‘On this project depends the glory of Palestine’: childhood and modern futures at the Ramallah clinic

ABSTRACTIn 1925, one of the first infant welfare clinics to specifically serve Arab children in Palestine opened in the city of Ramallah. This article examines how that institution brought together various political ideologies that used the Palestinian child’s body as a vehicle for a modern future. The clinic targeted poor children and mothers in an attempt to eradicate local knowledge and indigenous practices of infant care in the name of progress and science. Supported and funded by American missionaries, Palestinian philanthropists, local medical practitioners, colonial administrators, and Zionist health organizations, it produced conceptions of modern Palestinian childhood at the intersections of Zionist settler colonialism, interwar global humanitarianism, and indigenous political claims. The Ramallah clinic, along with other infant welfare projects in Palestine, offers a complicated view of the on-the-ground operation of settler colonial projects and the role of children within them. Based on a study of the different constituencies involved in opening the clinic, this article argues that discourses of infant health became means for articulating different – and sometimes opposing – political futures. In doing so, this article illuminates how settler colonialism interacted with, shaped, and was shaped by other local and global forms of coloniality as well as resistance to colonial structures.KEYWORDS: PalestineMandateZionisminfant welfaresettler colonialismclinicschildren Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1 Ramallah Infant Welfare Scheme, Israel State Archive (ISA) Record Group 10/M 6597/2.2 The war impacted Palestine in a variety of ways. Effects of a locust infestation in 1915 were exacerbated by Ottoman wartime supply requisitions, resulting in devastating famine conditions across the Eastern Mediterranean. Multiple military occupations (Ottoman, German, and subsequently, British) as well as direct military engagement in several Palestinian cities damaged infrastructure and industries and conscription into the military or Ottoman labor corps disrupted family structures and incomes. Salim Tamari, Year of the Locust: A Soldier’s Diary and the Erasure of Palestine’s Ottoman Past (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2011); Zackary Foster, ‘The 1915 Locust Attack in Syria and Palestine and its Role in the Famine During the First World War’, Middle Eastern Studies 51, no. 3 (May 2015): 370–94; Abigail Jacobson, ‘A City Living Through Crisis: Jerusalem During World War I’, British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 36, no. 1 (2009): 73–92.3 Sherene Seikaly, Men of Capital: Scarcity and Economy in Mandate Palestine (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2016), 5.4 Patrick Wolfe, ‘Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native’, Journal of Genocide Research 8, no. 4 (December 2006).5 Wolfe, ‘Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native’, 388. The infant welfare clinic operated similarly to institutions like boarding schools or missions in other settler colonial environments.6 Dr. Emanuel Cohen, ‘Obstetric and Infant Welfare in Palestine by Hadassah’, Center for Jewish History (CJH) Hadassah Medical Organization (HMO) Record Group 2 Box 72.7 See Erica Simmons, Hadassah and the Zionist Project (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006); Dafna Hirsch, ‘We are Here to Bring the West, Not Only to Ourselves’: Zionist Occidentalism and the Discourse of Hygiene in Mandate Palestine’, International Journal of Middle East Studies 41 (2009): 577–94; Tammi Razi, ‘Immigration and its Discontents: Treating the Children in the Psycho-Hygiene Clinic in Mandate Tel-Aviv’, Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 11, no. 3 (2012): 339–56.8 Rana Barakat, ‘Writing/righting Palestine Studies: Settler Colonialism, Indigenous Sovereignty and Resisting the Ghost(s) of Memory’, Settler Colonial Studies 8, no. 3 (2018): 350.9 Katherine Natanel, ‘Affect, Excess & Settler Colonialism in Palestine/Israel’, Settler Colonial Studies (2022): 12. doi: 10.10080/2201473X.2022.2112427.10 Minutes of Infant Welfare Committee Meeting, August 1924, ISA/RG 10/M 6597/2.11 In 1920–1921, the Palestine Department of Health an infant mortality rate of 123.3 per 1,000 live births in villages and 209.6 per 1,000 live births in towns/cities. Report on the Palestine Administration, July 1920–December 1921, in Palestine and Transjordan Administration Reports, Volume 1: 1918–1924, Great Britain: Archive Editions, 1995.12 Ha-yaludah va-hatamotah bishanat 1927 [Birth and death rates in the Year 1927], Davar, August 14, 1928, p. 1; ‘Taqrir da’irat al-saha: kathir wafiat al-atfal [Department of Health’s Report: High Infant Mortality]’, Filastin September 2, 1930; ‘Khalasat taqrir da’irat al-saha [Summary of the Department of Health’s Report]’ al-Hayat, July 11, 1930; ‘State of Health in Palestine’, Palestine Bulletin, December 6, 1927, ‘The Health of Palestine’, Palestine Bulletin, November 19, 1929.13 Letter to Helen Bentwich, December 21, CJH/HMO 72/2.14 ‘Al-‘anaya bil-atfal [Child Welfare]’ Al Jazira, March 15, 1926.15 Tawfiq Canaan, ‘The Child in Palestinian Arab Superstition’, The Journal of the Palestine Oriental Society VII, no. 4 (Jerusalem: Published by the Palestine Oriental Society, 1927): 175.16 Shiber’s first name is transliterated in both ways in the source record. I defer to the spelling that she used herself (Regina) in files from the clinic.17 Alumni Association of the American University of Beirut, Directory of Alumni, 1870–1952 (Beirut, April 1952), 147.18 Ramallah Infant Welfare Scheme, ISA/RG 10/M 6597/2.19 Report of the American Red Cross Commission to Palestine for the Year 1918, March 20, 1919, Box 110, American National Red Cross, 1906–1995, Hoover Institution Archives.20 ‘A Tragic Cry from the Holy Land’, The Life of Faith, April 25, 1917 and ‘Help for Destitute Children of Palestine’, Express and Echo, January 26, 1918, News Cuttings’, MSS 2613, Syria and Palestine Relief, Davidson 400, ff. 247–316, Lambeth Palace Library.21 Joelle Droux shows that the category of child stood in for national and international redemption after the devastation of the war globally. Joelle Droux, ‘A League of its Own? The League of Nations’ Child Welfare Committee (1919–1936) and International Monitoring of Child Welfare Policies’, in The League’s Work on Social Issues: Visions, Endeavors, Experiments (New York: UN, 2016), 92.22 Report of the American Red Cross Commission to Palestine for the Year 1918, March 20, 1919, Box 110, American National Red Cross, 1906–1995, Hoover Institution Archives; S&P Hostel and Club, Jerusalem: Its Work and Its Need (booklet), Series I (Correspondence), Box 36 (Palestine Letters), John Huston Finley Papers (1892–1940), Manuscripts, Archives, and Rare Books Division, New York Public Library.23 The League of Nations Child Welfare Committee issued the Declaration on the Rights of the Child in 1924; Save the Children, founded in 1919, began permanent humanitarian campaigns in the early 1920s. In the words of Emily Baughan, the value of children to nation-states (rather than families) became an organizing political principle in twentieth-century states, Emily Baughan, Saving the Children: Humanitarianism, Internationalism, and Empire (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2022), 7.24 The Palestine Zionist Executive asked the League of Nations for copies of League publications on infant mortality and hygiene data. The Haifa Social and Infant Welfare Association sent similar reports to the League. Dr. Katznelson to League Secretariat, May 21, 1924, League of Nations Archives (LNA), R938/12B/36859/36589. Haifa Welfare Association President to League Secretariat, August 14, 1929, LNA R5997/8F/321/15112.25 Minutes of Meeting of Infant Welfare Committee, December 10, 1924, ISA/RG 10/M 6597/2.26 Ibid.27 For more on the relationship of infant welfare initiatives to colonial regimes, see for instance, Kalpana Ram and Margaret Jolly, eds., Maternities and Modernities: Colonial and Postcolonial Experiences in Asia and the Pacific, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); N. Rose-Hunt, ‘“Le Bebe en Brousse”: European Women, African Birth Spacing, and Colonial Intervention in Breastfeeding in the Belgian Congo’, in Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World, ed. Frederick Cooper (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997).28 Effie Cooke, ‘Child Welfare in Palestine: Ten Years’ Progress’, The Palestine Bulletin III, no. 666 (1927): 2.29 Progress of Infant Welfare Work and Prenatal Care in Palestine, CJH/HMO RG 2, 72/1.30 Simmons, Hadassah and the Zionist Project, 7.31 Summary Report of Infant Welfare Work (January 1922 to May 1923), CJH/HMO RG 2, 72/1.32 Ibid.33 Julia Shatz, ‘A Politics of Care: Local Nurses in Mandate Palestine’, International Journal of Middle East Studies 50 (2018): 669–89.34 Hadassah News Release, CJH/HMO RG 2, 72/1.35 Infant Welfare Ramallah, February 4, 1925, ISA/RG 10/M 6597/2.36 Mildred White to Bertha Landsman, June 5, 1925, CJH/HMO RG 2, 72/2.37 Bertha Landsman to Child Welfare Committee Ramallah, June 22, 1925, CJH/HMO RG 2, 72/2.38 Bertha Landsman to Mildred White, June 10, 1925, CJH/HMO RG 2, 72/2.39 Infant Welfare Work Done by Hadassah Medical Organization in Jerusalem, CJH/HMO RG 2/72/1; Straus Health Center Committee Minutes (February 20, 1927), CJH/HMO RG 2/14/46/3.40 Article by Mrs. Goldfarb for Infant Welfare Pamphlet, February 20, 1928, CJH/HMO RG 2, 72/1.41 Katherine Natanel discussed how Zionist discourses established Palestinians as constituting a part of the physical landscape to be acted upon. Natanel, ‘Affect, Excess, & Settler Colonialism’, 11.42 Hirsch, ‘We are Here to Bring the West’; Razi, ‘Immigration and its Discontents’.43 Letter to Helen Bentwich, December 21, CJH/HMO RG2, 72/2.44 Frances Hasso similarly argues that Hadassah workers used Muslim and Christian mothers as individual examples of the ‘primitive’ practices that Zionist health programs would eradicate as proof of the ‘worth of the Jewish homeland’. Frances Hasso, Buried in the Red Dirt: Race, Reproduction and Death in Modern Palestine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 67.45 CJH/HMO RG 2 25/58/6.46 ‘Al-‘anaya bil-atfal [Child Welfare]’ Al Jazira, March 15, 1926.47 Contract between Mayor and Nurse Tannous, June 1, 1928, ISA/RG 10/M/6572/2.48 Kabril Jamil ‘Id (Medical Officer of Health) to District Health Officer, September 24, 1928, ISA/RG 10/M/6572/2.49 District Commissioner (Jerusalem) to Senior Medical Officer, March 26, 1935, ISA/RG 10/M/6572/2.50 G.W. Herron (Director of Medical Services) to Senior Medical Officer, February 13, 1935, ISA/RG 10/M/6572/2.51 As Elizabeth Brownson points out, the majority of IWCs for Palestinian Arabs were government-funded, in contrast to the Jewish IWCs funded by Hadassah and other private organizations. However, many government clinics were established at the behest of local communities and community leaders. Elizabeth Brownson, ‘Enacting Imperial Control: Midwifery Regulation in Mandate Palestine’, Journal of Palestine Studies 46, no. 3(183) (Spring 2017): 29.52 ‘Sahat al-Atfal: ‘adat yajib an tasatasil [Infant Health: Customs Must Be Eradicated]’, Filastin, August 21, 1928.53 Ibid.54 Hasso, Buried in the Red Dirt, 73–74.55 Dr. Mahmud Tahir Dajani was a prominent physician in Palestine during the Mandate period and in East Jerusalem after 1948. He was a leader of the Arab Medical Association and later physician at the Spafford Children’s Hospital.56 M. Dajani, ‘al-‘anayat al-tifl [Child Welfare]’, Hunna al-Quds 2, Issue 19 (1941).57 Dr. Iskandar Halabi was a physician in Jaffa, previously trained at the American University of Beirut and Kiev University.58 ‘Al-‘anaya bil-atfal [Child Welfare]’ Al Jazira, March 15, 1926.59 Baughan, Saving the Children, 71.60 See Lisa Pollard, Nurturing the Nation: The Family Politics of Modernizing, Colonizing, and Liberating Egypt 1805–1923 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2005); O. El-Shakry, ‘Schooled Mothers and Structured Play: Child Rearing in Turn-of-the-Century Egypt’, in Remaking Women: Feminism and Modernity in the Middle East, ed. Lila Abu-Lughod (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), 126–70; H. Morrison, ‘Nation-Building and Childhood in Early Twentieth-Century Egypt’, in Childhood in the Late Ottoman Empire and After, ed. Benjamin Fortna (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 73–90.61 ‘Al-‘anaya bil-atfal [Child Welfare]’, Al Jazira, March 15, 1926.62 Ibid.63 M. Dajani, ‘al-‘anayat al-tifl [Child Welfare]’, Hunna al-Quds 2, Issue 19 (1941).64 Shifra Shvarts, Health and Zionism: The Israeli Health Care System, 1948–1960 (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester, 2008).65 Provision of milk to children and monitoring infant and child nutrition, for example, were focal points for relief organizations working with Palestinian refugee populations in the late 1940s and 1950s. Many relief agencies operated maternal and child clinics similar to those in use in the Mandate period and, sometimes, employing Palestinian nurses who had previously served in Mandate-era infant welfare clinics. Julia Shatz, ‘Governing Global Children: Child Welfare in Palestine, 1917–1950’ (PhD diss., University of California, 2018), 148–53.