“Like a dead person you live in Palestine”: students on precarity under occupation

For Palestinians living under Israeli occupation personal and collective narratives have long served as important forms of resistance. Drawing on interviews with 28 Palestinian university students living in the West Bank, this paper argues that the students' stories were crafted to convey to international audiences the precarity of life under occupation and their experiences of negotiating it. Based on a social constructionist analysis of semi-structured interviews conducted in 2010, the paper argues that participants articulated the ever-present threat of imprisonment and the constant threat of death at the hands of Israeli forces. This precarity gave rise to "temporary life," in which impermanence and uncertainty shaped Palestinians' daily lives and underlined their dehumanization. The students' narratives, which sought to humanize Palestinians, were driven, in part, by the aim of fostering international solidarity in support of Palestinian liberation. In sharing them some students hoped to inspire international opposition to the occupation.