Youth and Conflict in Israel-Palestine: Storytelling, Contested Space and the Politics of Memory

How are forbidden histories told and transmitted among young people in Israel/Palestine? What can their stories teach us about their everyday experiences of segregation and political violence? This book investigates how young people use storytelling to navigate borders, memory, and unseen spaces, and to confront questions of belonging and those they see as the ‘other’. The study is unique in its inclusion of children from a broad spectrum of communities, including Palestinian refugee camps and right-wing Israeli settlement homes. The book shows that boundary spaces are fertile ground for the transmission of forbidden stories and memories. Young people are at the centre of the research and Victoria Biggs argues that storytelling reveals much more about their experiences and perceptions than either quantitative data or qualitative interviews. Through analysis of the language, metaphor, violence, and endings employed in the stories, storytelling is shown to be a political act that plays a vital role in shaping conflict-affected young people’s concepts of community, exclusion, and belonging.