Chapter 3 investigates how age shapes Palestinians’ lives in four contexts. The first is Israeli military trials of Palestinians. The chapter reveals how military judges have treated Palestinians’ young age as an aggravating factor; how Palestinians’ physical appearance affects their sentences; how the age categories applicable to Palestinians evolved from colonial British law; and how the Israeli judiciary has been inconsistent on all these issues. Broader insights are provided into both Israel’s governing through uncertainty and the inherent fluidity of childhood and age. Second, this chapter examines legal disputes over Israel’s open-fire regulations (rules of engagement). It shows how these regulations, which in principle forbid shooting at under-14s, have been interpreted to authorize firing at younger Palestinians whom Israeli forces perceive to be dangerous or older. Third, the chapter discusses the age-based food quotas imposed on the Gaza Strip. A critical light is cast on the logic guiding this form of biological warfare, as well as on Israel’s attempts to justify it in humanitarian and legal terms. Fourth, the chapter interrogates the deployment of age as a risk management tool within Israel’s movement restrictions, as well as Palestinians’ resistance to these restrictions by deceiving Israeli authorities about their age.

Chapter 4 focuses on reforms in the first two decades of this century, which represented, for both Israel and the human rights community, fixing childhood’s spatial and age boundaries in line with legal standards. Key among them were the separation of incarcerated Palestinians under 18 from their elders; the establishment of the world’s only “military youth court”; raising the age of majority under military law; and assessment of the rehabilitation chances of Palestinian youth. Contrary to claims by Israeli officials and their human rights critics, this chapter reveals that some reforms have made no actual difference while others have served to fragment, monitor, and suppress Palestinians. Five broader issues exemplified by these reforms are discussed: the blind spots of human rights actors; the complicity of child law and children’s rights in the oppression of disempowered communities around the world; the growing convergence between military and nonmilitary Israeli law; the multiple forms of separation Israel imposes on Palestinians, which operate to divide and conquer them; and Israel’s attempts at confining Palestinian minds beyond the prison walls. Also examined are Palestinian acts of resistance: running study groups in prison, smuggling sperm of incarcerated men, and conducting readings and discussions in public protests.

This chapter examines how nationalism, religious claims, and settler colonialism enmesh within Zionism and demonstrates how their interaction played a major role for Israeli academia and politics in sidelining or obfuscating settler colonialism as an appropriate frame of analysis for Zionism’s encounter with the Palestinians. The chapter makes three main arguments: first, that while settler colonialism is an obvious framework for analyzing and understanding the unfolding of the Zionist project in Palestine, the framework has been obscured by highlighting the connection between Jewish nationalism and religious claims; second, that the steady rise in religious encroachment into institutions and the public sphere in Israel is rooted in the need for legitimation (grounded in religious claims) in face of rising Palestinian resistance to the expansion of the settler-colonial project from Israel to the West Bank; and third, that while secularization was possible in other settler-colonial contexts such as South Africa, Northern Ireland, and North America, it is impossible to achieve secularization within a Zionist regime. Rather, for secularization and democratization to take place, Israel has to recognize the settler-colonial reality of the Zionist project, a recognition that will make it possible to free Israeli Jewish nationalism from religionism and work toward decolonization.