"ON NETANYAHU’S SPEECH AND GENDERING ISRAEL’S OCCUPATION OF PALESTINE"

"And many times, describing these assaults has meant repeatedly using language that points to a glaring majority of victims as always civilian, and a disproportionate number as women and children. But while the killing of women and children is horrific, Maya Mikdashi points out that “in the reiteration of these disturbing facts there is something missing: the public mourning of Palestinian men killed by Israel’s war machine.” As we continue drawing attention and demanding recognition of Israeli violence against Palestinians, Mikdashi’s remarkable piece from last summer over at Jadaliyya still serves as an incredibly relevant read on how this form of gendered analysis can be racist and destructive:

Today, we should be aware of how the trope of “womenandchildren” is circulating in relation to Gaza and to Palestine more broadly. This trope accomplishes many discursive feats, two of which are most prominent: The massifying of women and children into an undistinguishable group brought together by the “sameness” of gender and sex, and the reproduction of the male Palestinian body (and the male Arab body more generally) as always already dangerous. Thus the status of male Palestinians (a designation that includes boys aged fifteen and up, and sometimes boys as young as thirteen) as “civilians” is always circumspect.

In this framework, the killing of women and girls and pre-teen and underage boys is to be marked, but boys and men are presumed guilty of what they might do if allowed to live their lives. Furthermore, these boys and men are potentially dangerous not only to the militaries that occupy them, but to those womenandchildren who actually are civilians. The young boys, after all, may grow up to be violent extremists. Thus, kill the flesh—extinguish the potential... 

The status of Muslim men as inherently uncivilian should come as unsurprising. The New York Times broke a story a few years ago on how the Obama administration institutionalized this mindset in its foreign policy: all military-age males in a strike zone are counted as combatants by our government (rather than civilian casualties), unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent."
http://feministing.com/2015/03/04/on-netanyahus-speech-and-gendering-israels-occupation-of-palestine/

I love this word "womenandchildren", this lump that acts as a rhetorical guilt club. It's so ugly.