Mental health policy in Palestine is largely based on short-term, emergency humanitarian aid and a biomedical approach to distress. It also takes sumud for granted, meaning it assumes Palestinians will always find a way to “get through.” In Palestine, there is not a system of sustainable public mental health services (Giacaman et al 2011). It is essential to understand how local populations (and not international aid agencies) conceive of their own suffering and well-being (Barber 2014). This paper is based on seven years of oral history interviews with a cohort of young adult Palestinians who grew up during the second intifada. Palestinian youth express that they live with Ongoing Traumatic Stress Syndrome (OTSS). The conditions that constitute ongoing traumatic stress are the inheritance of multi-generational trauma, compounded with continued violence. Political rights and freedoms are the key domains of good functioning for Palestinians (Barber 2014). For some Palestinians, the difficulty of local, daily living conditions can even at times trump larger abstract concepts such as collective national identity (Allan 2014). Palestinians make clear that lack of good functioning is not the fault of the individual but is the result of exposure to perpetual danger. Palestinians do not want their frailties to be pathologized, bio-medicalized and/or attributed to PTSD from the second intifada. Palestinians say their trauma is rooted in the near century-long Zionist project that led to the formation of the state of Israel and continues today in the form of the Israeli military occupation of the Palestinian territories. Young adult Palestinians convey that the occupation functions on a multi-pronged system of state-led surveillance, racism, and settler colonialism, which they talk about in three concrete ways: military detention/imprisonment, armed conflict-related fatalities, and immobility. This paper employs the art and science of portraiture (Lawrence-Lightfoot & Davis, 1994), to provide an in-depth and nuanced understanding of localized community expressions of well-being and normalcy outside the mental health clinics.