As developing human beings living within a zone of conflict, Palestinian children come to understand their everyday lives as "normal." According to my two and a half years of field research, they become socialized not just to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict but to adult Palestinian narratives about it, leading them to filter their everyday experiences through a lens of "justice." As a result, they alter these experiences to make aberrations to their narrative constructions "fit" their understandings of the conflict. Thus, when they have contact or mediated contact with Jewish-Israelis who are not dressed in Israeli soldier uniforms, they interpret themselves to instead have had contact with "Arabs" or "foreigners." According to their justice-filtered narrative explanations, "Arabs" and "foreigners" are those who are different. On the other hand, "Jews", are those who are an "army" or "who carry a gun" and prevent Palestinians from obtaining justice. Thus, it seems, if they meet someone who is Jewish who does not fit this construct, they convert that person's identity. Through a combination of ethnographic observations and interview-based responses, I found these children drew such meanings from their unstructured real-world contact and mediated contact experiences with Jewish-Israelis, including even when interacting with Jewish-Israeli peace activists. In light of the meanings Palestinian children made, and contrary to optimistic evidence about the contact hypothesis (Tropp & Pettigrew, 2005), or the ability for contact to reduce prejudice and help manage conflict, I argue that an important additional criterion needs to be considered when evaluating contact's peacebuilding effect. Namely, scholars should also consider a person's symbolic interpretation of contact. In the case of these children, given that they concluded themselves to have had contact with "Arabs" or "foreigners", when they actually had contact with Jewish-Israelis, such experiences, even if positive, could not alter their negative intergroup attitudes, and neither their political beliefs towards peacemaking. I conclude my paper by arguing that efforts to make peace, whether by emphasizing contact or another strategy, must take into account how children become socialized to conflict - by learning to filter their understandings of it - their "normal" everyday lives, in this case, through a lens of justice. An understanding of the meanings Palestinian children, in turn, construct out of their contact experiences, not just their actual contact, should prove beneficial for our understanding and forecasting of how the next generation of Palestinians will continue and adapt to the ramifications of the conflict.