Resilience is by no means a new theme to Palestinian literature. To the contrary, stories of the way people stand up to and survive adversities, respond to threat in ingenious ways, and keep their fortitude and good form in the face of danger are what people traditionally seek in literature. Furthermore, theories of reading (for example, Ghassan Kanafani’s adab al-muqawama or resistance literature, or the role of storytelling in Elias Khoury’s Bab el-Shams) often argue that literature is a means of enhancing resilience, both personal and collective. Resilience, often narrated as ṣumud, has been a central theme in Palestinian culture facing decades of violence and settler colonialism. In the past few decades, however, the exploration of the meaning of “resilience” has far exceeded the literary realm. In a world that seems to be prone to uncalculatable uncertainty (Beck 1992), the ill-defined concept of resilience came to be seen as best one could hope for, replacing goals such as prosperity, well-being, or security. Today, scholars in disciplines as diverse as psychology, finance, security, development, or organizational theory strive to identify the building blocks of resilience and design programs to enhance it. Resilience is now defined as a set of capacities that can be built through training and development, another skill in the skillset required of an individual in a neoliberal economy. How has Palestinian literature responded to this new normalized and commodified demand for resilience, its emergence as a “a pervasive idiom of global governance” (Walker and Cooper 2011), and permeation of the NGO sector in Palestine (Keelan and Browne 2019)? This paper analyzes short contemporary stories by the Palestinian writers Adania Shibli, Ala Hlehle, and Majd Kayyal, alongside documents from the 2016-2020 “Resilience Building” program initiated by the United Nations Development Program and the Palestinian Authority, in order to ask how they conceptualize risk, harm, and vulnerability, as well as the new Palestinian resilient subject. My readings demonstrate that while the literature adopts the same view of the future as a complex, unmanageable catastrophe, the new demand for resilience is presented as a test which the contemporary Palestinian subject is bound to fail.