Palestinians who grew up during the second intifada say they remain traumatized. They still feel trapped in the intifada, both through memories that are embedded in their lived space and through continued occupation. These young adults assert their agency in the present by telling life stories that restore their agency in the past. This paper uses oral histories of Palestinians who grew up during the second intifada to build on the growing body of work that explores how Palestinians empower themselves through their everyday personal experiences and through memory (Levine and Shafir 2012; Norman 2011). Memory of childhood is one form of resistance employed by young adult Palestinians. Memory is not a passive depository of facts, but is an ongoing process of creating meaning (Portelli, 2005). Three genres of narrating agency emerge from the life stories of Palestinians who grew up during the second intifada. Palestinians recall empowering themselves as children by redefining markers of constraint, expressing the limits of their power, and conflating the imaginary with the real. First, Palestinians say that as children they carved out small spaces of protest within situations of constraint, i.e. the employment of “traverse tactics” (de Certeau 1984). A Palestinian woman states, for example, that during the second intifada her mother compensated for a food shortage by baking her own (and supposedly better) bread at home. Her family was able to produce a desired outcome within an oppressive system. Second, Palestinians narrate the limits of their power. Agency and strength comes from an awareness of one’s vulnerability and inability to control one’s life (Butler, 2005). For example, one Palestinian woman concludes a heroic story about obtaining food for her hungry siblings by saying that the rations only lasted three days. The conclusion of the story conveys the limitations of her power as a child. Third, many Palestinians conflate the imaginary with the real in their accounts of the second intifada. Individual agency can derive from a person’s ability to imagine liberation from a dominant system (Appaduri, 1990). One Palestinian woman recalls, for instance, that as a child she believed a hat would protect her from falling bombs. She broke the boundaries of restraint in which she lived through the invention of her own reality. Generally, Palestinians want to convey that their vulnerability as children in war did not preclude their ability. These memories empower them in the face of the ongoing conflict.