Problematizing Law, Rights, and Childhood in Israel/Palestine

In this book, Hedi Viterbo radically challenges our picture of law, human rights, and childhood, both in and beyond the Israel/Palestine context. He reveals how Israel, rather than disregarding international law and children's rights, has used them to hone and legitimize its violence against Palestinians. He exposes the human rights community's complicity in this situation, due to its problematic assumptions about childhood, its uncritical embrace of international law, and its recurring emulation of Israel's security discourse. He examines how, and to what effect, both the state and its critics manufacture, shape, and weaponize the categories 'child' and 'adult.' Bridging disciplinary divides, Viterbo analyzes hundreds of previously unexamined sources, many of which are not publicly available. Bold, sophisticated, and informative, Problematizing Law, Rights, and Childhood in Israel/Palestine provides unique insights into the ever-tightening relationship between law, children's rights, and state violence, at both the local and global levels.

1. Conceptual and theoretical foundations; 2. Casting the first stone: the Israeli legal system, its human rights critics, and their approaches to young Palestinians; 3. The age of governing: young age as a means of control; 4. Boundary governance: amending childhood and separating Palestinians; 5. Stolen childhood: voice, loss, and trauma in human rights reports; 6. Sights of violence: childhood in the visual battlefield; 7. Infantilization and militarism: soldiers as children, children as soldiers; 8. Unsettling children: Israeli law and settlers' childhood.

Hedi Viterbo is Lecturer in Law at Queen Mary University of London. Previously, he was Lecturer in Law at the University of Essex, a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at SOAS, University of London, a visiting scholar at Harvard Law School, and a visiting researcher at Columbia University. Dr Viterbo's previous publications include The ABC of the OPT: A Legal Lexicon of the Israeli Control over the Palestinian Territory (2018) (co-authored with Orna Ben-Naftali and Michael Sfard).