The images of children throwing stones, demonstrating against the Israeli occupation, and taking part in political events in the context of the first Intifada and the second Intifada dominate any discussion on the Palestinian children and childhood. What is common in these images is the portrayal of the Palestinian childhood, and Palestinian children as a group, as deviant from the normative globalized and Eurocentric childhood or children. Children, in the Palestinian context, are usually presented as heroes or victims depending on the ideologically and politically charged narratives. Such perceptions, of heroism and victimhood, keep children in the arena of symbolism, through romanticizing them and their action, and exclude them from activism. Their resistance, for example, is usually overlooked in these perceptions/constructions.
This paper aims at highlighting aspects of their resistance not only to the Israeli occupation and its settler colonial practices, but also to the social hierarchical structures that undermine or overlook their role and contribution. Drawing on fieldworks conducted at different times in the last five years in the West Bank including East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip, this paper explores forms of resistance led and practiced by the youngsters. Attending to their voices, the fieldworks use ethnographies to unveil the subjective ways the children see and think of themselves and their choices and actions. Contrary to the dominant portrayal of Palestinian childhood as a homogeneous common experience, the papers showed the various ways childhood and children’s resistance manifest in Palestine, also through the lenses of gender, class and generation.
Children and Youth Studies