Palestinian daily life in city centers, towns, and villages is characterized by community and tradition and resilience. Palestinian daily life maintains the richness and resilience of the Palestinian society in face of social and political tensions.
Along busy city center streets of Bethlehem and Ramallah, street life in city centers presents a picture of community life. Bazaars are filled with street vendors, spilling newly available vegetables and fruits, spices, and home-made goodies, not just into the local economy but into a glorious brocade of everyday social living. Home bakeries and fruit trees are institutions of home and provision. Multigenerational workplaces are the order of the day, where youth and elder in the family work together, recalling good old times.
They bear the children’s fantasies of street play, back alleys off side streets where kick-start soccer games are kicked. Sharing bread—hummus and tabbouleh bread—is also a way of life, food and good times with one another. They have formed a far-distance sort of identity with kins and host-guest systems.
Local geography also lends itself well to living from day to day, as well. Slop farmers and olive farmers seasonally have a job that ties them to the land and to the tradition of farming. Olive harvest, especially, is a sharing one-day event, one with sharing. Men and women come together and harvest the olives, press out the oil, and eat, communing between and among people.
Palestinian life-enabling and representational mechanisms include one of the cultural expressions. Recitals, concerts, and exhibitions are channels for artist-recounted stories. Artists put context to survival, land, and family stories as the referent point in the local environment and adopt new stories with old splendor. All arts practice is all forms of representation of an ongoing cultural exchange that serves alternative representation of life in Palestine as being un-political. The answer is:.
Social life—be it everyday greeting in the marketplace, common labor on the fields, or even common art—is reshaped into a solidarity culture and collective memory of art. Religious life under the vigil of festival, wedding, and other public rites also reinforces the social relationships that make up everyday life.
This is an image of solidarity and perseverance. Apart from systemic hardship, Palestinian existence still bears witness to human solidarity, cultural resistance, and common purpose. In biased, yet insightful, cases, Palestinian society clings to a bodied presence premised on dignity, solidarity, and hope.
