Three generations, one story: Palestinian women, resilience, and survival

Abstract

This article explores the intergenerational narratives of three Palestinian women: a grandmother displaced from Lydd in the Nakba in 1948; her daughter, who came of age during the 1967 Naksa and the First Intifada; and her granddaughter, whose formative years unfolded under siege in the Second Intifada, military occupation, and digital warfare. Drawing on the feminist narrative/testimonio method and genealogical analysis, the study weaves oral histories with theoretical reflection to examine how memory, resistance, and survival are transmitted across generations of Palestinian women. By situating these lived experiences within a framework informed by Frantz Fanon’s analysis of women in anti-colonial struggle, the article highlights the gendered continuities of dispossession, resilience, and political agency. The narrators’ stories, collected through testimony, personal archives, and embodied remembrance, illustrate how Palestinian women negotiate trauma through labor, education, motherhood, and storytelling, producing alternative epistemologies of survival. In tracing these narratives, the article argues that intergenerational memory is not merely the inheritance of loss but a praxis of resistance that transforms pain into political consciousness.