In the wake of the Oslo Accords, the temporal logic of Israeli rule in the Occupied Palestinian Territories has been intensified. While Vladimir Jabotinsky wanted to eliminate any “gleam of hope” that Zionism could be defeated, today every facet of Palestinian life is subject to regulations that render the future ambiguous. Long waits at checkpoints, temporary ordinances, uncertainty over the status of political negotiations, and a calculated use of caprice in regulating mobility have contributed to the emergence of a despairing tone in Palestinian cultural discourse. Through a reading of Sahar Khalifeh’s novel al-M?r?th [The Inheritance, 1997], this paper elicits the stultifying conditions of everyday life in the West Bank that preempt individual and collective development. Mirroring this dynamic in the novel’s own fragmented representation of its characters’ lives, its representation of the experience of “stuckness” through dilated representations of encounters with checkpoints, and its tragic and inconclusive ending, al-M?r?th discloses the hopelessness that pervades much of post-Oslo Palestinian life. But Khalifeh also suggests that the struggles of Palestinian women against both settler colonialism and patriarchy promise to restore the sense of openness and hence potentiality that Israeli rule and Palestinian leadership suppress. For Khalifeh, this potentiality inheres in both the aporetic nature of Zionism itself, which yields precisely the contact, exposure, and self-encumbrance that it wishes to evade through methodical separation, and in the critical challenge that Palestinian women issue to the patriarchal principle that currently organizes much of Palestinian sociality and politics. When Palestinian women challenge the terms of their double subordination, they transmute Palestinian liberation from a closed project resting on a timeless claim into one that is open to the unforeseeable possibilities of future becoming. Their provocation, Khalifeh suggests, demands more than merely inclusion into the presently-constituted Palestinian order; it aims to recover the very constitutive powers of Palestinianness. In this way it also functions as a tacit refusal of Israel’s realist governance, which demands that Palestinians be practical, acknowledge facts on the ground, and accept the irreversible condition of their vanquishment. The paper concludes that the apparent state of hopelessness in much contemporary Palestinian writing in fact conceals a profoundly utopian critical impulse.