Iron Caging the Palestinian Home: Child Home Arrest in Occupied East Jerusalem as Lawfare
Keyword: 
Palestinian childhood
criminalization
racialization
settler colonial governance
alternative to punishment
lawfare
searing the consciousness
home arrest
Unchilding
Abstract: 

The Israeli legal regime in occupied East Jerusalem has increasingly home-arrested Palestinian children, while invoking legalistic welfare discursively reliant on principles of so-called child-protection. While criminologists, legal scholars, and social workers have defined home arrest as a “rehabilitative” alternative to punishment, children’s voices reveal that home arrest is a mundane penal technology used to penetrate a colonized childhood and home. Contextualizing this penal technology within settler-colonial violence, this article reveals how home arrest became an alternative mode of “lawfare,” a legal means of racialized structural violence targeting children. As the voices of children analyzed in this paper illustrate, home arrest invades, cages, and governs the native home and family to ultimately violate, debilitate, and paralyze the home-arrested child’s childhood and future.

Author biography: 

Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian is the Lawrence D. Biele Chair in Law at the Faculty of Law, Institute of Criminology and the School of Social Work and Public Welfare at Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and the Global Chair in Law, Queen Mary University of London.

Amir Marshi is a research fellow at Mada al-Carmel Center for Applied Social Studies in Haifa.