Paper Short Abstract:

This paper explores Palestinian development workers' everyday encounters with the Israeli occupation, and the daily negotiation of terms at work. What constructs the meaning of a 'normal' routine for these development workers, and how do they cope with fears that arise in such an extreme reality?

Paper Abstract:

Over the past decades, Israel has created a rather specific everyday for Palestinians; an everyday that folds in itself different practices of overt and/or concealed violence. How does the fusion of violence into everyday life shape one’s experiences at work? This paper explores ethnographically the daily routine of young Palestinian professionals, hired by Jerusalem's municipality for implementing a large-scale Israeli development policy for East Jerusalem. As Palestinians who work for the Israeli state, these local practitioners are uniquely, sometimes uncomfortably, positioned between the state and their own Palestinian communities; this particular positionality creates a rather precarious worker.

How does one's daily route from home to work, and back look like? What sorts of emotional reactions arise when working in a community centre that is located inside a military basecamp, at Qalandia checkpoint? With reference to the militarised aesthetics of the space in which my interlocutors operate, I ask, how should we analyse the verbal and beyond-spoken references to such routine as 'normal'? What do Palestinians who live and work in Jerusalem actually mean when they refer to their daily encounters with the Israeli occupation as ‘normal’? Is this a psychological coping mechanism, or anything beyond?

Although mostly referring to my interlocutors' daily routine, I would also refer to their experiences at times of crisis, and especially to the impact of the current war in Israel/Palestine.

In this paper, I offer potential explanations to these questions and show how these everyday experiences shape these development workers' radical imagination of the future.