Ties of Separation: Analogy and Generational Segregation in North America, Australia, and Israel/Palestine

Taking analogy as both its mode and object of inquiry, this Article canvasses the relationship between historical-geographical analogies and generational segregation (the large-scale separation of children and adults) from three complementary perspectives. First, due to restrictions recently introduced by the Israeli authorities, Palestinian prisoners have been prevented from reading popular study materials dealing with both Indigenous child removal and analogies concerning settler-Indigenous relations in North America and Australia. Reviving the critical potential of this encounter with analogies and accounts, I put forward an analogy between the removal of Indigenous children to boarding schools in the United States and Canada, Australia’s Aboriginal “stolen generations”, and the increased separation of Palestinian children and adults themselves in Israeli custody. This analogy highlights key parallels: the deleterious effects of allegedly benevolent generational segregation; the invocation of law and children’s “best interests”; the severance of unwanted intergenerational influences; the targeting of children due to their presumed plasticity; the use of separation to govern adults; and links between generational segregation, “national security”, and incarceration. Second, these analogies – those Palestinians explored in Israeli prison and the generational segregation analogy developed here – partly overlap with, and acquire their potential and implications from other analogies, concerning settler-Indigenous relations in North America, Australia, and Israel/Palestine. I examine the roles such analogies have played, and their alignment with competing ideologies, across a range of legal and political discourses over the past two centuries. Finally, in order to maximize the critical potential of such historical-geographical analogies, I offer a conceptual critique of three relevant discourses: legalistic analogies concerning generational segregation, which leave unchallenged the broader field of child law and policy on which such segregation hinges; analogies between North America, Australia, and Israel/Palestine that rigidly conceptualize (settler) colonialism; and a tendency to reduce analogy to similarity. Bringing into conversation previously separate bodies of scholarship, these three interdependent perspectives shed new light on important yet hitherto unexamined issues at the intersection of analogy and generational segregation.