Chapter 2 introduces the book’s two institutional protagonists: the Israeli legal system and the liberal human rights community. Their key characteristics are outlined, their shared fetishization of law is examined, and the intricate dynamic within and between them is described. Issues and trends in their approaches to young Palestinians are identified. The chapter expands on the mass prosecution and incarceration of Palestinians, the military court system, the mechanisms for judicial review of military actions, and Israel’s repeated invocation of international law, with special attention to the effects and manifestations of each of them in relation to young Palestinians. At the forefront of the analysis are the importance, characteristics, blind spots, and silences of legal and human rights texts. Accordingly, the chapter’s entry points into the subject matter are extensive quotes from two documents – an Israeli military court file and a human rights report – both of which concern Palestinians convicted of stone throwing. As this is the most common charge against noncitizen Palestinians under 18, it is also a common thread through the chapter.

Chapter 8 delves into the legal construction of Israeli settlers’ childhood, revisiting in the process key themes and insights from the previous chapters. The greater rights and preferential treatment enjoyed by settlers aged under 18, compared with those of same-age Palestinians, are explored in this chapter, with a focus on two test cases: stone throwing by settler youth, and the question of whether to detain settlers aged under 18 separately from their elders. In the process, the chapter sheds light on the lax law enforcement on settler youth; on their lenient sentencing; on soldiers’ abuse of Palestinian victims of settler violence; on the courts’ consideration of settlers’ military service as a mitigating factor; on convictions only where Palestinian complaints are corroborated by Israeli witnesses; and on the rejection of Palestinians’ selective enforcement claims. Next, the chapter interrogates what critics have described as Israel’s childish response to the refusal of detained settler girls to disclose their ages. This dynamic offers broader lessons about age, voice, and infantilization. Finally, the chapter casts light on two central modes of representation in parliamentary debates on the impact of the Gaza pullout on young Jewish evacuees: a mental health language of trauma and loss, and visual imagery.

Chapter 6 deals with the legal and political forces determining the visibility of Israeli state violence against young Palestinians. First, it examines three ways in which Israel subjects Palestinians to its gaze or pressures them to internalize it: putting up threatening posters with photographs of Palestinian youth or their parents; taking pictures of unsuspected Palestinian youth; and soldiers filming their abuse of young Palestinians. Second, this chapter lays bare a range of Israeli practices and discursive techniques operating to conceal, downplay, and legitimize violence against young Palestinians: the prevention of such violence from being witnessed in real time; the destruction of incriminating evidence; restrictions on publishing unflattering information; the failure to record interrogations; torture methods that leave no physical marks; legally sanctioned secrecy; the impunity of alleged perpetrators; and their depiction as merely a few rotten apples. Finally, the chapter offers a rethinking of evidence. Israel and its human rights critics tend to privilege video footage and state agents’ testimonies, thereby validating both Israel’s dismissal of uncorroborated Palestinian allegations and its “rotten apples” narrative. It is argued that alternative types of evidence foreground the representation at work and can thus highlight the invisibility shrouding both state violence and young witnesses.

Chapter 1 lays the theoretical, methodological, and contextual foundations of this book. First, an overview is provided of the book’s key arguments, as well as its contribution to existing studies and debates. The chapter then offers a detailed rethinking of conventional wisdom about each of the book’s central themes: childhood, law, and human rights. Children, it argues, are not simply a preexisting group with inherently unique traits and needs but, rather, are a category largely manufactured by social forces. Key among these forces are law and children’s rights, both of which, for reasons explained in this chapter, have been complicit in state domination and violence. From there, the chapter places the subject matter in its political context. This is done by outlining the varying modes and degrees of control that Israeli authorities exercise over each of the following territories: Israel “proper” (within its pre-1967 borders), East Jerusalem, the rest of the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip. The methodology of this study is then discussed, and the book’s sources are described, along with the decisions that were taken in interpreting them, as well as the inaccessibility of some sources. Finally, an outline of the next chapters is provided.

Chapter 5 tackles four interrelated interpretive frameworks recurring in human rights publications. It challenges their depiction of childhood, exposes their pitfalls and omissions, and links them to wider issues both globally and locally. First discussed is a mental health discourse of childhood trauma and loss. This language, it is argued, individualizes and often decontextualizes the issues at stake; pathologizes young Palestinians; and casts them as a security threat. Second, the depiction of Palestinian childhood as lost or stolen is criticized for overlooking Palestinians’ actual sociopolitical circumstances. Further, this chapter analyzes how the loss of childhood is often tied to the loss of the Palestinian homeland, and how this linkage portrays Palestinians’ collective past, present, and future. Third, the notion that Palestinians have a “right to childhood” is criticized for perpetuating two harmful tendencies of the dominant children’s rights discourse: the exclusion of young people (or their inclusion only on older people’s terms) and the legitimation of apathy and harshness toward those defined as adults. Finally, and contrary to what human rights organizations claim to be doing, this chapter highlights several ways in which they obscure rather than simply represent the voices of young Palestinians.

At the heart of Chapter 7 are two characteristics of the dominant Israeli legal and human rights discourse. The first is its portrayal of soldiers as children, particularly in court cases concerning either soldiers’ violence against Palestinians or military hazing. The analysis pays special attention to courts’ conjuring up of two conflicting childhoods: that of the violent soldier, who is not formally a child yet tends to be perceived as such, and that of the young Palestinian, whom the statutory law defines as a “minor.” The second discursive characteristic is the treatment of under-18s in military terms. Regarding young Israelis in conflict with the law, the chapter analyzes their depiction as soldiers in the making, as well as the judiciary’s consideration of their future military service as a mitigating factor. Regarding young Palestinians, the chapter discusses their use as human shields, as well as the double standard in Israeli contentions that they are trained for combat from an early age. Across these contexts, the chapter criticizes invocations of two problematic international legal principles: first, the categorization of young people as protected civilians, and, second, the ban on recruiting underage soldiers.

Chapter 3 investigates how age shapes Palestinians’ lives in four contexts. The first is Israeli military trials of Palestinians. The chapter reveals how military judges have treated Palestinians’ young age as an aggravating factor; how Palestinians’ physical appearance affects their sentences; how the age categories applicable to Palestinians evolved from colonial British law; and how the Israeli judiciary has been inconsistent on all these issues. Broader insights are provided into both Israel’s governing through uncertainty and the inherent fluidity of childhood and age. Second, this chapter examines legal disputes over Israel’s open-fire regulations (rules of engagement). It shows how these regulations, which in principle forbid shooting at under-14s, have been interpreted to authorize firing at younger Palestinians whom Israeli forces perceive to be dangerous or older. Third, the chapter discusses the age-based food quotas imposed on the Gaza Strip. A critical light is cast on the logic guiding this form of biological warfare, as well as on Israel’s attempts to justify it in humanitarian and legal terms. Fourth, the chapter interrogates the deployment of age as a risk management tool within Israel’s movement restrictions, as well as Palestinians’ resistance to these restrictions by deceiving Israeli authorities about their age.

Chapter 4 focuses on reforms in the first two decades of this century, which represented, for both Israel and the human rights community, fixing childhood’s spatial and age boundaries in line with legal standards. Key among them were the separation of incarcerated Palestinians under 18 from their elders; the establishment of the world’s only “military youth court”; raising the age of majority under military law; and assessment of the rehabilitation chances of Palestinian youth. Contrary to claims by Israeli officials and their human rights critics, this chapter reveals that some reforms have made no actual difference while others have served to fragment, monitor, and suppress Palestinians. Five broader issues exemplified by these reforms are discussed: the blind spots of human rights actors; the complicity of child law and children’s rights in the oppression of disempowered communities around the world; the growing convergence between military and nonmilitary Israeli law; the multiple forms of separation Israel imposes on Palestinians, which operate to divide and conquer them; and Israel’s attempts at confining Palestinian minds beyond the prison walls. Also examined are Palestinian acts of resistance: running study groups in prison, smuggling sperm of incarcerated men, and conducting readings and discussions in public protests.