Chapter 14: Speaking Life, Speaking Death: Jerusalemite Children Confronting Israel’s Technologies of Violence

To better understand states’ technologies of violence, colonisation, and military occupation, this chapter shares Jerusalemite children’s written and spoken opposition to the mundane yet intimate governance of Israel’s ‘combat proven’ politics over their lives. ‘Combat proven’ politics are forms of surveillance, strategies of control, imprisonment, torture, murder, and techniques of managing colonised populations that are mobilised in service of the state. Combat proven politics turn children’s everyday spaces into a ‘show room’ – a living laboratory – for states, arms companies, and security agencies (both private and public) to market their technologies as ‘tested positively’. As sites of violence proliferate in these contexts, children are folded into the testing ground of ‘combat proven’ politics, intensifying and incentivising infrastructural warfare. Occupied East Jerusalem, where the children in this study live, acutely illustrates how combat proven politics is driven by a concentration of biopolitics, geopolitics (including the topography of settlement and colonial architecture), and necropolitics. At the same time, children’s language of life subverts the logic of the death machines.