Everyday resilience as resistance: Palestinian women practicing sumud’

This article contributes a different approach to discussions of resilience and resistance by arguing that within the current literature, there is too little attention to how communities may engage in their own resilience building without outside intervention or interference. Further, this article will argue that the literature which poses resilience as fundamentally different from resistance overlooks the ways in which resilience can be seen as a tactic of resistance through the lens of infrapolitics. The article uses the Palestinian example of sumud to illustrate these two points. Sumud is a tactic of resistance to the Israeli occupation that relies upon adaptation to the difficulties of life under occupation, staying in the territories despite hardship, and asserting Palestinian culture and identity in response to Zionist claims which posit Israelis as the sole legitimate inhabitants of the land. Sumud represents a resilient resistancea tactic of resistance that relies on qualities of resilience such as getting by and adapting to shock. Thinking about sumud as a form of resilient resistance challenges the resilience literature to engage with a greater variety of forms of resilience.