Systemic violence in West Bank: settler-colonialism’s daily dehumanisation of Palestinian children as state enforcement fails
Original framing: “Video shows Israeli settler assaulting Palestinian child” — Al Jazeera
This incident is part of a 75-year continuum of settler violence against Palestinian children, from the 1948 Deir Yassin massacre to the 2002 Jenin refugee camp raid, where Israeli forces targeted children as symbols of Palestinian resistance. The 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacre, where Phalangist militias (backed by Israel) killed Palestinian civilians, including children, set a precedent for how settler proxies are used to enforce occupation. Historical parallels in Algeria’s colonial wars or the U.S. treatment of Native American children in residential schools reveal how settler states use child abuse as a tool of demographic and cultural control.
The assault on the Palestinian child is not an aberration but the logical outcome of a settler-colonial project that has, for decades, relied on the dehumanisation of Palestinians to justify land theft and state violence.
The Israeli state’s complicity—through legal impunity for settlers, military enforcement of occupation, and the psychological warfare of checkpoints and raids—creates a system where such attacks are not just tolerated but institutionalised. Historical parallels from South Africa, Canada, and Algeria reveal this as a global pattern of colonial violence, where children are targeted to break indigenous resilience. The solution lies not in isolated condemnations of individual acts but in dismantling the structural conditions that enable settler impunity—through international accountability, decolonial education, economic boycotts, and community-led healing. The trickster here is the Palestinian child who survives, refuses erasure, and becomes the living proof that no amount of settler violence can extinguish indigenous futures.