Narrating hyphenated selves: Intergroup contact and configurations of identity among young Palestinian citizens of Israel

Contemporary Palestinian citizens of Israel must negotiate disparate identities as they construct a “hyphenated” self. Their status as a national indigenous minority places them in a particular location of subordination and existential insecurity within Israeli society, which has been accentuated during the intensification of conflict between Israel and the Palestinians in the occupied territories since 2000. This study examines processes of identity negotiation and reconciliation in the personal narratives of young Palestinian citizens of Israel who participate in intergroup contact with Jewish Israelis and Palestinians from the occupied territories. An interpretive thematic analysis of personal narratives reveals the discursive strategies youth employ as they traverse the limits of hyphenation, constructing configurations of identity that reconcile conflicting discourses. Pre-contact narratives suggested considerable variability in processes of identity negotiation. Post-contact narratives were characterized by three patterns: (1) Palestinian identity accentuation, in which youth came to identify more strongly with their Palestinian national identity over their Israeli civic identity; (2) temporal stability, in which youth whose pre-contact narrative was already characterized by Palestinian identity accentuation maintained that configuration; and (3) life at the hyphen, in which youth actively struggled with and vacillated between states of conflict and integration of their disparate identities.