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Lookup NU author(s): Dr Benjamin Bouquet, Professor Rhona Smith
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC 4.0).
In this paper, we examine the social construction of race as a determinant of health inequities in Palestine. Race myths about Palestinians conform to the “logic of elimination” integral to settler colonialism, predicated on the dispossession and removal of the Indigenous people from the land. Racialized legal categorizations of Palestinians are deployed in strategies of elimination that include policies and practices of extrajudicial killing, maiming, and excessive use of force; displacement, dispossession, isolation, and containment; and arbitrary detention and movement restrictions. Differential freedoms and entitlements derive from the deployment of racialized legal categorizations, regulating the material conditions of life and exposure to deliberate bodily harm that make up intermediary determinants of health. Our iterative model outlining the symbolic and systemic constitution of racialized health inequities in Palestine aims to support analysis of the root causes of human rights violations, essential to a human rights-based approach to health. Root-cause analysis confers appropriate recommendations for action. The radical dismantling of systematic racial oppression and domination in Palestine, tantamount to apartheid, is a precondition for realizing the right to health for all.
Author(s): Bouquet B, Muhareb R, Smith R
Publication type: Article
Publication status: Published
Journal: Health and Human Rights Journal
Year: 2022
Volume: 44
Issue: 2
Pages: 237-254
Online publication date: 12/12/2022
Acceptance date: 12/10/2022
Date deposited: 02/03/2023
ISSN (print): 1079-0969
ISSN (electronic): 2150-4113
Publisher: François-Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health and Human Rights, Harvard School for Public Health
URL: https://www.hhrjournal.org/2022/12/its-not-whatever-because-this-is-where-the-problem-starts-racialized-strategies-of-elimination-as-determinants-of-health-in-palestine/
