By Miri -
Highlighting the
participation of Palestinian women in the struggle for national
self-determination is important, but also often misleading.
Overemphasising and celebrating their role can obscure the challenges
that they face within their own society. Applying gendered theories
which solely focus on their position within Palestinian society on
the other hand too often ignores the extent to which the Israeli
occupation intervenes with and disrupts all dimensions of Palestinian
life. Especially Western analysts commonly concentrate on the
personal/gendered circumstances of the women's lives in question, and
elide the Occupation, which however should be seen as the single most
important motivation for women to participate in resistance
activities.
Palestinian women's
participation in resistance activities is by no means a recent
phenomenon, but goes back more than a century and even predates the
establishment of the British Mandate over Palestine.
Pre 1948
The first women to
actively oppose the activities of the Zionist movement were those
ones whose communities came under physical attack first. Peasant
women were among the first ones to act against early Zionist
agricultural settlements and even with the involvement of the British
after 1917 continued to defend their villages in spite of raids,
searches and arrests.
They built roadblocks and
trenches, transported food, supplies and weapons to fighters, and
scouted and monitored the locations and movements of the enemy. Many
women also learned how to shoot guns and fought alongside men in the
defence of their villages.
 |
Women activists collecting donations for the struggle, 1938 |
Although their movement
was more restricted than that of their rural counterparts,
Palestinian women from the cities did also actively participate in
resistance activities. Rather than getting physically involved in
battle, they formed charitable organisations, collected funds for the
resistance, held demonstrations, strikes and formulated and
circulated petitions. In 1921 the Palestine Women's Union was founded
which structured elite women's active participation in the resistance
against British rule and the Zionist expansion.
Following the Al-Buraq
Uprising in 1929, also known as the Wailing Wall Incident, the first
Palestinian Arab Women's Conference took place in Jerusalem. The over
300 participants decided to organise a
boycott against British products, to establish a media centre to
globally circulate information about the happenings in Palestine and
to organise more protests. In addition, a delegation of 14 women met
with the British High Commissioner of Palestine, demanding the
cancellation of the Balfour Declaration and the halting of Jewish
immigration to Palestine.
 |
Two activists of the "Mala'ikat Al Rahma", 1947 |
With the establishment of
an armed movement through Sheikh Izz al-Din al-Qassam in 1935,
Palestinian women started to participate in structured military work.
The first documented female martyr was Fatmeh Khalil Ghazal, who was
killed during the battle of Wadi Azzoun at the onset of the Arab
Uprising in 1936. According to a Zionist intelligence report, during
a demonstration in Nablus in 1931, a woman killed a policeman.
With increasing tensions
and more frequent fighting between Palestinians, Jews and British
various local women groups emerged, operating under names, such as
"Mala'ikat Al-Rahma" (Angels of Mercy), and provided
fighters with food, weapons, but above all with first aid and other
medical services, which also meant that they accompanied the men to
the battle fields. Other groups also reportedly trained women in
using weapons and fought alongside the men.
The First Decades of the
Israeli State
Immediately after 1948,
Palestinian political activities were largely structured through secret
political parties. In the beginning, women were mainly permitted
minor roles, they participated by performing secretarial duties, or
by recruiting more female members. With the founding of the
Palestinian Liberation Organisation and its dubdivision of the
General Union of Palestinian Women (GUPW) in 1965 this should change
however. The main activities of the GUPW, as a charitable
organisation, consisted in organising literacy, sewing, first aid and
nursing courses, as well as founding of orphanages, hospitals, and
schools. Another part of it concentrated on writing to the media,
organising strikes and protests, and lobbying.
 |
The now iconic photo of Leila Khaled |
Finally a considerably
amount of women also joined the ranks of the PLO resistance fighters
and received military training in Gaza and the West Bank, as well as
in refugee camps in other Middle Eastern states.
Probably the most
famous of the women of this era was Leila Khaled, whose family had
fled from Haifa to Lebanon in 1948, and who had become an active
member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Khaled
was involved in two attempts to hijack airplanes carrying Israeli
passengers.
Another iconic female
militant is Dalal Mughrabi, who in 1978 reportedly led a unit of 22
men to hijack a civilian bus in Israel in order to demand the release
of Palestinian prisoners. During what has become known as the Coastal
Road Massacre a total of 38 Israelis were killed, 72 were wounded.
Mughrabi and nine other militants were also killed.
The First Intifada and Its
Backlash
 |
Gaza, First Intifada |
The early stages of the
First Intifada, which erupted in 1987 in Gaza, were characterised by
a large scale civil disobedience movement which called for strikes,
boycotts of Israeli products, and the refusal to pay taxes among
other things. Palestinian women of all
ages and social classes participated in those activities, as well as
in demonstrations by throwing stones, building barriers, raising
Palestinian flags and preventing arrests by Israeli soldiers. A
journalist for the Israeli newspaper Yediot Ahronot was quoted as
warning soldiers to "be careful of Arab women, who have lately
proved as dangerous as men".
The beginning of the First
Intifada is often described as having transformed the boundaries of
Palestinian women's social status: "side by side with their
fathers, husbands and sons, they participated in every aspect of the
struggle." However, a few years into the uprising, the
centralisation and formalisation of resistance activities through the
PLO, and the emergence of Hamas in Gaza, which attempted to push women
back into more traditional gender roles, drastically diminished the
avenues of political participation for women.
The Second Intifada
As opposed to the First
Intifada, the second uprising which started in 2000 was primarily
characterised by armed conflict, guerilla warfare and terrorist
attacks. While during the First Intifada "the division between
combatants and non-combatants was very fluid", the Second
Intifada's combatants were "highly defined by gender and age",
most of them being young men.
However, in January 2002, Wafa Idris
shocked Israel and the Western world when she detonated a bomb in the
centre of Jerusalem and became the first Palestinian female suicide
bomber.
 |
Idris' family in front of her martyr poster |
The phenomenon of female
suicide bombers has been widely discussed and was often perceived as
exceptional in the media and also in the academy. Yet looking back at
the history of women's participation in resistance activities against
the Israeli occupation, women becoming actors in suicide bombings
should rather be seen as a logical extension of this
continuum. Especially Western academics and media ignored this
history and explained Idris' action through her gender and her
personal circumstances of being a divorced woman. Female suicide
bombers, they claimed, see their actions as “a way to resist
patriarchal subservience, erase stains due to violations of sexual
behaviour, or restore a tarnished family or personal reputation”.
Such an analysis is problematic in many ways, as it dismisses life
under occupation as a main reason for the women's actions and too
often relegates them to a status of disgraced and marginalised
victims of their society.
Idris was not the only
woman to carry out a suicide attack. The resistance movement clearly
saw the advantages that women combatants have over men; considered to
be "harmless" they usually raise less suspicions, are less
likely to undergo rigorous body searches and can therefore hide
explosives and weapons more easily. Palestinian women were thus not
only carrying out attacks but were also involved in planning and
facilitating attacks.
Palestinian Women's
Participation in Resistance Activities Today
 |
The new generation, Ofer, West Bank, 2012 |
After the end of the
Second Intifada, Palestinian resistance moved back to focus on
popular unarmed activities, such as the weekly Friday protests in
numerous West Bank villages, the BDS movement, and the prisoner
strikes.
Like their predecessors, many women still face obstacles and restrictions through their families and society at large, yet they continue to play a significant role in all of
those activities. The introduction of social media networks equipped
women with new avenues to easily participate in the struggle, and
they are among the most fervent bloggers and twitts, reporting
eloquently about the situation in Palestine and mobilising support
for their struggle.
In addition, the Arab
Spring instilled the Palestinian resistance movement with new hopes
and the large participation of women in Egypt, Tunisia and other
countries inspired many young Palestinians, both men and women.
Palestinian women are
obviously aware of their position in society and many see their
struggle as twofold, and hope that their participation in national
liberation activities will eventually also challenge gender
subordination and entrenched stereotypes in Palestinian society.
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