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.

Throughout the first Palestinian intifada, graffiti served as both a form of communication and resistance for youth struggling against the Israeli occupation. Peteet's studies of this proverbial 'writing on the wall' - often located on the exterior courtyards and walls of private residences - demonstrate how graffiti enabled Palestinians to anonymously, yet publicly, communicate despite Israel's censorship and provide a visible and, at times, visceral challenge to Israeli surveillance and control. Today, graffiti continues to be used as a means of communication and resistance against the ongoing occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. However, unlike the first intifada, there is noticeable international influence and participation in the graffiti on the 8m high concrete sections of the Israeli Separation Barrier that seals off major Palestinian population centers, such as Bethlehem, Jerusalem, and Qalqilia. British street artist Banksy, former Pink Floyd bassist Roger Waters, the Netherlands-based 'Send a Message' project as well as countless individual international activists have placed graffiti on the wall in order to express solidarity with Palestinians or to resist the continued occupation. This paper, based on field work in the West Bank conducted between July and September 2009, will compare the graffiti of the first intifada to the current graffiti on the Israeli Separation Wall and consider how increased internationalization has impacted its conceptualization as a form of Palestinian nonviolent resistance. The paper will also consider how the internationalization of graffiti in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict informs the ongoing anthropological discourse and theories pertaining to international solidarity and social movements.

The experience of young Palestinian camp refugees in Amman, sheltered from military violence, is different from that of Palestinian children in the West Bank, Gaza, or inside Israel. But together they share a common history, a sense of imagined community and a strong Palestinian identity shaped by the Israel-Palestine conflict. The young heroes of the Intifada have inevitably influenced their peers from the refugee camps in Jordan. My paper examines anthropologically children's rights taught at the UN schools in urban refugee camps as a space of change in which children perceive themselves in new ways. Rights are not laws; hence their applicability and implementation involve more complex processes. The concepts included in the discourse of children's rights such as identity, self or citizen strongly influence young minds and sentiments. Children's rights discourse allows youngsters not only to be self reflective but also socially engaged. My paper investigates children, a now-recognized category of individuals, not only separately, but also as part of the dynamics of a larger group, their family and community. Data based on fieldwork conducted in 2003-2204 shows that rights confer upon children and adolescents a sense of entitlement for justice and provides them with empowering tools such as confidence and self esteem they use in claiming their rights as refugees, especially the right of return. In that regard, I found the notion of rights also carries deep ambivalence, but children demonstrate they are capable of reinventing children's rights and eschew the hegemony of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child by affirming and including their own cultural values. The goal of this paper is to emphasize the role of children agents of change in the contained space of the refugee camp, and promote their enormous potential in shaping their environment as a model for challenging and supporting social justice. Until that time, children's rights in Palestinian refugee camps contribute to restore a sense of pride and dignity to an uprooted community deprived of land, hence honor, a most fundamental value.