1 ABOVE AND BEYOND DENIAL: INCARCERATED CHILDREN IN ISRAEL/PALESTINE Smadar Ben-Natan The Version of Record of this manuscript has been published and is available in the Journal of Genocide Research, October 19 2020, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14623528.2020.1829838?scroll=top&needAccess =true Reading Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian’s book Incarcerated Childhood and the Politics of Unchilding made me recall the story of one Palestinian teenager in particular. Several years ago, as a criminal defence and human rights lawyer in Israel, I met Mohammad Nouara. By now, he has been imprisoned for nearly 20 years, after being arrested in 2001 when he was 17 and sentenced to life. All my legal attempts to help him failed. At 17, Mohammad got caught up in a chain of events much bigger than he could manage; he had been a victim, but not the prototypical purely innocent victim, which makes his story murky and could help us overcome the victim- victimizer dichotomy. Nonetheless, he was denied justice and “unchilded,” like many other Palestinian children and youth that this book brings their stories and voices. Mohammad was arrested and convicted for taking part in what has become known as the “Ramallah lynching” in October 2000. On 12 October there was a funeral service in Ramallah for Halil Zahran, a 17-year old Palestinian who had been killed in clashes with Israeli forces two days earlier. Coincidentally, on the same day, two Israeli reserve soldiers, Vadim Norzhich and Yosef Avrahami, had accidentally entered Ramallah and taken into custody by Palestinian Authority police force. Tensions were running high during that time, right after negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians failed and the second intifada broke: Israeli forces killed over 100 Palestinians, nearly two dozen of them minors, in protests over the preceding two weeks in Ramallah, the largest city in the Occupied West Bank. The two Israeli reserve soldiers were