Stolen Youth: The Politics of Israel's Detention of Palestinian Children Book

Stolen Youth is the first book to explore Israel's incarceration of Palestinian children. Based on first-hand information from international human rights groups and NGO workers in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, it also features interviews with children who have been imprisoned. The result is a disturbing and often shocking account of the abuses that are being carried out by Israel, and that have been widely documented by human rights groups such as Amnesty, but have never been addressed by the international community.

The book presents a critical analysis of the international legal framework and the UN system, arguing that a major failure of these institutions is their appeal to neutrality while ignoring the reality of power. The book offers an explanation for these failures by locating the issue of Palestinian child prisoners within the framework of the Israeli overall system of control as a long-term political strategy.

The book is divided into three main sections: the first chapters introduce the major issues, and propose a framework for understanding Israel's policy towards Palestinian detainees, particularly children. The second section examines the actual experience of children from the moment of arrest until their release from prison based on hundreds of affidavits collected from children released from prison. The final section of the book analyzes in detail the reasons underlying Israel's incarceration of children and the impact on Palestinian society. It outlines Israel's system of institutionalized discrimination and state torture, challenges the legitimacy of Israel's "security" argument, and argues that Israel's treatment of Palestinian detainees forms one pillar of a policy designed to quash resistance to the occupation.