Blurring the lines: Israeli Government Support for Child Soldiers and Sexualized Violence

Protective presence is a term that describes the use of physical accompaniment to deter violence and support safety for vulnerable communities. In the village of Ras al-Ein al-Auja in the West Bank in Palestine, volunteers come from around Israel and across the world to put themselves in between the residents of the last remaining Bedouin village in the South Jordan Valley, and the settlers who wake up each morning intent on destroying it. Twice a day, nearly every day, volunteers face down settlers who travel nearly a kilometer from their growing outpost to trespass through the village. They bring their livestock to trample just outside homes where women and children hide and toddlers cry in fear. They film residents inside their homes, and count Palestinian sheep in their pens to threaten residents’ whose economic livelihoods rests on herds under constant threat of theft. They attack volunteers using sticks as clubs; knees and fists as weapons. They are masterful at detecting when there is a lapse in camera coverage– these are the occasions where blood and bruising can be expected. They also use another important tactic to cause harm and humiliation– sexualized touch as a form of violence. When shoving female volunteers, they target breasts. They knee men and women alike in the crotch. They spit and grope. They laugh about it afterwards. This threatening, violent ‘they’ includes, often, children. I have seen boys as young as nine brought to the field to watch this violence play out. One of our daily settler attackers is not more than fifteen. The other most commonly seen settler attacker might be nineteen, perhaps twenty, but we are left wondering at what age he was first initiated into this ritual of violence. The Israeli government funds the settlements who dispatch these children to carry out their agenda of displacement and violation. Children are strategically placed into this role for several reasons. Israeli law prohibits sharing images of children, complicating efforts to document and hold settlers accountable for their crimes. Children are also used as propaganda for right-wing outlets, where they are painted as watchful shepherds tending their ancestral lands. Children are a strategic asset for the settler agenda because they are harder than adults to prosecute and hold legally accountable for their crimes. The children we see in the field are particularly vulnerable, which makes them particularly easy to train into violence. Documentation uncovered by volunteers shows that the settlement security apparatus (funded by the government, and in our area, led by a man named Gabriel Kalish) sources these youth directly from social services agencies. The empty-eyed kids who we watch enact violence daily are often from abusive families or deep intergenerational poverty. They have few options, and even fewer resources and rights. This “choicelessness” makes their complicity in the violence even more disturbing. If using children to carry out violence is a strategic move, so is the blending of children (legally underage) and very young adults (late teens). Where seasoned volunteers see vulnerable young people being exploited by a powerful state apparatus, the media often simply characterizes them as ‘hooligans’ or ‘teens.’ The rights and protections that children should have– the right to safety, education, family life, etc– are lost when these children are depersonalized as “hilltop youths.” This phrase, well-worn in the West Bank and Israel, glosses over the reality that these are children being deployed as weapons, with government funds, weapons, and rhetoric at their back. The blurring of these lines– between supposedly “consenting” adult young men, and the exploited children many of them were just months or a few short years earlier– mirror and mimic the lines that they blur when they sexually assault activists. Does a shove that targets breasts constitute an intentional act? Is a knee to the groin ‘bad enough’ to constitute sexual violence when a child does it to a grown man? Does the degradation of spitting on a woman’s face or chest translate inside the mind of a pubescent child?I have been subject to all three of these forms of sexualized touch, all of which are disturbing and unsettling. But the most tragic consequence for me is knowing that for these children– isolated and alone, living in a hilltop compound with little or no family, no opportunity for education or social life, and being raised into a Jewish supremacist ideology that considers violence a religious duty– these may constitute some of their first and formative experiences of sexuality. Years before they even reach adulthood, they are learning that degradation, violence, and humiliation are their birthright. Police are called and, if they even bother to arrive, leave. They tell volunteers verbatim that “Jews can do anything they want in Area C,” or “videos on your phone aren’t evidence.” If international volunteers chose to file charges for assault, they would face a high likelihood of deportation. And, ultimately, the interventions that these youth need– love, support, education, trauma-informed care– are far beyond the reach of what we can offer young people who believe peace activists represent nearly demonic outside forces that want to prevent the “chosen people” from accessing the “promised land.”Our responsibility as volunteers, then, is more circumscribed than we might wish. We cannot create safe, loving, responsible homes for hurting young people. We can’t free them from the conditioning they receive on a daily basis to do harm and enact violence. What we can do is stand between targeted Palestinians and the violence they face each day. We can take small actions– accompanying people on the way to the doctor; patrolling roads to prevent stoning attacks; interpositioning our bodies between settlers and private Palestinian homes. We do all of this in the name of peace, safety, and dignity for the beautiful and steadfast community of Ras al-Ein al-Auja. And we can commit to telling the world the truth about what we have seen and endured in so doing. All of these are acts of hope: that against incredibly long odds, and a violent and well-funded settler agenda, justice and mercy can still prevail, for the sake of every child.