About this session

Wednesday, 3:30 PM - 5:00 PM

Palestine and Child Development: Occupation, Colonialism, Sumud, and the Psyche

Palestinians have endured the harsh reality of a settler-colonialist apartheid state since Israel's inception in 1948, documented by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and Israeli rights group B’Tselem. The U.S.-backed and Israeli-led assaults on Gaza and the West Bank since October 2023 are a continuation of a long campaign that began over 75 years ago aimed at the erasure of Palestinians not only through carpet bombing and indiscriminate murder but also through an apartheid regime that robs Palestinians of basic human rights and inflicts physical and psychological terror. Examples of longstanding human rights violations include the detention of Palestinian children in Israeli prisons, demolition of homes, restrictions on movement, expansion of settlements, control and restriction of access to water; and the separation barrier (B’Tselem, 2023). The processes of colonization and ethnic cleansing are enabled and justified by the criminalization of Palestinian children, who are seen as embodiment of violence and marked as “terrorist others'' or “potential terrorists'' (Shalhoub-Kevorkian, 2009). Young people are developmentally tasked with meaning-making and constructing a sense of self. Palestinian youth engage in a process of maintaining the culture and psyche of what we would call ‘Palestinian presence ' in the face of erasure (Sheehi & Sheehi, 2022, p. 8). We integrate a combination of media such as empirical research, historical texts, storytelling, poetry, prayer, and indigenous Palestinian traditions such as sumud to discuss and attempt to answer questions on the impact of occupation on children’s psyche, meaning-making in the face of attempted erasure, and resistance.

Session moderator
Asil Yassine, University of California, Los Angeles

Panelists
Dr. Abdullah Awad, The Institute for Critical Thought, Jordan
Merna Naguib, Clark University, United States
Roua Dass, Pennsylvania State University, United States

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