Terrorist Images: Virtual Childhoods in Occupied Palestine

• In Event: Homonationalism, Imperial “Harm-Reduction,” and Pinkwashing Zionism

Abstract

Since the October 7 2023 onset of the most recent episode of genocide against the Palestinian people, calls for ceasefire globally have proven particularly attentive to the child as an exceptionalized figure, a limit case in the consideration of Palestinian sovereignty and its relation to citizenship, nationalism, and resistance. In this talk, I detangle the conundrums of race and sexuality in the Palestinian child that produce certain queer liminalities and frustrated contradictions between virtual popular conceptions of Palestinian childhood and the reality of its material conditions. Within a larger liberal discourse that privileges unstable rubrics of innocence, what racial and sexual features of the Palestinian child in the US popular imaginary render them an exceptionally upstanding subject for whom calls for peace are sounded?

Thinking with terrorism studies and queer child studies alongside an examination of real literary and aesthetic accounts of Palestinian childhood from the West Bank and Gaza and their relationship to resistance and sovereignty, this talk theorizes the popular conception of Palestinian childhood as a racially hybrid process. Through writings like that of Ghassan Khanafani and Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian as well as popular cultural objects such as the Netflix film Farha (2023) and social media currents, this talk holds together how the Palestinian child both is and is (imagined). The talk takes childhood militancy in occupied Jenin as a main case study to reckon with the stakes of these images, their refractions, and their potentials. Considering these children taking up militancy to resist occupation, I provoke how these lived experiences—juvenile decolonial impulse—are held at odds with a more palatably imagined popular image. Where we see the child once instrumentalized by liberal ethics of peace and non-violence in the US, we see the child twice stand in new ways to challenge and combat empire itself. Through and beyond this thought, the talk is concerned with what an exceptional women-and-children political narrative may reveal about Palestinian militancy more largely with respect to the child’s emergent relationship to resistance against the regime which seeks to efface Palestinian life and culture from the land between the river and the sea.

Author

• Hady A Elrafei, New York University