Palestinian Childhoods - Growing up in a Heterotopic World

Questions: How does being Palestinian structure the childhood and youth of people who grow up as Palestinians in different constellations and regions? What are the experiences of violence, and under what circumstances do they become particularly relevant? Are there common experiences that are significant even if childhood was spent at least partly in Western countries? How are these experiences transmitted across generations?

Method: The paper is based on life-history interviews with 15 Palestinian people (8 men, 7 women; between 30 and 60 years old) who grew up in Israel, Gaza, the occupied territories, refugee camps in neighbouring countries, in other countries in the Middle East, or for part of their childhood in Western countries. The interviews focused on childhood and adolescent experiences and are used to uncover important social structural features, following Bertaux' life-history approach (1981).

Results: By comparing these very different life stories, we sought to identify what structures all these stories in the same way. The fundamentally ‘heterotopic character of the world’ for these people was identified as a particularly relevant structuring factor. The term is taken from an essay by Foucault (2004) and is used here to capture the following: the restricted access to space everywhere, the expulsion from spaces, the surveillance of movements in space (even if they already have citizenship of a Western country), the application of different rules to this group than to other people. This creates a context in which experiences of violence and traumatization become particularly threatening, as there is neither escape nor safety; it can be characterized as a form of violence per se. As with other forms of violence, the experience of a heterotopic world can be passed on intergenerationally, and in the case of some of our interviewees, still to their children, even if that generation was born abroad.