What it means to be Palestinian has been central to Palestinian national consciousness since the emergence of this consciousness in the 20th century. This centrality is not only manifested in Palestinian oral history, collective memory and mythologies, but is also reflected in popular and official discourses, thus appearing to be immutable and almost a “natural” marker of difference. Drawing on interviews with Palestinians in Lebanon, Jordan, Syria and Palestine about their lives between the late 1930s and 1993, this paper shows how in telling, these Palestinians articulate diverse experiences and modes of struggle between the subjective and objective, between the personal and the political and between the real and the imagined. They also articulate different modes of existence and imagination, reflecting that memory and identity are malleable, dynamic and constructed, and that it is in remembering and telling that people become agents in the making of public history. Indeed, the narratives of lived and imagined experiences reflect how Palestinians, like many other peoples involved in national liberation struggles, deal with the politics of the present, with the politics of time and space and with living at the edges of extreme experiences, personal and collective.