Jawaheer, a woman in her twenties from Khan Younis, has just returned from a nearby cafeteria with ice cream and sweets to share with her friends. Making the best of a summer under siege, she and the other women affirm joy and the aesthetics of life in Gaza Beach (see fig. 1). This image brings forth the hoping Palestinian subject, whose space of enunciation has, during the intifada al-Aqsa, become increasingly marginal and unrecognizable within dominant discourses on conflict.

The images presented here of Jawaheer and other Palestinians camping on the beach were produced in response to several questions and concerns surrounding the politics of representation of Palestinian agency. First, why has the second Palestinian uprising, the intifada al-Aqsa, been characterized by increasingly polarized and dichotomous representations of the Palestinians? In these representations, the political subjectivity of the Palestinians tends to be portrayed either in terms of Islamic militancy and suicide or in terms of passive victimhood. Second, what forms of Palestinian political subjectivity and agency exist today beyond these narrow parameters of militancy and victimhood? And third, to what extent can these other, subaltern aspects of Palestinian subjectivity be represented? In other words, if representation is, as Gayatri Spivak argues, always conditioned by discourses against which utterances are interpreted and given meaning, how is it possible to move beyond this discursive poverty and to create more complex understandings of Palestinian political subjectivity and agency?1

The problem considered here, then, is the way in which the boundaries of discourses on war and conflict are implicated in the politics of representation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Further, who can speak through these discourses? As central sites of contestation among oppositional groups, discourses on war and conflict are inherently polarizing and tend to privilege sites of spectacular violence and high-profile politics. Accordingly, dominating discourses of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict exclude the many shifting ways in which Palestinians experience, negotiate, and contest the Israeli occupation in their day-to-day lives; they also prevent the articulation of Palestinian voices and subject positions that are more complex and ambivalent than dichotomous representations. What I hope to suggest, through the image of Jawaheer and through the following ethnography on the politics of Gaza Beach, is that in order to move beyond this discursive poverty, it is necessary to shift attention away from sites of conflict that are taken for granted toward un(der)represented spaces of Palestinian everyday life. These spaces, I argue, invite the possibility of epistemological “third spaces,� where meaning is not governed by preexisting interpretative frameworks and where the condition of aporia forces attention to other, subaltern aspects of the Palestinian struggle (see fig. 2).