This study examines the formulation of national identity in Palestinian children by exploring their understanding of its paradoxes. Twelve Palestinian children were interviewed from cities, villages and refugee camps in the West Bank. The children express the multiple dimensions of national identity in terms of self and other; however these expressions are fragmented in nature. Furthermore, the findings indicate that national identity highlights children as geopolitical agents, rather than separate entities defined by time.

No abstract

This article investigates the premise that Palestinian children are the authors of collective memory. Palestinian society employs an oral tradition that propagates the collective experience among different generations in which the individual dimensions of each is apparent. The oral history for Palestinian children not only illustrates past events, it also provides the tool for grasping the present and traversing the future. In this ethnographic study, 12 Palestinian children from cities, villages and refugee camps in the West Bank were interviewed. The children demonstrated active roles in reconstructing previous collective memory in relation to their own experiences and vigorously restructured the collective memory as a prerequisite for passing it to the next generation.

No abstract

This paper seeks to examine how Palestinian children's agency integrates Islamic religious idioms in daily life to combat Israeli oppression. While children are often seen as objects that are merely subjected to political and cultural processes, this research shows that children have agency and use their religious expression as a way to further their own political freedom and resist the imposing geopolitical agenda of colonialism. Since the inception of the war on terror that highlighted increased scrutiny and backlash against Islam in Western discourse, resistance through religion has become an integral part of Palestinian children's agency. The narratives of 28 Palestinian children demonstrate the claim that the children have agency in using the expression of Islamic idioms as resistance against Western perceptions and Israeli oppression.