political

Under the Convention on the Rights of the Child, Israel must protect children’s rights to life, survival and development. It must prohibit arbitrary detention, torture and deprivation of life. It must also ensure the best interests of the child remain a primary consideration in all actions affecting them. The commission’s conclusions are stark: children have not simply been caught in the crossfire of war. Many appear to have been deliberately targeted, denied essential care, detained, tortured, displaced and subjected to conditions that threaten their survival. It reframes the suffering of Palestinian children not as collateral damage alone, but as a possible site of serious international crimes.

“In 1967, when Israel annexed Jerusalem, they only gave 13% to Palestinian residential use, which was already fully built up,” Godfrey-Goldstein tells me. “So from the get-go, the policy was forcible transfer, which is a war crime.” This isn’t the only land grab disguised as tourism. Just beyond Valley Farm you’ll see the Guy Ben Hinnom Bridge, “the longest suspension bridge in Israel.” It connects Ben Hinnom Gorge to Mount Zion for no apparent reason other than to encourage the country’s Israeli population to edge closer into East Jerusalem without fear.

Eyal Weizman

Some of these offences further criminalised women rather than those exploiting them. For example, if two or more sex workers operated in shared premises for safety, they could become liable for brothel-keeping – that is still the law today. A late amendment introduced by Henry Labouchere MP also outlawed all consensual sexual activity between men; the new offence was used to convict the writer Oscar Wilde a decade later. Ironically, only Stead and several of his colleagues were convicted as a result of these events. They were imprisoned for the kidnapping of Eliza Armstrong. Meanwhile, the men accused by campaigners of exploiting underage girls were unprosecuted and unpunished.

This report investigates the corporate machinery sustaining Israel’s settler-colonial project of displacement and replacement of the Palestinians in the occupied territory. While political leaders and governments shirk their obligations, far too many corporate entities have profited from Israel’s economy of illegal occupation, apartheid and now, genocide.