The struggle of Palestinian women in the occupied territories: between national and social liberation.

• Author: Dajani, Souad

The momentous "breakthrough" in negotiations between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization, that culminated in the signing of a joint Declaration of Principles in Washington, D.C. on 13 September 1993, caught veteran Middle East analysts by surprise. Observers immediately scrambled to make sense of these accords and to assess their implications. The possibility of peace "breaking out" and of Palestinians finally enjoying some sort of self-rule, which, if they played their cards right, could eventually result in full sovereignty, seemed to have left Palestinian women at the wayside. Talking about Palestinian women at this point appeared rather ridiculous and irrelevant. Or did it?

The task of national liberation remains far from over, even some would argue, increasingly remote. The struggle of Palestinian women for equality and social justice has likewise remained unresolved. The interim period affords Palestinians (and especially women) a unique opportunity to declare their preferences and define their future society. They can take advantage of the very fluidity of the situation before relationships crystallize into permanent structures to position themselves and their agendas at the forefront of the Palestinian struggle.

The purpose of this paper is to explore issues facing Palestinian women in their struggle for national and social liberation. By situating their experiences within a broader historical and theoretical context, we may better appreciate the factors that impinge upon their current agendas and affect their social movements. Given the location of the West Bank and Gaza Strip as a type of colony for Israel, the intersections between the internal and external, domestic and international, are readily observable and have discernible effects on women. By drawing on appropriate theoretical formulations that explain connections between gender, ethnicity, class, and the state, we can explore the impact of the occupation in general and the implications of interim self-rule on Palestinian women. From there, we can assess the possibilities and constraints surrounding women's activism in the Occupied Territories.(1) This study is necessarily of an exploratory nature; the pace of events on the ground and the uncertainty of future directions and strategies make it difficult to do more than outline theoretical concerns and indicate issues to which Palestinians may want to direct their attention.

When Israel occupied the West Bank and Gaza Strip in 1967, it extended its colonial domination over these last remaining areas of Mandate Palestine. Over the ensuing 27 years, Israel issued laws and implemented policies that progressively integrated the Occupied Territories into Israel and rendered them dependent and "distorted" in their indigenous productive sectors.(2) Characteristic of the dynamics of settler colonialism, the Israeli authorities expropriated wide tracts of land that it then used to settle its own population. Israel created two distinct societies in these areas; a Jewish settler population under the jurisdiction of Israeli civilian law, and an indigenous Palestinian population subject to Israeli military rule. This and other features of Israel's colonial domination of the Occupied Territories depict the first level - the colonial settler state - at which external politics and relations are manifested internally. The impact of the occupation and resultant dislocations in Palestinian society are observable at virtually all levels, including the family and the role of women.(3) As Palestinians were increasingly dispossessed and proletarianized; in the Gaza Strip, among the huge refugee population, and among those whose village lands were confiscated, women too were "freed" from traditional structures and roles and forced into the public arena. Women emerged as participants in the labor force and as activists on behalf of the national cause. Gradually - and especially with the launching of the Intifada - Palestinian women became a force to be reckoned with, not only in the national struggle but in the struggle for social liberation as well.

Despite the differential impact of the occupation on Palestinian women, and despite Palestinian women's visible role in both the national and social struggle in the Occupied Territories, their distinct concerns remain largely absent in both the theoretical literature on the subject and in the practical arena in which such struggles are generally played out.

Women around the world - and Palestinian women are no exception - have traditionally been left out of the sphere of international relations. This omission manifests itself at the level of the state and of gender relations and the state. Reasons for such exclusion varied: It was either assumed that women were non-agents, hence the affairs of state did not concern them, or that state affairs did not affect them. In other words, there was assumed to be no gender content or consequences to political actions and the policies and power relations of states. Over the last decades, both feminist scholars and women activists have been pushing the boundaries of these understandings and have been demanding inclusion. They have shown quite persuasively how state and society interact, with dramatic implications for women. They have questioned the omission of gender issues from the discourse over "national interests" and have analyzed sweeping national processes and state policies that impinge directly on women's lives.(4) Much of the writing on these themes has expanded upon the idea of the international division of labor in which women worldwide are progressively pushed into a permanently exploited sector in the emerging global economy. This is a theme that remains largely beyond the scope of this paper except to point out that women have become increasingly attentive to the effects of various developmental policies and have urged greater attention to their precise impact on women,(5) If these issues depict a concern for the gendered effects of international relations, then a parallel level at which women have challenged prevailing constructs concerns internal processes at the level of domestic politics. In the case of the Palestinians, international relations and domestic politics converge even more clearly, as the "external" forms of direct Israeli political and economic control give way to and are transformed internally in indirect neo-colonial control during the period of interim self-rule.

A central focus of these concerns is the area of civil society and the role women can play as agents of social change. In the Arab World, one can point, for example, to the role of women's organizations in challenging various Islamists' views of society and in checking their inroads into policy-making.(6) In the Palestinian case, given the situation where the governing Palestinian "authority" has not been yet institutionalized, the institutions of civil society can still play a critical and dynamic role in challenging and checking the incursions of both the transitional Palestinian authority and the domination of the Israeli colonial state. The role of Palestinian women in mobilizing and strengthening the institutions of civil society may also empower them to influence processes in favor of women's rights, democratic participation and social reform in general.

It is this last issue that draws together the various strands of theoretical and practical concerns outlined in this essay. Herein lies the point of distillation and intersection between state and civil society, domestic politics and external relations, and the role and fate of women at and across these levels. Throughout the occupation, and particularly during the years of the Intifada, Palestinian women have been a major force behind the creation of "alternative" structures in the Palestinian community. One could argue that Palestinian women have been instrumental in defining the parameters of these institutions. It was these structures that in turn contributed to the Palestinians' ability to check and resist the encroachment of the Israeli colonial state into the Occupied Territories. Drawing from the terminology and parlance of the field of nonviolent action and nonviolent civilian resistance, such structures of civil society are basically synonymous to "centers of gravity" located in each of the resistance (in this case, Palestinians) and the opponent (that is, Israel).(7) For the Palestinians, these centers of gravity denote the very foundations of their unity and resistance to occupation. Their strength rests upon the existence of viable social networks for Palestinians to fail back on for support and subsistence. Such civilian based societies can exist at both official and unofficial levels and across different sectors. They comprise such institutions as family structures, grassroots organizations, economic and productive ventures, and other organizational settings that enable Palestinians to sustain a livelihood and resist occupation.(8) By virtue of their diffuse and decentralized nature and civilian based character, such institutions can mobilize people to wield a certain degree of influence and pressure against the total control of the state. The efforts of Palestinian women to mobilize themselves and others in grassroots committees, to participate in other organizational activities and frameworks, enable them to position themselves in precisely these "alternative" civil structures that could in turn wield influence in a forthcoming state or in the interim...