Palestinian children: a transformation of national identity in the Abbas era

Abstract

The constant rendering of Palestinian national identity provides crucial insight not only to the current Palestinian community’s political status, but also to past and the future experiences. National identity echoes the intersectionality of history and local politics. For the last few decades, Palestinian national identity has been evolving with continuous alteration that encompasses local political discourse in the Palestinian community. Whereas it once embraced unity among different political ideologies, a shift occurred with Hamas election victory in 2006, which resulted in the division of the Palestinian community, whereby the Palestinian Authority, under Abbas leadership is ruling the West Bank, and Hamas is governing the Gaza Strip. This political tension has served to render national identity. Palestinian children echoed such politics in the construction of their national identity through their interpretation of personal experiences that are intertwined with current political events. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to show how Palestinian children articulated national identity in a post-Arafat/Abbas era, recognizing that national identity is not static.

The state of Palestinian youth – commentary to Habashi

“…In particular, this paper illustrates how the conceptions of Palestinian national identity shift alongside shifts in the national struggle. The period covered in Habashi's (2019Habashi's ( ) paper, 2007Habashi's ( -2011, represents a very turbulent time for internal Palestinian politics following the victory of Hamas in Palestinian legislative elections in 2006. This situation during this period, which I have referred to as the "double occupation" of Palestine (Marshall 2011), has been dominated by the split between a Hamas-governed Gaza and a Fatah-controlled Palestinian Authority (PA) in the West Bank, with ramped up security coordination between the PA and Israel.…”

“…Specifically, this paper prompts me to consider some conceptual and methodological concerns related to the issue of spatial scale that continues to vex children's geographies, as well as the issue of temporal scale, typically measured in generations when in studies of children and youth. Habashi's (2019) paper sets out to examine how Palestinian children read and respond to "local" political events and realities -such as the aforementioned Hamas/Fatah split, repeated Israeli onslaughts against Gaza, continued settlement encroachment, and ongoing imposition of checkpoints and barriers -in terms of their national identity. However, the way that participants blurred scalar boundaries between the local, national, and international spheres in their reactions to these political events and issues is itself interesting.…”

“…One possibility is the use of digital technology. Habashi (2019) has made creative and productive use of journaling in her research with Palestinian young people. How could digital photos snapped by now ubiquitous smart phones help to ground their narratives of national identities more solidly in their local surroundings?…”

“…Though Habashi's (2017) ecological model of socialization takes into account child/adult mutual socialization even as it disrupts top-down adult-centered models of youth socialization, the emphasis of childhood agency and child-centered methods in children's geographies (combined, perhaps, with the Western conceptions of childhood smuggled into our work), has reproduced a tendency to exclude adults from our research with children. Yet, the moment described in Habashi's (2019) paper in which one of the participants asks their father about his memories of displacement during the 1967 war is a powerful one. In my own recent work with Palestinian refugee children in the West Bank, I have used place-based intergenerational digital storytelling as a method for understanding how young people form a sense of local belonging to the camp even as they articulate a longing for return to a national homeland.…”

Geopolitical lives of children – commentary to Habashi

“…Finally, as I use Habashi's (2019) article as a sounding board for some of the complexities of children's national identities in BiH, I would like to end with a few words on the open-review process for this article. It was an enlightening process that I was happy to be a part of.…”