History of Childhood in Palestine:
A Critical Assessment of a Field Emerging in a War Zone

Heidi Morrison, University of Wisconsin- La Crosse

As an historian of childhood in the Middle East, I am committed to research that gives voice to vulnerable members of society.  My research thus far has focused primarily on the experiences of children in twentieth century Egypt, however, after the 2008-2009 War on Gaza, I began to develop an interest in the children of Palestine.  During the three-week attacks on Gaza, children were locked into a war zone, and not allowed to become refugees, even temporarily.  This exposure to violence on the part of children, who reportedly make up 53% of the current 1.5 million persons living in Gaza, is unprecedented in modern warfare, and arguably has had traumatic effects on the entire cohort of children living in Gaza under incredibly difficult conditions.  For over four decades, children in Gaza and the West Bank have grown up under military occupation and undergone numerous wars, however, there exists little, if any, research on the history of Palestinian children. 

When the opportunity arose this summer for me to partake in a 12-day Faculty Development Seminar in Palestine, I knew this would be an excellent chance to assess the state of Childhood Studies at Palestinian universities, as well as to make contacts for future research projects.   The seminar was sponsored by PARC (Palestinian American Research Center), which is a part of the consortium of the Council of American Overseas Research Centers whose primary goals are to strengthen research and knowledge about foreign countries and promote linkages between American and foreign researchers.  The Faculty Development Seminar was Jerusalem-based and included lectures, workshops, and visits to local universities and other related institutions in the West Bank.

The non-existence of existence

 Challenges abound worldwide in building the field of the history of childhood.   Historians of western childhoods have fought a long battle to make children and childhood a viable and valued category of study in academia.  These scholars have also struggled to find sources.   Historians of non-western childhoods and of global childhoods have recently emerged out of a movement to bring diversity into the field, but they are still marginal in number.   Palestinian historians face an additional obstacle: their libraries, offices, and lecture halls exist in a war zone.

It is difficult to separate the challenges that Palestinian historians of childhood face from the challenges that all academics face in Palestine.  Instead of being able to focus on research, Palestinian academics must focus on logistical issues, such as: unexpected road closures to campus; possible denial of country reentry if traveling to international conferences; research written in Arabic not receiving international recognition; the refusal of some western academic journals to publish Palestinians’ research; the lack of existence of a Palestinian university press; and Israel’s prohibition of entry of some books and technological equipment.  Some challenges are clearly visible on campuses.  Bethlehem University’s library, for example, has a missile hole in its wall from Israeli rockets that came during the second intifada in the middle of the night and burned books.  During the first intifada the university was closed for three years.

For the above reasons, and for three more specific ones that I will explain now, the field of the history of childhood does not exist in Palestine.  First, due to the lack of existence of a Palestinian state, there is no archive, making writing history nearly impossible.  Israeli archives are non-accessible to Palestinians living in the Palestinian occupied territories.  During the 1948 War, Israel confiscated and destroyed many Palestinian historical documents.  Private libraries of family papers in Jerusalem are deteriorating due to the conditions of occupation.  In the West Bank, the Palestinian Authority prioritizes security over education and does not attempt to systematize scattered documents into an archive.  Enormous effort is being made by groups like the Palestinian Association for Cultural Exchange (PACE) to collect, transcribe, and publish oral histories, but children have yet to be the focus of the projects.  Relying on oral history, however, serves to reduce Palestinian children’s history to the twentieth century. 

Second, when I teach about the evolution of the field of the history of childhood, I often pinpoint gender as a playing a critical role in the late development of the field in the West.  The majority male historians of the twentieth-century fell into the trap of overlooking childhood for more “noble” topics of study.  Historians in Palestine have a similar tendency not to view children as a respectable matter of study, but instead as a topic of interest for mothers.   The fact that the majority of faculty at Palestinian universities is men does not help the matter.  At Birzeit University, for example, only 20 percent of faculty is female.  (The dearth in female faculty is mainly due to the lack of PhD granting universities in Palestine and the cultural taboo of sending daughters to live alone abroad for higher education.)

Third, the Ramallah-based academic journal “Jerusalem Quarterly” has led the way since 1995 in developing the field of social history in Palestine, paying attention to how people are defined in history by their class and gender.  However, when age is used as a category of analysis, the emphasis seems to be placed on youth and not children.  Youth are attractive for their engagement in political resistance.   Even if historians in Palestine sought to provide a more nuanced narrative of history that included children, these scholars would be constantly challenged with the fragmented nature of Palestinian territory.   Are the generations of Palestinian children that have grown up in refugee camps in Jordan or in the ’67 occupied territories to be included?

The absence of a field of the history of childhood in Palestinian academia is tragic.  Children are the embodiment of the existence of a people, in the past, present, and future.  The message appears clear: when it comes to Palestine, there is a non-existence of existence. 

Seeds of an Emerging Field

Despite the fact that the history of childhood has not taken root in Palestinian universities, there are numerous Palestinian intellectuals who put children at the center of their work.   Here are three examples that I encountered while on the faculty development seminar.

First, Abdel Fattah Abu-Srour was born in the Aida refugee camp in Bethlehem, received his PhD in Biology in France, and returned to the camp to establish Al-Rowwad Theater Group.  The motto of this group is ‘Beautiful Resistance’ and the goal is to use theater to build peace within Palestinian children so that they can then go out and build peace with others.  Students make films and project them onto the Israeli Separation Wall that surrounds the camp.  This provides entertainment in the community as well as allows Palestinian children to create and tell the stories they want to tell about themselves.

Second, a Palestinian woman who seeks to create a new vision of education in Palestinian schools runs the Ma’dad institution in Bethlehem.   Her goal is to unlock the authoritarian relationship that exists between teachers and students in schools.  She trains teachers to foster the development of the student, as opposed to the customary approach of the adult shaping the child.  She trains students to be in touch with their feelings, as opposed to being rote learners.  The Ma’dad institution has a program in which children in masks stand in front of a mirror and role-play different characters.   Children express feelings that they have suppressed due to the multiple layers of power that cascade downward upon them.

Third, Ramzi Abu Radwan, who grew up in a refugee camp and went on to play violin in the Edward Said and David Baremboim Peace Orchestra, founded the Al-Kamandjati music school in the poorest part of Ramallah.  Music lessons provide daily relaxation and spiritual escape for children’s daily struggles.  Ramzy’s center has won the hearts of poor Palestinian families who were previously not accustomed to allocating time for music lessons.  Concerts are held on rooftops, in abandoned jails, and in camps.  Ramzy himself is known to have played Vivaldi and Bach for Palestinians waiting in Israeli checkpoint lines.

Palestine is area of the world where parents often find themselves saying that gunshots in the distance are from bird hunters.  It is an area where children insist on sleeping with toy guns around their bed for security.   It is also an area where activists and scholars are using their intellectual imagination, and that of children, to transcend the physical restrictions of war.  Such transcendence inevitably opens the door for growth in academia.  

Future projects

My participation in the faculty development seminar in Palestine was not just a safari or a form of academic voyeurism.  Three potential research projects emerged from my visit to Palestinian academic and research institutions. 

The first project is to work with researchers at the Ramallah-based Juzoor Foundation for Health and Social Development to assess the impact of children’s exposure to violence in the second intifadah on their mental health today as adults.  The project would seek to clarify how the long-term impact of living through these tragic events varies by gender, with the hope of being able to provide some concrete policy suggestions.  Young adult males would be the major object of concern, since females currently receive more social assistance programs.  Males who grew up during the second intifada are now becoming fathers, often never even having had a childhood of their own. In addition, for many of these young men, their fathers were in Israeli prisons during much of their childhood leaving them without male role models as they grew up.   These males tend to lack confidence in themselves and don’t know how to think or plan for their future, let alone that of their family.

The second possible project would be to work with PACE in collecting the oral histories of parents who lost their children during the first intifada.  In the preliminary interviews that PACE researchers have already conducted, they have found that people who lost their children were devastated and to this day wish they had died in the place of their children.  The parents’ feelings are in stark contrast to the image often presented in the Israeli and the United States media that depicts Palestinians as intentionally putting their children in harm’s way and teaching them violence.

The third idea for a research project is to work with a professor of literature that I met at Birzeit University to explore the evolution and change of children’s literature in Palestine over the last century.  There is a present-day movement in Palestine to bring back the rich tradition of oral story telling for children.   The goal of this movement is to deconstruct the authority that a written text has over a child, instead allowing the child to gain the empowering experience of interacting with and questioning authority in a positive manner.

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The next time I attend a conference on the history of childhood and see no Palestinian scholars in attendance, I will think of the Palestinian literature professor that I met at Birzeit University.  He is blind and obtained his PhD in Egypt.  He teaches a course on children’s literature and recently hosted at his university a colloquium with a prominent Scandinavian children’s book writer. The professor’s interest in children’s literature came one day when he was walking down the streets of Cairo and heard some children in a kindergarten happily singing.   The professor sang to me the song he heard that day, to the accompaniment of his enthusiastically clapping hands.  In translation, and without the rhyme found in the original, the song is: “1, 2, 1, 2!  One time there was a poor boy!  3, 4, 3, 4!  All his clothes were torn!  5, 6, 5, 6!  I gave him a jacket!  6, 7, 6, 7!  He became the happiest man in the world!  8, 9, 8, 9!  Oh what a nice chance it is for those who give to the poor!”

Scholars interested in applying for next year’s PARC Faculty Development Seminar should check their webpage (http://parc-us-pal.org/).

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