From Resilience to Resistance: The State of Children’s Health in the Occupied Palestinian Territory

Jacqueline Bhabha is a Professor of the Practice of Health and Human Rights at the Harvard T.H.Chan School of Public Health, the Jeremiah Smith Jr. Lecturer in Law at Harvard Law School, and an Adjunct Lecturer in Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. She is also the Director of Research at the FXB Center for Health and Human Rights at Harvard University. She received a first class honors degree and an M.Sc. from Oxford University, and a J.D. from the College of Law in London.

From 1997 to 2001, Bhabha directed the Human Rights Program at the University of Chicago. Prior to 1997, she was a practicing human rights lawyer in London and at the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. She has published extensively on issues of transnational child migration, refugee protection, children’s rights and citizenship. She is the author of Child Migration and Human Rights in a Global Age (2014) and Can We Solve the Migration Crisis? (2018). She has edited or co-edited many books, including Children Without A State (2011), Human Rights and Adolescence (2014), Research Handbook on Child Migration (2018), A Better Future: The Role of Education for Displaced and Marginalized People (2020), and A Time for Reparation: Addressing State Responsibility for Collective Injustice (2021, forthcoming).

Bhabha was the founding chair of the Scholars at Risk Network, and she serves on the board of the World Peace Foundation, the Institute for Statelessness and Inclusion, Fortify Rights, the Journal of Refugee Studies and the Journal on Migration and Human Security.

Prof. Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian is the Lawrence D. Biele Chair in Law at the Faculty of Law-Institute of Criminology and the School of Social Work and Public Welfare at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the Global Chair in Law- Queen Mary University of London.   Her research focuses on trauma, state crimes and criminology, surveillance, gender violence, law and society.  She studies the crime of femicide and other forms of gendered based violence, violence against children in conflict ridden areas, crimes of abuse of power in settler colonial contexts, surveillance, securitization and social control.

Shalhoub-Kevorkian is the author of numerous books among them “Militarization and Violence Against Women in Conflict Zones in the Middle East: The Palestinian Case Study” published in 2010;  “Security Theology, Surveillance and the Politics of Fear”, published by Cambridge University Press, 2015.  She just published a new book examining Palestinian childhood entitled: “Incarcerated Childhood and the Politics of Unchilding”, and a new edited book entitled: Understanding Campus-Community Partnerships in Conflict Zones”, and is currently co-editing two new book on the sacralization of politics and its effect on human suffering, and Islam and gender based violence.

She has published articles in multi-disciplinary fields including British Journal of Criminology, Feminist Studies, Ethnic and Racial Studies, State Crime, Violence Against Women, Social Science and Medicine, Signs, Law & Society Review, International Journal of Applied Psychoanalytic Studies.  As a resident of the old city of Jerusalem, Shalhoub-Kevorkian is a prominent local activist.  She engages in direct actions and critical dialogue to end the inscription of power over Palestinian children’s lives, spaces of death, and women’s birthing bodies and lives.

Dr. Jumana Odeh is a highly-regarded pediatrician and public health expert in the Middle East. She is the Founder and Director of the Palestinian Happy Child Center (PHCC), a non-governmental organization in Ramallah that promotes the well-being of children with special needs since 1994. The centre promotes early screenings, diagnoses, specialized care, therapy and support for parents and caregivers, who often struggle with how to care for their handicapped children. The centre also provides information for the public in a region that does not always recognize disabilities.

Furthermore, Dr. Odeh has built an impressive career in Palestine and beyond, throughout which she has demonstrated an innovative and strategic vision to aid the most vulnerable of society. Commencing her medical service to the Palestinian people in 1981, Dr. Odeh opted to work for government hospitals in lieu of more profitable private practices. Her career has since included work as a pediatrician at Augusta Victoria Hospital in Jerusalem, as a faculty member of Al Quds University and a faculty director at Harvard, and positions with Union of Palestinian Medical Relief Committees, Caritas Baby Hospital in Bethlehem, UNICEF, the Palestinian Ministry of Health, Save the Children in Gaza, the Swiss Development Cooperation, the Canadian International Development Research Center, and the International Federation of Health and Human Rights Organizations. She also regularly participates as an expert at international workshops and conferences and writes for the International Herald Tribune. She has appeared as a health expert on Palestinian TV, Al-Jazeera, Abu Dhabi TV, CNN, Democracy Now, BBC and Night Line.

Dr. Odeh is the winner of the 2008 Health Award from World of Children Award and the first Arab professional to win the AidEx 2013 Humanitarian Hero Award.