Keeping mum: The mediation of military conflict in the everyday mothering of middle-class Israeli Palestinian and Jewish women

Abstract

The article examines how Israeli Palestinian and Jewish middle-class mothers mediate military conflict to young children, through silence and talk. This mediation is underpinned by dissonance between the mandate to protect children from the adult world and to ready them for it, and between the idea of children as individuals and conflict as collective engagement. The article explores the discourses and practices used for managing this twofold dissonance, including differences in the privilege of silence for Palestinian and Jewish mothers.

In/secure childhoods: Children and conflict in Kashmir

“…Children whose experiences do not fit within the remits of normative childhood are portrayed as deviant and “their childhoods marked as abnormal or even immoral” (Lee-Koo, 2020: 21). Thus, liberal notions of childhood based on middle-class ideals (Golden and Erdreich, 2020) fail to productively theorise the lives of children from different cultural contexts, other than as victims. Hence, there is a need to historicize the concept of childhood considering postcolonial and decolonial frameworks that have challenged Western ideas of children as innocent and vulnerable (Balagopalan, 2020).…”

Ethno‐political socialization of young children in societies involved in intractable conflict: The case of Israel

“…Together, these products represent the shared sociopsychological repertoire that provides meaning and rules of practice for society members. This shared socio-psychological repertoire is transmitted to the younger generation by socialization agents (Bourdieu, 1977;Geertz, 1973;Goodnow et al, 1995;Nelson, 1996;Selman, 1980;Vygotsky, 1980). Children absorb cultural information which shapes their perspectives on their social world, including their views about the conflict, about the in-group and about the rival.…”

“…Socialization through agents can be done both through direct instruction, for example, through describing and explaining the conflict to children; and indirectly, for example, through modeling reactions, limiting children's access to counter‐narrative messages, or socialization of general orientations such as world views and emotions (e.g., Golden & Erdreich, 2020; Maccoby, 1994; Myers‐Walls et al., 1993; Priest et al., 2014; Shamai, 2001). Parents are major sources of socialization in conflict, especially during the early years of life.…”