Our member, Dr. Heidi Morrison (University of Wisconsin, La Crosse, US), talks about her edited collection, Lived Resistance Against the War on Palestinian Children (University of Georgia Press, 2024).
This book is about Palestinian young people’s will to survive Israeli oppression and demand its end, despite their lack of conventional capital and formal citizenship. In large part, Palestinian young people resourcefully rely on what is available to them: their bodies (in flesh and mind), a phenomenon this book refers to as lived resistance.
Lived resistance is the embodied (i.e., the bodily grounding of cognition and experience) process by which people purposefully resist, individually and collectively, unjust domination in their everyday lives. Lived resistance refers to a way of life for children under constant dispossession, as well as a research technique. Researchers too have bodies that impact their work. Namely, as adults researching children we bring multiple layers of asymmetrical power to our projects that must be accounted for.
This book has been seven years in the making, but it could be no more relevant than today when we see unrelenting violence against the children of Gaza. I decided to make this book because, despite the increasing volume of scholarship that shows children are political actors, a cohesive framework is lacking to express children’s relationship with oppressive political power. In conventional resistance studies, children’s voices alone are often not considered sufficient to be included in the political community unless they are part of inter- or intragenerational struggles or considered from the perspective of empowerment in adult-led policies. Or, it is assumed children do not usually engage in “real resistance.”
The essential question this book asks is not whether children’s resistance takes place, but how it is occurring. The following scholars unpack this question in the volume: Amahl Bishara, Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkia, Rami Salameh, Amneh Badran, Janette Habashi, Cindy Sousa and Sara Bressi, Abeer Otman, Nitin Sawhney, Shahrazad Odeh, Mohammed Alrozzi, Valentina Marconi, and Yousef M. Aljamal, Natalia Molebatsi, Ahed Tamimi and Jana Jihad Ayad, Lama Yahya, and Heidi Morrison.
A tangible example of the intersectional nature of Palestinian children's lived resistance is found in the photograph that went viral in 2018 of a nine-year-old Gazan boy, Mohamed Ayyash, wearing a homemade onion face mask while at the front of Land Day protests at the Gaza-Israel border. Mohamed made his "gas mask" by sticking the bulb of an onion in a disposable surgical mask; he later explained that he thought sniffing an onion could neutralize Israeli tear gas, as he had heard stories of his father using such a technique during the first intifada. Mohamed's face mask is thoughtfully conceived, yet at the same time, it is playful. In the image, long green onion stalks, still attached to the bulb, protrude from the mask perpendicular to his nose and rise a few inches above his little head. The overall image of Mohamed is bittersweet: a young person being silly yet engaged in a serious fight against the Israeli settler-colonial forces. He seeks to withstand the toxic smell, blurry vision, and stinging touch of tear gas, while at the same time draw attention to the memory (and continued practice) of Israel's confiscation of Palestinian land. All the while he does so while standing in a land that other Palestinian children have described as "non-breathing," nonliving space. To demand justice, he places his body in a highly symbolic location, at the limit line of the open-air prison that strips him of all rights to citizenship. He rebuffs Israel's bodily control and containment of Palestinians through his body itself. He seems to remain silent, refusing engagement with the language of the Zionist political regime, yet allowing his presence to be a medium of expression that says the unspeakable. The image of Mohamed captures how he braids his body and mind together, in a quintessential form of lived resistance.
The mere act of being alive takes up space, which means that the existence of Palestinian children's bodies subverts settler-colonial forces that seek to erase the colonized. As they walk, run, and play on the land, the feet of Palestinian children make visible the Palestinian homeland underneath, which, literally and figuratively, holds them up and propels them forward. Further, as repositories of past and future generations of Palestinians, children's bodies defy the settler-colonial logic that deems Palestinian bodies as exterminable and disposable. (Palestinians refer to children killed by Israeli forces as martyrs, indicating that even in death the corpse holds power.) The use of the body to fight for the mere existence of the body is eloquently captured in the words of the twelve-year-old Palestinian girl named Sumud who, outraged by the unjust murder of her fourteen-year-old brother by Israeli police officers and the subsequent agonizing withholding of his corpse in Israel's refrigerators, proclaims "Ana Sumud (I am steadfastness)." Sumud explains that she is stronger than walls, soldiers, and checkpoints; her will to live, which includes growing up to become a lawyer, is more powerful than the Israeli occupation itself. Her body is her resistance, and is a tool for enacting her resistance. She uses her body as both "the messenger and the message," to borrow from the work of Jouni Häkli and Kirsi Pauliina Kallio on the embodied experience of refugees seeking to draw attention to inhumane treatment. Further, her thinking is grounded in the context of her setting, which, as has been discussed, includes a culture of sumud as resistance. Thus, Sumud quite literally lives her resistance.
This book contains numerous examples of lived resistance as a braided experience between mind and body, where children use them as an effectual source of power. The chapters by Odeh and by Alruzzi, Marconi, and Aljamal show Palestinian children and families tirelessly navigating the Israeli injustice system, refusing to let children's bodies be pushed out of sight (i.e., behind bars) by Israel's excessive Palestinian child imprisonment system. Children in East Jerusalem strategically occupy streets shoulder to shoulder in planned sit-ins, as Amneh Badran's chapter illustrates, effectively staging their bodies to be gazed at. Israeli courts consider Palestinian stone throwing as a threat to the security of Israel, as Odeh's chapter illustrates. Nitin Sawhney describes rows of children in Gaza standing on a beach flying kites, using the strength and dexterity of their hands to draw physical attention to their plight and paint in the sky an image of themselves as anything but a faceless mass. Self-harming and suicidal behavior can also be a way of communicating, as my chapter illustrates. Shalhoub-Kevorkian's chapter focuses on the Palestinian children's corpses systematically withheld by Israel; Palestinian parents insist on grieving their lost children and not letting Israel vanish the already vanished bodies. While not included in this book, Hedi Viterbo's research shows how Palestinian children sometimes manipulate their physical appearance (as a determinant of age) or misrepresent their physical age to frustrate Israeli rule. Thus, lived resistance means that the body and mind co-construct one another in dialogue with the context in which they exist. Children empower themselves through training/harnessing their senses and through the deliberate maneuvering of their arms, legs, and so forth, all while the mind and body remain the target of Israeli disciplining and control.