Listen to thisI began this year by noting that 2023 was not kind to young people. I worried that 2024 would not be whole lot better. However, I didn’t anticipate that it would get so much worse so quickly. When I wrote my January column, there were children all over the world who were suffering and dying as the results of war, famine, disease, and an ever-proliferating array of violent actions local, national, and international. I have written about this a number of times in this column and regrettably will probably need to continue to do so. The callousness of adults towards the well-being of their children is a constant source of astonishment to me as I hear of atrocity after atrocity. Perhaps, I should be used to it by now and maybe even a little numb or cynical. But that hasn’t happened yet, and I persist in believing that we can do better. In fact, we must do better. For me, that is at the heart of the work that do in CYC, to work collectively with young people to create spaces that affirm the possibility of a different world that challenges the brutality of the one we live in now.
However, some days the sheer savagery of what we adults are capable of doing to our fellow human beings and children, in particular, takes my breath away. Most recently, I have been stunned that over 10,000 children were killed in Gaza by the end of the first month of 2024. They were killed indiscriminately in acts of what can only be called industrial level violence. These children, along with even more adults were killed in profoundly impersonal assaults on the places where they lived out their lives with their families and communities. This level of slaughter is horrifying to say the least. It is unconscionable and a violation of any sort of moral code. The fact that it has occurred and continues to occur as of this writing, is an outrage against compassion and decency everywhere.
Of course, there are those who would argue that the deaths of these children were an unfortunate necessity of war. That the attacks on Gaza by Israel were an unavoidable consequence of the attacks on Israel by Hamas on Oct 9 of last year when 48 children and hundreds of adults were killed. To be sure, it is an inevitability that if an attack is mounted on a nation state, there will be a military response. The nature of that response, however, is not inevitable. There are many possible strategies available to a state as powerful as Israel. To choose a strategy of indiscriminate bombing is an intentional choice with predictable consequences that will include massive civilian casualties and death. Those deaths will include children. To propose that the deaths of 10,000 children was a shock and surprise to those carrying out the bombing is absurd.
The death of any child because of intentional violence is inexcusable, period. Of course, there are instances in war where non-combatants, including children are killed. However, this should always be the exception not the rule. What is happening in Gaza is not accidental. It has to be seen as a calculated risk. To engage in large scale bombing of places where civilians including children live and, in many cases, cannot flee, is to engage in the indiscriminate killing and maiming of children on a massive scale. Since the bombing began in Gaza it is estimated that more than 10 children a day suffer the loss of a limb. This is unconscionable and must stop. This must be the position of all ethical people. As Rabbi Jeffrey Claussen states,
As a rabbi, Jewish ethicist, father and human being, I am horrified by the continuation of attacks killing innocent children. While I understand responding to heinous crimes by attacking those who perpetrated them, I believe that all children deserve to live and thrive, whether they are Israeli or Palestinian.
The idea that all children deserve to live and thrive is foundational to the work we do in CYC. When I read about is happening in Gaza, I can’t help but be aware that there are child and youth workers there, who are watching as the young people they have spent their lives working to protect are being killed. While this is regrettably true for many CYC workers around the world, the scale here is overwhelming. And of course, these workers lives are also at risk in an environment filled with death and daily destruction as they wait to see where the next bombs will fall, and which children will die or be maimed for life. This is, as a recent piece in the New York Times called it, “beyond PTSD.” The article noted that PTSD is a syndrome that occurs when the trauma has passed, But what about ongoing and incessant trauma. In Gaza even when the bombing stops,
the rebuilding of Gaza’s homes, schools, hospitals and essential infrastructure will begin — a process Gazans are extremely familiar with at this point. They will also begin processing trauma many people on Earth cannot understand: the prospect of starving to death; waking up at a hospital and finding out you are one of the last surviving members of your family; watching a child killed by an airstrike being pulled from rubble; displacement for the second, fifth or 10th time.
So, when there is a cease fire, that will not be the end. The conditions that brought about this level of industrial killing and maiming will not be any closer to being resolved. That means that the trauma of growing up in an environment where your land can be confiscated, your home demolished by bulldozers driven by soldiers or settlers, the ongoing loss of those you love and the daily fear of losing your life, even when there is not an active bombing campaign. As stated in the article, “Even if a cease-fire is brokered, what is the good of working to recover from such trauma if people are nearly certain they will experience it again? Everyone above the age of 10 in Gaza already has, several times.”
This begs the question of how to assure that this cycle of violence doesn’t persist. Of course, one can hope for a political decision brokered by a collection of nation states and corporate entities. But as we have seen in the ongoing conflict in Ukraine (where children are also being killed and kidnapped) such efforts are unpredictable and often unstable over time. For many analysts, the key is to address the political leadership of the nation state involved. The idea being that if we get the correct leadership in place, then negotiations can occur that will lead to a lasting and equitable piece.
If we have learned anything since the founding of Israel, changes in leadership makes little difference. I would suggest that this is because the logic of the nation state as an institution is shot through with a collective belief that land can be owned and that the nation state has the right to determine who owns it. If this requires violence or even the ethnic cleansing of the land in question to make it available for the citizens of the nation, then that becomes the driving imperative for action.
This belief that land belongs to a particular group of people who can enforce their right of ownership on others has been a central feature of world politics since the inception of European colonization. Of course, there have been Empires that existed before the European colonial project, but the imperial logic of previous Empires was not premised on the capacity to ethnically cleanse the lands that were to be colonized. The logic of land as open space, available to be cleansed of the peoples who were living there is a logic particular to the European project. As Hardt and Negri describe the colonial logic of the “settling” of the Americas,
Just as the land must be cleared of trees and rocks in order to farm it, so too the terrain must be cleared of native inhabitants. Just as the frontier people must gird themselves against the severe winters, so too they must arm themselves against the indigenous populations. Native Americans were regarded as merely a particularly thorny element of nature.
The profound depersonalization of human beings that stood in the way of the colonizer/settler to occupy and dominate the land is an integral part of the logic of settlement. Certainly, this can be seen in the logic of Israel’s approach to Gaza and the settlements on the West Bank, but also in the Russian invasion of Ukraine. In both cases, there is a settler/colonial logic that sustains a belief that the there is an ethnic superiority that justifies the violent suppression of the inhabitants of the land being attacked, invaded, or “settled.”
But this logic is not unique to these conflicts. It can be found anywhere that colonization occurred or had a central role in defining the parameters of the nation state. That is to say that we are all subject to such logic to some degree. As Chris Hedges puts in relation to the violence in Gaza, “We all inhabit a moral gray zone. We all can be induced to become part of the apparatus of death, often for trivial reasons and paltry rewards.” As this statement implies, we are all complicit in the kinds of violence that sustains the logic of land as property and human beings as expendable impediments to our ability to exploit that land as we see fit. I would argue that unless we shift this logic, the kinds of violence that is occurring in Gaza will persist both there and elsewhere.
In the recent book I wrote with Kathleen Skott-Myhre, Scott Kouri, and Jeff Smith on Desettlering as Re-subjectification of the Settler Subject, we describe this as settler logic and argue that it has tremendous force in how we think of who are and what we are capable of doing to ourselves and each other. We argue that efforts at decolonization will founder as long as those engaged in ongoing collective processes of colonization and settlement sustain the logic of their identities in the practices of settlement. The central premise of land acquisition and the right to own and control property, including other human beings, animals, and other living ecologies is both toxic and suicidal. The capacity to kill over 10,000 children and somehow find ways to justify their deaths is but one example of how settler logic works. It is the kind of logic that argues that we must protect our right to the land that is ours, even if it means exterminating any other human beings who contest our right to ownership and domination.
It is a logic premised in fear and unresolved trauma. In the book, we trace that trauma back to the foundations of Europe in its internal colonization of tribal peoples who were brutally subjugated by the emerging monarchies and the Catholic church. It is there that we see the social diagram that will become the blueprint for the European colonial project and the ongoing escalation of brutality and trauma that has persisted up to and including today. In the work we do in CYC, we can see the effects of multi-generational trauma on families and children. We know that unresolved trauma often leads to a perpetuation of violence and brutality across generations. As Chris Hedges says about the intensity of violence in Gaza, “Those to whom evil is done, do evil in return.”
I would argue that this is also the case on the world stage. Unresolved trauma often escalates the savagery of brutality to ourselves and those around us. The kind of fear and hypervigilance we see in individual traumatic responses echoes in what we see in the fights over who controls the land and its resources at the level of the nation state. It is, at core, a response to a perceived existential threat that can only be resolved through the absolute subjugation and control of the world around us and those who inhabit that world.
Of course, this is an impossibility and ultimately a recipe for self-destruction. Which is why Chris Hedges argues that continued actions of the type occurring in Gaza signals the death of Israel as a viable nation state. However, for those of us working in CYC at a much smaller scale, we can see this kind of settler logic in the kind of paranoia that can result in the perceived necessity to own and control which kind of gendered subject can use the bathroom, who controls the library, women’s reproductive rights, everyone’s bodies, our labor, our time, and at the most fundamental level who we get become.
In our programs, the ownership of space and the controlling of the bodies in that space can reflect this logic as well. An inherent and sometimes not too subtle sense of staff superiority when it comes to ownership of the program, its buildings, offices, etc. can easily slip into settler logic. If we mean to contest the kind of violence against children occurring in Gaza then certainly we should take every measure we can to stop it. However, if we want a shift in the conditions that create such violence in the first place, we might want to have a look in the mirror and think about the settler within and how we might become someone else. In short, how might we desettler ourselves and field in which we work. It may seem to be too small a scale in the face of the kinds of brutality facing children today, but without that work at the micro level, the rest of it is unlikely to change. Every major social change originates in a collective shift in who we imagine ourselves to be, and that happens one person at a time.
