Paper short abstract:

This paper explores how Palestinians development workers, hired by the Israeli state, navigate daily life in a worsening reality, politically and economically. Embodying memories and histories these workers struggle to generate meaningful political actions under seriously restricting conditions.

Paper long abstract:

How do people act when violence is a norm and precarity is unremarkable?

This paper ethnographically explores what constitutes the idea of creative political action as generated through the labour of Palestinian development workers in Jerusalem. Situated uncomfortably between the Israeli state, as their employer/Occupier, and their own communities with whom they work, these practitioners must navigate their actions in a morally laden, precarious and violent daily routine.

A focus on ‘resistance’ in the study of Palestine, had shaped Palestinians ultimately as resisters, who boycott and act against Israel’s oppressive mechanisms. Palestinians who seemed to adapt to the ongoing reality of Occupation by interacting with it, especially as workers, were often called ‘collaborators’ or ‘normalisers’ who normalise the abnormal Occupation. Acting from their impossible positionality, my interlocutors find creative ways to widen this spectrum while considering their people’s ongoing struggle for national liberation, and the pressing and honest need for improving their and their communities’ living conditions in the immediate time. In a reality that is constantly worsening, politically and economically, how do they navigate these pressures?

Through a cross-cutting lens of politics, affects, and the moral realities of deprived populations, I explore how my interlocutors consciously make-sense of these tensions, and cultivate space for political action under seriously restricting conditions and critiques. I introduce the concept of ‘creative political action,’ to explain how people act outside of the usual traditions of Resistance, in order to challenge existing socio-political structures and norms in an ongoing violent reality of Occupation.