Youth and conflict in Israel-Palestine: Storytelling, contested space, and the politics of memory

How are forbidden histories and memories retold in Israel/Palestine? What do stories tell us about peoples' everyday experiences of division and segregation? This book investigates the feelings and attitudes of children and young people in Israel/Palestine regarding borders, unseen places, violence, identity, memory, and those they see as the other. The study is unique in its inclusion of young people from both Palestinian refugee camps and right-wing settlement homes and the book shows that boundary spaces are fertile ground for the transmission of stories and forbidden memories. Young people are at the centre of the research and Victoria Biggs argues that their stories can reveal much more about their feelings and experiences than qualitative interviews or quantitative research. By studying the language, metaphor, violence, and endings employed in the imaginative stories, storytelling is shown to be a political act which plays a vital role in shaping their concepts of community, exclusion, and belonging.