A careful examination of Palestinian service work in Israeli settlements and of everyday settler-Palestinian contact demonstrates how these encounters play a key role in normalizing the presence and dominance of settlers in the occupied West Bank. Based on ethnographic fieldwork at a settlement supermarket, this article shows that Palestinians are called upon to perform customer service in a setting where they are not only subjugated but are also coerced to help create the ultranationalist climate of their occupiers' holidays. In addition to being compelled to normalize Israeli dominance, Palestinian workers are also the object of a seemingly contradictory orientation, one that favors not having Palestinians around at all. The article thus weighs in on the broader contemporary significance of Palestinian labor for the settler-colonial logics of Zionism.

This short biography of Dr. Eyad El Sarraj, the founder of the Gaza Community Mental Health Programme, describes his formative experiences under Israeli occupation, his education, and his professional life, including interactions with Palestinian and Israeli colleagues. El Sarraj's vision of collective resistance, his stubborn ‘pathological optimism,’ and his devotion to the dignity and well-being of his patients and the people of the Gaza Strip in the face of unrelenting Israeli state violence are colorfully described by his colleague and long-time friend Paul Aaron.

This article foregrounds how international aid and the Israeli occupation intersect in the historically prosperous West Bank agricultural village of Jayyus; with most of its lands isolated behind the Israeli Wall, Jayyus is now aid-dependent. While material aid plays a larger role in sustaining the village, it is through “advocacy work” (a form of international aid largely unaddressed in the literature) that Jayyusis experience aid on a daily basis. The article examines the paradoxes of dependence and subordination seen from the vantage point of local communities under the jurisdiction of an occupying power and in the absence of a sovereign Palestinian state. Also shown is how the routinization of aid both obscures the ongoing status of occupation and has become an important mechanism that sustains it.