A child is testifying: Testimony and the cultural construction of childhood in a trans/national frame

Abstract

This essay discusses the controversy over the reception of Deborah Ellis's book of children's testimony, Three Wishes: Palestinian and Israeli Children Speak. By situating her book and the controversy surrounding it in the context of the modern ideal of childhood as a site of psychoanalytical knowledge, I argue that the possibility of children testifying to trauma and the violence of war is over‐determined by the production of competing fantasies as to who or what lies at the origins of violence. From these competing fantasies emerge transnational complicities of innocence that disavow the narratives of trauma and wartime conflict as told by children.