretched landscape of our world to the ideals of social transformation, calling for a place, the planet, where collective passions can bring about a true and radical democracy.”

David Palumbo-Liu is the Louise Hewlett Nixon Professor and Professor of Comparative Literature at Stanford University. He has written widely on issues of literary criticism and theory, culture and society, race, ethnicity and indigeneity, human rights, and environmental justice. His books include The Deliverance of Others: Reading Literature in a Global Age, and Speaking Out of Place: Getting Our Political Voices Back. His writing has appeared in The Washington Post, The Guardian, The Nation, Al Jazeera, Jacobin, Truthout, and other venues. Twitter @palumboliu
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