Abstract This paper examines how Palestinian English teachers (PETs) working at Jewish–Israeli schools navigate trauma in an educational space that both requires and negates them. Driven by labor market demands rather than efforts at educational integration, PETs operate under constant affective and political tension, forced to comply with colonial measures of silencing and surveillance while struggling to assert their dignity as Palestinians, professionalism as educators, and humanity in a securitized space. This situation has intensified since the outbreak of war on Gaza following the Hamas attacks on Israel in October 2023, reflecting the political persecution and severe crackdowns on freedoms of expression and assembly faced by the general Palestinian public in Israel. In light of escalating repression and silencing, this paper examines how PETs navigate erasure and surveillance while cultivating spaces of love, ethical relations, and political presence in their classrooms by drawing on Stroud's notion of linguistic citizenship and its intersection with love and sumud (Arabic for steadfastness) as Southern decolonial acts. Drawing on interview data with six Palestinian English teachers working at Jewish‐Israeli schools, I illustrate how English language teaching is at the nexus of affective‐discursive trauma shaped by structural conditions of political, existential, and economic subjugation.
Muzna Awayed‐Bishara (Mon,) studied this question.