Children develop a keen sense of injustice at an early age. This is experienced by exasperated carers all over the world as protestations, ad nauseam, of unfairness: “but she has a bigger piece; why can’t I go too?” Strategies employed, with limited success, include distracting the little people with alternate entertainment or treats, and fooling them into believing that they have actually got the better deal. Children grow wary of their carers’ motives not without reason. In the occupied Palestinian territory (oPt), children have the right to feel profoundly aggrieved for the betrayal is of a far more serious nature. A September 2010 report has found that Palestinian children’s rights to life and liberty are being sacrificed, as major donor agencies fail to challenge the Israeli state’s violations of international laws for fear of offending influential political lobbies.
Beyond the fundamental right to life, “access of children to basic services, to social and leisure opportunities and to the care and nurturance of relatives beyond the immediate household has become subject to the whim of the Israeli administration and military forces”, as stated in the recent Oxford University Refugee Studies Centre’s Policy Briefing, “Protecting Palestinian children from political violence: the role of the international community” by Dr Jason Hart and Claudia Lo Forte. Interviews for the Briefing were conducted in the UK with former and current senior agency staff from various child focused organisations. Around 120 interviews and focus groups were conducted with individuals and groups that ranged from donor agency staff, PA officials, UN, INGO and NGO staff, teachers, parents and children in a range of locations across the West Bank and East Jerusalem. While the Briefing begins with the devastating loss of young life during Israel’s bombardment of Gaza in 2008/9, due to “issues of access and time” the authors were unable to visit the besieged strip as part of their research.
Child protection is the responsibility of the state, but Hart and Lo Forte’s findings strongly indicate that in the context of a prolonged Israeli military occupation, the absence of a sovereign Palestinian state, and as long as the so-called ‘Middle East Peace Process’ grinds on, the task of protecting children and ensuring their wellbeing disproportionately falls to INGOs and UN agencies. These bodies are failing to make meaningful interventions in cases of persistent violations of children’s rights because of the dominant tendency to focus on response to threats rather than prevention, and the avoidance of political engagement with the Israeli state and its sponsors:
The close and dependent relationship of most child protection organisations to major western governments, means that their work is constrained accordingly. For example, the alleged reluctance of UNICEF to take a public stand in challenging Israel’s violations as a signatory to the UNCRC and other international legal instruments was attributed by several interviewees primarily to fear of alienating funders as well as those with political influence in the US, where the pro-Israel lobby is immensely powerful.
As one interviewee remarked, “We had more pressure on what we could say about violations of children’s rights from New York than even from the Israeli government.”
Rather than tirelessly advocating for the removal of the menace of Israeli state violence and settler violence from the streets and from children’s schools and homes, the organisations focus the greater part of their energies and funds in identifying ever-dwindling ‘safe spaces’ for Palestinian children in which the latter can benefit from psychosocial activities and insultingly limited educational and cultural opportunities. As one Palestinian NGO worker commented to the authors of the Briefing:
… this morning I was really really upset because my daughters were going on a school trip and I know that just ten years ago a school trip meant that they were going up to Haifa, and going up to Tel Aviv / Jaffa, and one time they actually went to Jordan, stuff like that. And so this school trip one of my daughters was going to Jericho, which we go to every week, and one of them was going to Jenin and Qalqilya. And that’s a school trip… I think that this is a larger political issue – it’s trying to restructure and contain how people perceive their living spaces and how society is being formed.
Thus, foreign donors might congratulate themselves on helping to somewhat alleviate the suffering and daily traumas of occupation, whilst, in the case of USAID and Save the Children US, they can eschew all reference to this occupation by using the term, ‘West Bank and Gaza’. Following the Oslo Accords, Palestinian NGOs became increasingly professionalised: “The involvement of western bilateral and multi-lateral donors grew and with that came the imposition of standardised bureaucratic practices upon local NGOs and a focus upon technical expertise and bureaucratic competence. One result of this gradual shift away from activism and solidarity has been to distance Palestinians working for local NGOs from the grassroots in terms of agenda-setting and prioritisation. A Palestinian working at a local child-focused NGO commented upon this shift in the following terms: “I shouldn’t say this, but I think international organisations are trying to shut us up. In the past locals were out on the streets, now we’re in the offices.”
The failure to protect the rights of children under International Human Rights Law and International Humanitarian Law severely impacts upon their carers – in particular women – and the wider community. Each year, approximately 700 Palestinian children are arrested, interrogated, prosecuted and detained in the Israeli military court system. Children are interrogated in the absence of a lawyer and family member, and the interrogations are not audio-visually recorded as an independent oversight against abuse. Reports of ill-treatment, and in some cases torture, are common, and the overwhelming majority of children confess during interrogation. Women’s Centre for Legal Aid and Counselling (WCLAC) and Defence for Children International (DCI), Palestine, have jointly published details of the July 2010 arrest and 22 day detention without charge of two Palestinian 16 year olds by Israeli forces. The boys were held in solitary confinement for six days inside Israel, where they were interrogated by the notorious Shin Bet security agency. In ‘Voices from the Occupation’ (PDF), WCLAC fieldworkers listened to the testimony of one of the mothers. The lawyer told the children’s mother that the court had secret evidence against one of her sons: “He told us there is nothing a lawyer can do when the court relies on secret evidence. I couldn’t sleep for two days when I heard this. It felt like a dark black cloud had descended on me.’”
The transfer of the two boys out of the Occupied Palestinian Territory and into Israel contravened Article 76 of the Fourth Geneva Convention. However, as Hart and Lo Forte found, “there is little evidence that major donors such as the EU, the governments of the UK and US, are prepared to take the kind of action at the political level that is required” to counter the systematic legal violations that so devastate the lives of children and their families. The Policy Briefing, “Protecting Palestinian children from political violence: the role of the international community” recommends, therefore, that the human rights crisis in the oPt requires a focus by the donors on root causes rather than effects, while the work of child protection organisations, however admirable, should be evaluated in terms of their impact preventing harm to Palestinian children arising from political violence, and “conversely, the unwillingness to go beyond ameliorative measures – such as psychosocial interventions – should become the focus of critical discussion.” There can be little doubt that Palestinian children are not fooled by international attempts to distract them from what is truly just and kind.
