Spatialization of Child Protection in the oPt

The policy is clear: Palestinians on both sides of the Green Line are to be treated like sheep, penned into ever-smaller areas, while Jews will have unrestrained access to a Greater Israel envisioned by Netanyahu.

5.1 The Setting

Discussion about child protection in the oPt is informed by fieldwork conducted in 2009, supported by prior qualitative research conducted on different occasions over several years, by subsequent interviews and by extensive engagement with practi­tioner and academic literature. The research undertaken in 2009 focussed specifically on the role of organizations in protecting Palestinian children (Hart and Lo Forte

2010). It was conducted in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Therefore, most observations relate to these parts of the occupied Palestinian territory. The children of Gaza, at that time and since, have faced a partially different set of conditions and challenges. Furthermore, the UN and international organizations working there contend with a set of limitations that differ in important respects from the West Bank and East Jerusalem, not least due to the policy of major Western donor nations toward the Hamas-led government in Gaza.

There is not the space here to offer a detailed description of the oPt as a setting of political violence for which a plethora of excellent publications exist (e.g., Gordon 2008; Gorenberg 2007; Perugini and Gordon 2015; Zertal and Eldar 2005). The intention, rather, is to offer sufficient contextual information to make clear the implications of employing a spatialized approach to child protection.

Within the media and in popular political debate in the West the notion of an “Israeli-Palestinian conflict” is commonplace. UN and international humanitarian organizations similarly invoke the conflict paradigm connoting enmity between two approximately equivalent forces fighting across clear lines of battle.

Occupation in this setting is not static: the “matrix of control” that Israel exerts over East Jerusalem and the West Bank enables the progressive appropriation of land and resources (Halper 2000). As more is taken for the construction of settlements and in the name of security or environmental protection, so the Palestinian popula­tion find themselves confined within shrinking pockets of land that can be sealed through checkpoints, curfews, and the closure of gates in the “separation wall.” This process of colonization and accompanying enclavization is evidenced in numerous statistics. For example, in East Jerusalem some 23,378 dunams (ca. 5,750 acres) of Palestinian land were appropriated for Israeli (Jewish) use in the period 1967-1991, while, in the period 1967-2010 more than 13,000 Palestinian Jerusalemites were forced to leave the municipality through revocation of their residency rights. Almost 500,000 Jewish settlers have moved into settlements in East Jerusalem and the West Bank. Additionally, Palestinians are routinely denied permits to build in areas under Israeli civil control (all of East Jerusalem and 59% of the West Bank) leading to the demolition of homes necessarily built without permits (300+ in the period 2007-2011). As of October 2010, there were 99 fixed checkpoints, 62 of which were internal to the West Bank hindering the population from moving between areas of Palestinian civilian life.

The actions of the Israeli authorities intended to promote the removal of Palestinians from certain areas of the oPt and their emplacement in a number of “cantons” or “bantustans” impact upon children in particular ways. Such actions are especially evident in locations within “Area C.” As part of the Oslo II Accord signed in 1995, the West Bank was divided into three zones, A, B, and C, with different security and civil arrangements. The largest of these zones - “Area C” comprising 60% of the land - was placed under full Israeli control (UN 2011). Over the years since then numerous measures have been taken to constrain the lives of Palestinians in “Area C.” For example, it is virtually impossible to obtain permits from the Israeli authorities to build upon Palestinian-owned land, with the consequence that even children’s play areas are subject to destruction. This happened in the village of Azzoun near Qalqilya where a children’s park was built in 2005 with international funding and shortly afterward partially demolished by the Israeli authorities. Foreign agencies were warned by the Israeli authorities not to respond to this action and thus the park remained in ruins (see Hart and Lo Forte 2010, p. 15). Furthermore, access to basic resources including water is severely limited with serious implications for children’s health. While Israeli settler children enjoy a plentiful supply of water, their Palestinian peers, according to UNDP, “experience one of the highest levels of water scarcity in the world” (2006, p. 216).

In the village of al-Hadidiya, visited in the course of field research, a well that had once served the community was found to have been fenced off by the Israeli authorities and the supply diverted to nearby settlements where it was used for the large-scale production of vegetables.

Child-focussed efforts to make life untenable for Palestinians so that they aban­don their homes include attacks upon students passing to and from school. This has occurred, for example, in the South Hebron Hills - a part of the West Bank within Area C. Here around 40,000 Palestinians have been subjected to sustained efforts from the Israeli authorities and settlers aimed at their removal. Homes are routinely demolished along with water infrastructure. Over a period of several years, settlers have threatened and assaulted children from villages near the Israeli settlement of Ma’on and its outpost Havat Ma’on as they walk to and from their school in al-Tuwani. International volunteers have maintained a presence in the immediate vicinity in order to minimize the risk to children. Nevertheless, settler violence has continued on a fenced-off section of the path to which no Palestinian or foreign adult is allowed access (CPT and Operation Dove 2010; DCI 2013; Operation Dove 2014). This is despite the army patrol mandated by the Israeli parliament to accom­pany the children along this stretch.

The violence against children here described - in terms of demolitions, denial of access to basic resources, and settler attacks - is clearly intended to promote the displacement and enclavization of Palestinian communities. Notwithstanding inter­mittent and generally muted advocacy efforts, the larger NGOs and UN agencies have not sought to intervene directly in situations where Palestinian children have been subjected to such violence. Instead they have focussed more on programmatic work on the ground: work that is often informed by conventional thinking about the protective value of children’s separation and enclosure.

5.2 Spatialization

In the oPt spatialization takes many forms, some more explicit than others. These might be categorized as follows: (1) efforts to strengthen the presumed protective spaces of family and community; (2) efforts to transform existing institutional spaces, making them safer and more child friendly; and (3) efforts to create social spaces that serve a protective function. All of these will be described in turn and observations offered about the particular implications of each in the context of occupation and colonization.

1. Efforts to strengthen the presumed protective spaces offamily and community: In recent years, a large proportion of child-related programming in the oPt has focussed on psychosocial interventions of various kinds. For some organizations, psychosocial programming has become virtually synonymous with child protec­tion programming, while for others the two remain distinct. Under the psycho­social label, several organizations focus on efforts intended to enable families to support children better by aiding caregivers to manage their own stress or by imparting techniques intended to equip caregivers to support children through traumatic times more effectively. Thus, for example, in the wake of Israel’s bombardment of the Gaza Strip in 2008/9 (“Operation Cast Lead”), the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) undertook a program the rationale for which was explained as follows:

Conditions in Gaza are so overwhelming that it’s very difficult for children to live normal lives...we try to rehabilitate these children and teach them how to lead a normal life in abnormal conditions.

In cases where families and communities are deemed to fail in their responsibility to care appropriately for individual children, referral networks have been created. Part of their function is to identify “at-risk” children and ensure that proper institutional support is given.

The popularity of such measures among international and UN agencies, and the governmental donors that fund them, can be attributed to at least two factors. First, these are standard responses employed in other settings of emergency. Undoubtedly, efforts to support families through psychosocial programming are important and valued in the oPt and a growing number of local organizations are involved in their delivery. However, the immense investment of UN agencies and INGOs in such programming, particularly in light of local competence, should alert us to other factors behind this focus. Certainly, psychosocial programming enables agencies to achieve (and demonstrate) some degree of efficacy by limiting the goal to coping and reducing harm within the conditions of occupa­tion, rather than challenging the source of the problems. While not all domestic violence can be attributed to occupation, there is no doubt that caregivers are commonly placed under unbearable strain and may express their frustration in behaviur that is abusive or neglectful. As one 12-year-old girl explained:

Now if you experience the occupation, you have someone in prison or you don’t know where they are... you will feel angry, stressed, you feel you cannot protect yourself; that will affect how you respond to the environment around you. So if my dad who’s a taxi driver, if the soldiers take his ID or his driving license, when he comes back home he will be angry and doesn’t want to listen to us.

Agency staff interviewed in 2009 readily acknowledged the negative impact of occupation upon the domestic realm. Nevertheless, in practice the focus of interventions was on the enhancement of coping strategies or upon identifying children “at risk.” Arguably this follows, in part, from a conceptual separation made by many practitioners in the oPt between “external”/“occupation-related” issues, on one hand, and “internal”/“traditional” issues on the other. The employ­ment of such a dichotomy contributes to a sense that these can be addressed in isolation from one another and that behaviors within the space of the home can be improved without challenging the conditions of occupation.

For some Palestinian children - particularly those living in refugee camps, in neighborhoods close to extremist settlers, and in the Jordan Valley - the bound­edness of the domestic/community realm is fragile. For these children, the separability of the space of family/community from the larger political setting is questionable given the experience of Israeli soldiers entering their homes at will, wrecking property, and arresting them or family members. Moreover, homes themselves are routinely destroyed on the grounds that they were built without (unobtainable) permits. Between 2007 and 2011 nearly 1,000 children were made homeless in this way (www.btselem.org). Assumptions about the ability of family and community to secure the most immediate spaces of children’s lives and afford them protection, which lie at the core of the spatialized approach, are clearly questionable in light of such experiences.

2. Efforts to transform existing institutional spaces, making them safer: At the global level, considerable attention has been given to the school as a potentially protective space for children living in situations of emergency. Initiatives such as “healing classrooms” involving the International Rescue Committee or “Schools as Zones of Peace” mentioned above seek to realize this potential through advocacy, community involvement, and capacity building. In the oPt, the “Pro­tective Sphere” project has pursued a similar objective of transforming the existing school space into an environment more conducive to children’s wellbeing. This is a project of Save the Children UK (SCUK) partnered by a local NGO, with funds from the European Commission. As SCUK describes the project:

...we’re building a ‘protective sphere’ to reduce violence in schools and in the wider community. We’re carrying out activities in 15 schools...benefiting 7,500 children. Working with teachers, children and their parents, we provide training on children’s rights and alternatives to corporal punishment. Other activities include setting up school-based educa­tion committees (SBECs) in each of the 15 schools we support, training teachers and parents on how they can make children safer. (2009, p. 3)

Working to create a school environment in which children are less fearful of violence from teachers or their peers is an important endeavor in any setting. However, in the oPt, the achievement of this aim rests on the assumption that violence within the school can be countered separately from the violence of occupation. As a child quoted in a report by SCUK/SC Sweden observed:

Teachers themselves are deprived of their rights and they are stressed. That’s why they practice violence. (2004: 22)

As with the domestic/community realm, school premises and other institu­tional settings frequented by children, including clinics, are commonly subject to threatening actions by the Israeli authorities. Leaving aside the attacks on school buildings and health facilities during Operation Cast Lead in Gaza during winter 2008/2009, Palestinian children have been routinely put at risk during military operations and incursions or as a result of attacks by settlers. Some schools have been targeted repeatedly, such as al-Qurtuba school in Hebron which lies amid neighborhoods inhabited by some of the most extremist settlers in the oPt. Due to repeated attacks with rocks, and Molotov cocktails, the windows of this school are now covered with metal netting. In order to reach their school, children must choose between the risk of physical and verbal abuse from settlers in an area near the school or a lengthy detour around town to reach al-Qurtuba from a different direction (DCI 2014, p. 22) In East Jerusalem, meanwhile, many children are obliged to learn in overcrowded, unsuited, and, in some cases, unsafe buildings due to a shortage of facilities and Israeli constraints on creation of the needed infrastructure.

More broadly, children risk verbal and physical abuse and may witness the humiliation of parents and other family members on their journey to and from school through Israeli checkpoints. One consequence is dropout, as a 14-year-old girl from Ramallah enrolled at a school in Jerusalem explained:

Our parents send us out early in the morning and don’t know if we will return. There are girls who gave up school because of the trouble on the way and the cost of the journey.

For Palestinian children, the challenges of traveling to school and other institutions offering needed services suggest that the focus upon safe space alone is inadequate. Also needed in this setting are concerted efforts to achieve safety in movement. In many emergencies, people prefer to stay in a limited but relatively safe area until immediate danger has passed. However, the oPt is not a conventional emergency context where immediate survival is the primary goal. Palestinians have lived under occupation for decades and endeavor to pursue a normal existence. Obstacles to movement and the risks associated with travel through checkpoints or on routes near to settlements create numerous acute and long-term problems for the young. For their part, child protection organizations and international donors have made few concerted efforts to challenge the Israeli authorities over the mobility of Palestinian children and their treatment by soldiers and settlers. As a senior Palestinian children’s rights expert related:

A lot of resources are being put into developing isolated programming simply because the donors don’t challenge Israel on allowing children to travel to different places. The donors will fund the Palestinians to build two or three additional classrooms rather than building one school in a central locality where everyone can come. We’ll say ‘it’s cheaper just to buy a bus and to use the bus’. And they’ll say ‘no, we can’t guarantee that the bus is going to go’.

3. Efforts to create social spaces that serve a protective function: Rather than seeking to transform an existing institutional space into a place of greater protection, some organizations create distinct new spaces. For example, UNICEF has instigated initiatives such as “Safe Play Areas” and “Adolescent Friendly Spaces” working with local authorities and communities to mark out and main­tain space where young people have “opportunities to meet, socialize, and play in a protected environment” (Dolan 2006). Some spaces come into being for a limited time period and specific aims. Most notable among these are the numer­ous summer camps that are held every year involving UN agencies and INGOs together with Palestinian organizations in a program of activities intended to “give young people a safe place to spend their days, a desperately needed chance to have some fun, and an important opportunity to pick up vital life skills to cope with the daily challenges they face” (UNICEF 2002).

Judging by the large numbers who participate in these various initiatives, they are meeting a need for social and leisure opportunities otherwise lacking in children’s lives. Nevertheless, as with all gatherings of children in a politically unstable setting there are risks entailed. Not only are such spaces vulnerable to violence from Israeli sources, there have also been incidents of attack by extrem­ist elements within Palestinian society affronted by the mixing of girls and boys that typically occurs in many of these projects.

In the oPt, the spatialized approach to child protection - as exemplified by efforts to create distinct and bounded spaces for social interaction - raises an additional and quite specific concern: children’s development as members of a larger political collectivity. Focus groups and interviews provided the opportunity to explore with children, parents, and local experts the physical mobility of today’s children in comparison to that of older generations when they were young. This involved the use of maps to mark out the places visited on family outings and school trips. In each location, the challenges to mobility differed somewhat and were inflected by socio-economic status. Nevertheless, it became apparent that overall children in 2009 had far less possibility to travel even within the West Bank than their parents or grandparents. The options for trips beyond a child’s village or town and the immediately surrounding countryside were typi­cally few in number, with Jerusalem and especially Gaza off-limits. This has serious implications at a societal level as one government official explained:

What protects children is a state, and a state cannot function as a bunch of little cantonettes. The idea that we all share certain commonalities together: that we’re all bound by the same laws and principles. Children living in isolated cantonettes never pick up what a state is because they’re living in this little area where everything is sort of set apart and they do their own thing.

Considered in terms of children’s right to membership of a national commu­nity and to know the heritage of that community, as well as their right of access to family, the obstructions to their movement across the territory of the oPt can be seen as a violation with serious, long-term implications. As suggested by the quote above, the localization of young people’s lives risks not only limiting their cognitive horizons but also fracturing the bonds that might otherwise unite them with a larger collective of people among whom they could reflect upon a collective history and build a common future.

5.3 Institutional Agendas

The foregoing discussion has offered description of a number of ways in which the spatialized approach to child protection - in the various forms that it takes - may be unsuited to the realities of children’s lives in the oPt. Some of the problems inherent to this approach are widely acknowledged: such as the inadequacy of efforts to address intrahousehold and intracommunity tensions in isolation from the pressures associated with life under occupation, or the basic fact that even “safe space” may be violated at a moment’s notice and with impunity. Other limitations of the spatialized approach are noted less often. Nevertheless, there can be little doubt that current protection efforts, in which separation and enclosure are core, have proven ineffective in preventing the systematic violation of Palestinian children’s lives and rights. We should therefore seek to understand why spatialization remains so strongly entrenched in practice.

To some extent, the spatialized approach in the oPt continues due to its wide­spread acceptance within the global child protection field: acceptance that is the product of a tradition of thought about children and within humanitarianism that dates back several decades. However, it is also necessary to consider the institutional purposes of spatialization that may have little relation to the aim of protection. As with the use of refugee camps for the containment of people that might otherwise prove a threat, so enclosure of children within agency-determined domains may serve a number of important additional functions - three of which are described as illustration.

First, by seeking to work with or support children within distinct spaces agencies circumscribe the arena wherein their own efficacy is estimated. Enclosure narrows the focus of evaluation: within a defined location such as a school, summer camp, or inside their homes, improvements to children’s lives as a result of agency interven­tion can be measured.

At the same time, questions about the inability of organizations to influence the conditions of children’s lives more broadly, such as to remove the obstacles to their movement or the risks they encounter passing through checkpoints, can be averted. By positively impacting rates of domestic violence or school bullying - worthy aims in themselves - agencies can be seen as effective in enhancing child protection and thus to be active in pursuit of their mandate. In this light, it may be fair to suggest that a “child-friendly space” also serves to define the boundaries within which an agency proves itself to outsiders.

Most of the UN agencies and INGOs working on children’s protection in the oPt claim to pursue a human rights-based approach. This is rooted in international law and entails addressing the causes of suffering (Fox 2001; UNICEF 2010). A narrowing of focus to issues emerging within specific domains, some of which have been created by the same agencies, constitutes curtailment of the rights-based approach.

In any setting, humanitarian organizations are likely to be nervous of engagement in matters deemed “political”; in the oPt, such anxiety is especially pronounced. Here UN agencies and INGOs must operate around the agendas of western govern­mental donors that are often shaped by domestic lobbies, including representatives of powerful corporate interests. In consequence, such governments have often prioritized trade with Israel and appeasement of the pro-Israel lobby over interna­tional law and children’s rights (Hever 2010; Cronin 2011; Winstanley and Barat

2011).

At the same time, agencies are faced by the expectations of young people and their caregivers for effective action. In recent years, young Palestinians have been outspoken in expressing concerns and aspirations, attracting international attention: their statements often discussing the violations resulting from occupation and, in some cases, criticizing international organizations over their failure to call Israel to account. One such statement includes the following sentiments:

...We are sick of the indifference we meet from the international community, the so-called experts in expressing concerns and drafting resolutions but cowards in enforcing anything they agree on; we are sick and tired of living a shitty life, being kept in jail by Israel, beaten up by Hamas and completely ignored by the rest of the world. (Gaza Youth Breaks Out 2010)

The spatialization of child protection activities thus offers a means by which children’s voices might be managed. Within bounded, agency-organized spaces, the participation of young people can be ‘localized’. This may reduce the risk of their frustration at donor governments role in perpetuating occupation becoming a matter of public debate. Concomitantly, children’s aspirations can be encouraged toward matters that agencies are able to address, thereby providing the opportunity to demonstrate accountability to intended beneficiaries.

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