This project is an oral history of a Palestinian family, tracing its experience from 1967 to the present. Members of this family have experienced military occupation, imprisonment, assassination, home demolition, restrictions on movement, and other forms of political violence. Some of them have been involved in Palestinian resistance to Israeli military occupation, planning martyr operations against Israelis and attacking Palestinian collaborators. While being mindful of this political violence and situating the oral history in such a context, my aim in this project is to tell a story of the nuances of rural life within these events, to capture the longue duree of social change, and to highlight everyday experiences and the way events and the mundane intertwine to produce people’s lives. Importantly, in telling this story, this project experiments with creative nonfiction as ethnography. In this talk, I explore my role as storyteller by first reading excerpts from my book, and then focusing on what it means to write creative nonfiction as an anthropologist, the challenges I encountered, and the choices I've made. How can we tell the story of a family’s life under occupation, apartheid and settler colonialism using the tools we learn as anthropologists? To this end, I explore the enduring question of representation and voice. And ask: how can we transform our data to forms that present themselves to greater audiences without sacrificing theory and critique? And how do we play with stories told to create stories written?

This paper will focus on how Jewish Israeli settlers have appropriated the discourse of liberal humanism and coexistence, not merely as a form of public relations, but as practices of settler-self-making. Based on twenty months of ethnographic fieldwork in and around the West Bank settlements, it will examine how settlers understand their own history there in relation to the Palestinians that they have displaced. For settlers, the last half century has involved self- and community-making through territorial expansion, building homes and memories on the spoils of war. Settler historical narratives thus have little more in common with the archives of the state than do their Palestinian counterparts; nor are they any less important to the staging of their own political horizons. I will show that in my primary field site, the northern West Bank settlement of Alfei Menashe, settlers look with nostalgia to the 1980s prior to the first intifada. According to this rose-tinted memory, at this time, the hills of the West Bank were open to their exploration, and people felt so comfortable in their surroundings that they would often go to the nearby Palestinian city of Qalqilia for groceries or for Saturday-morning shopping when the Jewish Israeli stores were shut. While settlers follow the state’s lead in turning a blind eye to Palestinian land claims, this is by no means the “empty land” of earlier Zionist propaganda. Rather, in a post-Oslo political moment—or even, as some argue, a post-two-state-solution moment—settlers take account of themselves and their project within the discursive contours of coexistence. I argue that settler nostalgia towards the 1980s is a way of claiming for themselves a moral high ground, positioning them as the right wing of a “peace movement” and the front line of coexistence.