RayArt

Meet one of the most intelligent and caring women alive today. Expert on Israel's war on childhood. Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian is a Palestinian scholar who has spent decades studying what happens when political violence enters the bodies, bedrooms and minds of children. Here are ten of her most devastating insights. 1. You can destroy a child's childhood without killing the child. Fear, imprisonment, humiliation and the constant possibility of death can rob a child of everything childhood should be. 2. Before you can brutalize a child, you must first make that child seem dangerous. Strip away innocence. Replace it with suspicion. Violence becomes easier to justify. 3. Call it security, and almost any cruelty can become a precaution. Even children can be treated as enemies. 4. Terror enters the mind long before a bomb strikes. The sound of footsteps, a knock on the door, a strange noise at night. Fear colonizes the imagination. 5. Occupation enters the bedroom. It determines whether families can live together, whether parents can protect their children, whether a home can remain a home. 6. Destroying a house destroys more than walls. It destroys the place where a child learned to feel safe. 7. Palestinian women face multiple forms of domination. Political violence from outside, patriarchal control from within. Neither should excuse the other. 8. Even death does not guarantee dignity. Shalhoub-Kevorkian writes about ashlaa’, the Arabic word for scattered body parts. Parents searching rubble for pieces of their children. A ring identifying a mother. Pajamas identifying a child. 9. How can a child recover from trauma when the trauma never ends? There is no meaningful after while the terror continues. 10. A little girl in Gaza begged her cat not to eat her if she was killed by a bomb. Shalhoub-Kevorkian understood something profound in this plea: even a terrified child was trying to preserve the dignity of her own body. And when parents gather the scattered remains of their children, they are doing more than preparing a burial. They are refusing to let violence have the final word about who their children were. That is perhaps the most extraordinary insight of her work: even when human beings are reduced to fragments, love still struggles to make them whole.