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Agents of Defiance and Despair:The Impact of Islamic Resistance onPalestinian Women in the West Bankand Gaza StripMaria Holt aa University of Westminster, London, UK

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To cite this article: Maria Holt (2010): Agents of Defiance and Despair: The Impact of IslamicResistance on Palestinian Women in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, Totalitarian Movements andPolitical Religions, 11:3-4, 397-415

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Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions,Vol. 11, Nos. 3–4, 397–415, September–December 2010

ISSN 1469-0764 Print/ISSN 1743-9647 Online/10/03-40397-19 © 2010 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/14690764.2010.546115

Agents of Defiance and Despair: The Impact of Islamic Resistance on Palestinian Women in the West Bank and Gaza Strip

MARIA HOLT*

University of Westminster, London, UKTaylor and FrancisFTMP_A_546115.sgm10.1080/14690764.2010.546115Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions1469-0764 (print)/1743-9647 (online)Original Article2010Taylor & Francis113–40000002010Dr MariaHoltM.C.Holt01@westminster.ac.uk

ABSTRACT In their struggle against the Israeli military occupation of their land andcontrol over all aspects of their lives, Palestinian women in the West Bank and Gaza Striphave exhibited both despair and defiance. Their despair stems from rising levels of poverty,violence and hopelessness; women are constrained not only by Israeli Occupation policiesbut also as a result of some of the patriarchal traditions of their own society. Yet theyremain defiant and many women are now choosing to express their defiance throughIslamic resistance, in terms of social activism, political expression and even militantaction. My essay, based on fieldwork carried out in 2001 and 2007, explores women’sdilemmas by way of their own narratives and concludes that the Islamic resistance is creat-ing a ‘new vision of modernity’ for women as well as men in the Palestinian territories.

Introduction

If one studies Islam correctly, it gives women more than secularism; morerights are given to women by Islam, and more freedom. Therefore,Islamic groups should be involved in the government. Many women areinvolved in Hamas. I studied at al-Najah University in Nablus and theHamas and Islamic Jihad movements had a strong influence on womenstudents. The Jihad movement sent women on martyrdom operations;they see the girl and the boy in the same way, and they see it as a higherform of jihad, to choose to die for Palestinians under Israeli occupation,the bravest act. Palestinians have the right of return and they believe that,with God’s help and with the Islamic movement, they will realize theirobjective to return. Israel will never accept any peace agreement thatthreatens its security, so it is a waste of time to keep negotiating. InHamas and Islamic Jihad, women participate in many activities; theycarry out military operations; they help the fighters; and they help whenthe Israelis enter the city … Women can involve themselves in violenceagainst the occupation.1

*Email: holtm@westminster.ac.uk.1Personal interview, Ramallah, 31 October 2007.

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These words, uttered by Salwa,2 a 30-year-old mother of two from Nablus in theWest Bank, illustrate the changing nature of ‘choice’ for Palestinian women andhow that choice is articulated. For over 40 years, Palestinians in the West Bankand Gaza Strip have been struggling against the Israeli occupation of their landand control over their lives. Their activities have taken a variety of forms, fromnon-violent resistance and diplomatic negotiation to militant protest and armedstruggle and, most recently, Islamic resistance as ‘a revolutionary project ofnational and regional liberation’,3 but all they have achieved is ‘a homelandsmaller than a single grain of wheat’.4 To the added discomfort of Palestinians,the practise of Islamic resistance, especially since the events of 11 September 2001,has been characterised by Israel and many in the West as ‘terrorism’.

Throughout the fight for a homeland, Palestinian women have been a persis-tent presence, active strugglers and yet constrained by ‘male nationalist rhetoricthat conceived of women as “hatcheries”’.5 The violence of the conflict, too, hastended to have a negative or demoralising effect on women’s participation.Although the national struggle has effectively mobilised all sectors of the commu-nity, the involvement of women, especially in military operations, raises thetroubling question of why, in a society which has traditionally tried to shieldwomen from overt violence, a few women are now choosing – or some wouldargue being coerced – to carry out suicide operations against Israeli civilians andmilitary personnel. Is the emergence of the shahida (female martyr), althoughconfined to a small minority, a sign of powerlessness, liberation or increasingdespair? As my essay is mainly concerned with female agency in situations ofmultiple patriarchies, I will confine the bulk of my analysis to the insightsprovided by the many Palestinian women who chose to share their life storieswith me rather than focusing on the ‘female martyr’ who, one could argue, hasbecome a kind of ‘fetish’ of Western consciousness.

They are stories of despair but also defiance, as women try to negotiatebetween appropriate roles and the perceived injustice of their situation. They arealso complex, many-layered narratives, as in the words of Umm Nadim6 inHebron, whose son, a Hamas fighter, was killed by the Israelis in the early days ofthe second Palestinian Intifada (uprising):

A woman is entitled to become a shahida. It is not violence against Israel;one cannot call it violence. If a woman kills herself, it is because she had abad experience with Israel. There is no conflict between religious andsecular groups; when Israel attacks, everyone – whatever their ideology –unites to defend the community.7

Her words imply that defence of the community against Israeli aggression is theoverriding objective. However, Israel and the West have created a more generaldiscourse of terrorism in which ‘armed Islamic resistance’ is presented as

2All names in this article have been disguised.3Hamid Dabashi, Islamic Liberation Theology: Resisting the Empire (London: Routledge, 2008), p. 21.4Qabbani, Nizar, prose poem ‘al-Muharwilun’ (‘the ones who rush’), published in Al-Hayat, 1995.5Joseph A. Massad, The Persistence of the Palestinian Question: Essays on Zionism and the Palestinians(London: Routledge, 2006), p. 52.6The practice in Arab societies of referring to women as ‘Umm’ (mother), while it denotes respectabil-ity, could also be interpreted as a signifier that women are valorised in relation to motherhood alone.7Interview, Hebron, 4 November 2007.

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Agents of Defiance and Despair 399

‘reactionary violence directed against a modernity to which Islamists are eitherresistant or incapable of assimilating’,8 and the female suicide bomber has becomesymbol of Islamist non-modernity. This, in turn, affects how Palestinians repre-sent themselves.

Many Palestinian women, as Salwa’s narrative reveals, are disillusioned withwhat they regard as the increasingly empty rhetoric of the secular nationalistmovement. The call for jihad resonates with women such as Salwa and UmmNadim who appreciate the rights and freedom given to them by Islam. At thesame time, women are aware of their relatively unequal standing in a society inwhich, although the humiliating and disempowering policies of the occupationaffect everyone, the ‘patriarchalisation’ of the leadership and social practices has‘marginalized women’s roles and voices’.9 In this essay, I will argue that women’srelationship with Islamic resistance embodies discourses of both defiance anddespair. I will make this argument, firstly, by conceptualising ‘resistance’, bothIslamic and non-Islamic, and women’s involvement in it; are Palestinian womenmilitants, with their ‘bodies and blood’, challenging both the ‘normative gender-sexual grid’ and also ‘Israeli gendered assumptions’?10 Secondly, I will contextua-lise Palestinian women’s experiences historically and in terms of the variousforms of violence to which they are subjected in order to show ‘how genderedidentities are constructed’.11 Finally, I will assess the roles played by Islamic activ-ism in Palestinian society and how, as faith or a tool of mobilisation, it enhances‘the kind of self which is integral to a modern lifestyle’.12

Methodology

In 2007, I conducted a research project into the effects of Islamic resistance onPalestinian women in the West Bank,13 which built on research I carried out withwomen in the Gaza Strip in 2001.14 During several visits, I interviewed a total of60 women in the West Bank15 and 15 in the Gaza Strip, ranging in age from 18 toover 90, from various socio-economic backgrounds and geographical locations(towns, villages and refugee camps), including professional women, academics,activists, students, journalists, elected politicians, refugees, non-governmentalrepresentatives and women without paid employment; I interviewed both thosewho belong to or support the Islamic resistance and others who are more critical.A few of the interviews were in English but the majority were in Arabic. Eachinterview lasted, on average, for one hour.

8Alastair Crooke, Resistance: The Essence of the Islamist Revolution (London: Pluto Press, 2009), p. 17.9Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, Militarization and Violence against Women in Conflict Zones in the MiddleEast: A Palestinian Case Study (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. 16.10Frances S. Hasso, ‘Discursive and Political Deployments by/of the 2002 Palestinian Women SuicideBombers/Martyrs’, Feminist Review, 81 (2005), pp. 23–51 at 24.11Cheryl A. Rubenberg, Palestinian Women: Patriarchy and Resistance in the West Bank (Boulder, CO:Lynne Rienner, 2001), p. 2.12Connie Caroe Christiansen, ‘Women’s Islamic Activism: Between Self-Practices and Social ReformEfforts’, in John L. Esposito and Francois Burgat (eds) Modernizing Islam: Religion in the Public Sphere inEurope and the Middle East (London: Hurst, 2003), p. 150.13My research was funded by the United States Institute of Peace.14My research trip was partially funded by Friends of Birzeit University.15Although I sought permission from the Israeli authorities to enter the Gaza Strip in November 2007,this was not forthcoming.

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My objective was to discover how the women had participated in the nationalliberation struggle, their personal experiences of the conflict, particularly the firstand second Intifadas, and their feelings about the Islamic resistance, especially inlight of the election of Hamas in January 2006 and the ‘war’ between Fatah andHamas in June 2007. The interviews were mostly with individuals, although a fewinvolved small groups (such as students, members of the same family and, in onecase, a group of kindergarten teachers). I began with a questionnaire, to establishthe woman’s background and personal details and then, through semi-structuredinterviewing techniques, invited her to speak about her own experiences and herhopes and expectations for the future. This was an open-ended process, with eachwoman free to say as much or as little as she wished.

As a Western researcher, I am aware of the dangers of objectifying and thusreconstruing the researched ‘Other’. If, as Spivak suggests, ‘the subaltern has nohistory and cannot speak, the subaltern as female is even more deeply inshadow’.16 I agree with Shalhoub-Kevorkian that feminist scholars have a respon-sibility to ‘promote politically progressive and liberating research methodolo-gies’, which ‘ought to empower our research subjects’, and to focus on thequestion of ‘who has the right to produce and circulate knowledge in relation tocolonised people’.17 Another responsibility is to avoid generalisation. ‘Palestinianwomen’ are not an undifferentiated category; their lives and stories contain infi-nite variety and I am certainly not claiming to speak for or on behalf of Palestinianwomen; all I can offer is some of their narratives which may help others to gain aninsight into the complexity of their lives. Finally, I acknowledge the inadequacy ofmy intrusion as a researcher to ease Palestinian women’s suffering and how‘much harder it would be to live their lives instead of merely writing aboutthem’.18

Conceptualising Islamic ‘Resistance’ and Women’s Role in it

We engage in struggle, jihad, resistance against the enemy who steals ourland and destroys our houses, commits sacrilegious acts against our holyplaces, assaults children and women and kills people. It is our normal,natural right to resist.19

There have been many words used to describe the Palestinian woman’s experi-ences of conflict: revolutionary, victim, shahida, survivor, mother, heroine, nation-alist, refugee, activist. These words contribute to the imagining of women, anexploration of the bounds of acceptability, and they reveal that women’s involve-ment is circumscribed by pressures from both outside and within their society, bytheir relationships with men and their responsibilities towards their families.Although a high proportion of women in the Palestinian territories (the WestBank and Gaza Strip) are well-educated, articulate and socially engaged, they still

16Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’, in Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and HelenTiffin (eds) The Post-Colonial Studies Reader (2nd edn) (London: Routledge: 2006), p. 32.17Shalhoub-Kevorkian, op. cit., pp. 29–30.18Rosemary Sayigh, ‘Remembering Mothers, Forming Daughters: Palestinian Women’s Narratives inRefugee Camps in Lebanon’, in Nahla Abdo and Ronit Lentin (eds) Women and the Politics of MilitaryConfrontation: Palestinian and Israeli Gendered Narratives of Dislocation (New York: Berghahn Book, 2002),p. 71.19Khaled Mesha’al, interview with Hugh Spanner for the Third Way, Damascus, June 2008.

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Agents of Defiance and Despair 401

tend to be constrained by traditional values and patriarchal agendas, and theselimitations have caused a conflict in the minds of some women, as Palestiniansstruggle to balance a notion of appropriate gender roles with the urgency of resis-tance. On the one hand, most believe that it is their duty to engage in the nationalstruggle and also feel they have little choice since the Occupation20 intrudes intoevery area of their lives and threatens their own and their children’s well-being;but, on the other hand, Palestinian society continues to regard woman’s primaryfunction as domestic, nurturing and therefore private. As the symbolic defenderof the nation’s honour, she should be protected from the violence of warfare.

However, there are ‘many forms of gendered resistance’21 and since the earlydays of the Palestinian national struggle, a distinctive expression of women’sresistance against invasion, colonisation and humiliation has gradually evolved.To begin with, women supported men’s efforts and followed their lead but, withthe passing of time, they have found their own voice and role. Revolution ‘doesnot only mean political revolution, but also a social revolution in gender rela-tions’.22 Women, as both symbols of modernity and, at the same time, preserversof Palestinian memory and tradition, need to be understood ‘by the degree towhich they are still able to imagine themselves’.23

Throughout history, ‘anti-colonial struggles have involved forms of violentresistance on the part of the colonised’.24 The stark imbalance of power betweenIsraelis and Palestinians has meant that conventional warfare is out of the ques-tion and therefore Palestinians have been forced to seek alternative methods towage their anti-colonial struggle. Their ‘recourse to violence finds justification inthe militant Islamist ideology and its concept of jihad’.25 The Islamic ResistanceMovement, Hamas (Harakat al-muqawwama al-Islamiyya), was created in the GazaStrip in the early days of the first Intifada (1987), in response to the perceived fail-ure of the secular national forces embodied in the Palestine Liberation Organisa-tion (PLO) to end the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, and also to anunease felt by some Palestinians at the ‘inauthenticity’ of their struggle, in thesense that it sought to conform to a broader, and uncritical, ‘Western’ modelof modernisation. Hamas was established ‘as the “paramilitary” wing of thePalestinian Muslim Brotherhood, the roots of which, in turn, lie in the EgyptianMuslim Brotherhood … founded in 1928 … with the twin goals of re-IslamisingEgyptian society, and liberating Egypt, and the Muslim world more broadly, fromcolonial rule’.26 The defeat of the Arabs by Israel in the Six Day War of 1967 ‘shat-tered the image of radical power in the region’27 and led to an inter-Arab ColdWar; as a result, the secular nationalism of Egyptian president Gamal Abdel

20The term ‘Occupation’ is capitalised because it is a construction and a condition (a small ‘o’ wouldimply normalisation).21Susie Jacobs, Ruth Jacobson and Jennifer Marchbank (eds), States of Conflict: Gender, Violence andResistance (London: Zed Books, 2000), p. 3.22Interview with Mona Rishmawi, Ramallah, 4 August 1989, in Orayb Aref Najjar, Portraits of PalestinianWomen (Salt Lake City, UT: University of Utah Press, 1992), p. 176.23Roy, Sara, ‘Black Milk: Lives of Desperation in the Gaza Strip’, The Women’s Review of Books (Summer1993), p. 15.24Sara Roy, ‘Black Milk: Lives of Desperation in the Gaza Strip’, The Women’s Review of Books (Summer1993), p. 68.25Salwa Ismail, Islamist Politics: Culture, the State and Islamism (London: I. B. Tauris, 2003), p. 136.26Jeroen Gunning, Hamas in Politics: Democracy, Religion, Violence (London: Hurst, 2009), p. 26.27Beverley Milton-Edwards, Contemporary Politics in the Middle East (Cambridge: Polity, 2006), p. 65.

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Nasser was discredited and religiously inspired political activism started to gainin popularity. Robinson argues that Hamas came into being:

… largely as a result of a revolt by middle-stratum cadres within theMuslim Brethren against their traditional leaders. Social emergencies,such as the uprising, by their very nature undermine more traditionalleaders who rely on routines as the central pillar of their position and puta premium on new leaders with different types of skills. In many ways,Islamic Jihad laid the groundwork in the year preceding the Intifada forHamas activism during the uprising.28

In the Hamas Charter, ‘religious discourse is dominant’ and jihad ‘is designed toprevent the infidels from ruling over the land of Islam’.29 How, then, does Salwa’sinterpretation of martyrdom as ‘a higher form of jihad’ and Umm Nadim’s asser-tion that violence against Israel is not violence at all, enhance the ‘religiousdiscourse’ of Hamas?

The Palestinian situation presents a special case. Whereas ‘exercising jihad tochange un-Islamic practices has involved . ..violent action’,30 Palestinians pointout that living conditions, especially in the Gaza Strip, have become ‘an affront tocivilised values’ and ‘a powerful precipitant to resistance’31 and, therefore, theresort to jihad is one of the few weapons available to them. The problem forPalestinians has been that Israel is superior not only in military prowess but alsocontrols the terms of the debate and has been able to define legitimate Palestinianresistance as ‘terrorism’ and to transform ‘the Palestinian struggle for indepen-dence and self-determination into a de-politicised humanitarian “refugee prob-lem”’.32 However, ‘resistance’ also has larger meanings and is not expressed onlythrough violence. Dr Mariam Saleh, an elected Hamas member of the PalestinianLegislative Council, defined ‘Islamic resistance’ or jihad, as follows:

One aspect is to fight with weapons but it can also mean giving moneyfor jihad or coping if a son is in prison or has been killed, or when awoman teaches her son about the land, all these are forms of jihad. Somewomen give their own souls; they fight and are martyred, even ordi-nary women; this is a form of resistance. If a man wants to go for jihad,he will leave his family; he must know that he can depend on his wifeto support the family – this is another kind of jihad. Staying in Palestineis a form of jihad, serving one’s community through social or healthwork is also a kind of jihad. The highest level of jihad is to sacrificeoneself; when someone blows himself up, these are not suicidal acts butacts of martyrdom.33

28Glenn E. Robinson, Building a Palestinian State: The Incomplete Revolution (Bloomington, IN: IndianaUniversity Press, 1997), p. 172.29Khaled Hroub, Hamas: Political Thought and Practice (Washington, DC: Institute for Palestine Studies,2000), p. 44.30Salwa Ismail, Rethinking Islamist Politics: Culture, the State and Islamism (London: 1 B Tauris, 2006), p. 112.31Avi Shlaim, Israel and Palestine: Reappraisals, Revisions, Refutations (London: Verso, 2009), p. 308.32Beshara Doumani, ‘Palestine Versus the Palestinians? The Iron Laws and Ironies of a People Denied’,Journal of Palestine Studies, XXXVI:4 (2007), pp. 49–64 at 53.33Interview with Dr Mariam Saleh, Ramallah, 1 November 2007.

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Agents of Defiance and Despair 403

It is also a way of evoking ‘a new vision of modernity … one that fundamen-tally differs from what the West terms “modernity”’.34 While many Westernersregard Islamism as ‘a violent, reactionary and transitory kick against the inevita-ble advance of modernity’,35 it is apparent that ‘the transnational discourse offundamentalism … challenges modernity’.36 Both ‘fundamentalism’ and ‘moder-nity’ are highly contested notions and require further analysis, especially in thecontext of violent conflict. Although ‘fundamentalist discourse’ has become apowerful tool of resistance, it also tends to have negative or coercive connota-tions, in the sense that there has been a ‘growth of fundamentalist movementswhose ideologies advocate … traditionalism in family relations [and] re-establish… a more authoritarian attitude towards women’.37 While the equating of ‘funda-mentalism’ with ‘traditionalism’ is familiar, it tends to disregard women’sagency. Thus, we need to take a step back and to consider three salient factorswith respect to the particular case of women and Islamic resistance in the Pales-tinian Territories.

The first consideration is that support for political Islam does not necessarilyresult in a rejection of modernity. On the contrary, Hamas has adopted a varietyof democratic practices38 and argues that ‘the essence of democracy is an Islamicinvention’.39 Although religion can be used to justify inequalities, ‘Hamas’ atti-tude towards women suggests that the interpretation of religion is neither staticnor wholly predictable’.40 Secondly, in his discussion about ‘the grand narrativesof the mainstream religions’, Turner suggest that one might expect ‘an alliancebetween the feminist critique of the patriarchal forms of grand narrative … andthe postmodernisation of cultural consumption’.41 In other words, as in the equat-ing of ‘fundamentalism’ with ‘traditionalism’, the patriarchal nature of the grandnarrative is likely to justify inequalities. However, postmodernism, according toTurner, also challenges ‘traditional feminist scholarship’,42 which brings us to thefinal consideration, of ‘a differentiated feminist response to the complexity ofmodern religion’.43 Feminist scholarship is beginning to recognise the complexityof women’s responses to modern religion, as Lara Deeb explores in her fascinat-ing account of gender and piety in Shi’i Lebanon. She argues that many piousLebanese Shi’i women are addressing ‘Western stereotypes of Islamic communi-ties and women as nonmodern’.44 As one of her interviewees observes: ‘We are …fighting the outside image of Muslim women. … [W]e have to set a new examplefor the world, an example of women who are Muslim but strong and educated’.45

34An Iranian cleric, quoted in Crooke, op. cit., p. 6.35Crooke, op. cit., p. 29.36Minoo Moallem, ‘Transnationalism, Feminism, and Fundamentalism’, in Caren Kaplan, NormaAlarcon and Minoo Moallem (eds) Between Woman and Nation: Nationalisms, Transnational Feminisms,and the State (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), p. 329.37Islah Jad, ‘Patterns of Relations within the Palestinian Family during the Intifada’, transl. Magida AbuHassabo, in Suha Sabbagh (ed.) Palestinian Women of Gaza and the West Bank (Bloomington, IN: IndianaUniversity Press, 1998), pp. 59–60.38Gunning op. cit., p. 241.39Gunning op. cit., p. 170.40Gunning op. cit., p. 267.41Bryan S. Turner, Orientalism, Postmodernism & Globalism (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 18.42Ibid., p. 18.43Ibid., p. 19.44Lara Deeb, An Enchanted Modern: Gender and Public Piety in Shi’i Lebanon (Princeton, NJ: PrincetonUniversity Press, 2006), p. 32.45Hajjeh Amal, quoted in Deeb, ibid., pp. 218–219.

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404 M. Holt

Makdisi, too, in her analysis of the ‘mythology of modernity’, refers to the ‘falsedichotomy’, which ‘pits “modern” against “traditional” women’.46 This is a simi-larly unrealistic dichotomy in the Palestinian case.

Modernity can be understood in terms, on the one hand, of ‘historical processesof technological and economic change’ and, on the other, of ‘the attendantprocesses of social and political change’.47 It is also generally thought to involve aprocess of secularisation. In the Middle East, ‘the social and political projects ofmodernity [are] assumed to require the restructuring of social relations, includinggender, along “non-traditional” lines’.48 However, as I have argued, one shouldnot automatically link tradition and religion. In the context of Islamic resistance,religion has another function, of ‘refusing subservience’.49

The Palestinian struggle, under the auspices of the PLO since the 1960s, haslargely taken a secular form, as if Palestinians have sought to conform to an essen-tially Western version of ‘modernity’. This was alluded to by Maha, a student atBirzeit University in the West Bank, who observed that:

… the elite of the secular Palestinian parties fear the Islamic movement.But, for me, this movement has a big role in Palestine; it makes peoplemore aware about Islam. In the past, there was only one way, but nowthere are many ways to think about a solution. People voted for Hamas,especially women, because they need to see changes in all aspects of life.50

Peteet refers to ‘cultures of resistance’, which are established on ‘expressions ofethnic identity and group solidarity’,51 but warns about ‘their contradictorypotential for progress and regression’.52 As Maha’s narrative suggests, many ofthe people who voted for Hamas in 2006 see in the resistance ‘a new vision ofmodernity’; it presents an alternative to the ‘grand narrative’ of Western‘progress’ and ‘directly challenges the Western vision’.53 In other words, politicalIslam becomes a rival enactment of modernity, rather than a reaction to it.

Women’s Activism and Resistance

Palestinian women have a long history of activism and resistance; however, theform and context of their resistance has changed significantly over time. From itsinception, ‘the Palestinian women’s movement has always been closely tied to the

46Jean Said Makdisi, ‘The Mythology of Modernity: Women and Democracy in Lebanon’, in MaiYamani (ed.) Feminism and Islam: Legal and Literary Perspectives (Reading: Ithaca Press, 1996), p. 238.47Bjorn Olav Utvik, ‘The Modernizing Force of Islam’, in John L. Esposito and Francois Burgat (eds)Modernizing Islam: Religion in the Public Sphere in Europe and the Middle East (London: Hurst & Company,2003), p. 44.48Frances S. Hasso, Resistance, Repression, and Gender Politics in Occupied Palestine and Jordan (Syracuse,NY: Syracuse University Press, 2005), p. 97.49Crooke, op. cit., p. 197.50Interview, Birzeit University, West Bank, 3 November 2007.51Mina Davis Caulfield, ‘Culture and Imperialism: Proposing a New Dialectic’, in Dell Hymes (ed.)Reinventing Anthropology (New York: Vintage Books, 1974), p. 203.52Julie M. Peteet, ‘Authenticity and Gender: The Presentation of Culture’, in Judith E. Tucker (ed.) ArabWomen: Old Boundaries, New Frontiers (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, published in associ-ation with the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies, Georgetown University, Washington, DC, 1993),p. 50.53Crooke, op. cit., p. 28.

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national issue’,54 and it has been argued that nationalism has had a ‘releasingeffect’ on women, ‘providing them with a public role and outlet for politicalexpression’,55 although some critics argue that the preoccupation with nationalliberation has stifled women’s natural inclination towards their own social eman-cipation. In the 1920s, predominantly upper- and middle-class ‘women joined thewidespread uprising to demonstrate opposition to the British Mandate andcontinued Zionist immigration’.56 Although the Palestinian women’s movement,at this stage, could not be described as ‘feminist’, the women in the movementshowed ‘their own indigenous kind of feminism, whereby they manipulated andexploited gender norms in order to subvert and challenge power structures’.57

With the creation of the state of Israel in 1948, the Palestinian nation suffered trau-matic disruption and many Palestinians fled from their homes. In the immediateaftermath of the Nakba (catastrophe), women ‘directed most of their energiestoward relief and support within the framework of charitable societies and orga-nizations to cope with the huge influx of refugees and help the people deal withthe effects of dispossession’,58 which could be interpreted as a domestication ofwomen’s roles.

In the 1960s, in Jordan and later in Lebanon, nationalist Palestinians created amilitant resistance movement under the auspices of the PLO; its aims weretwofold – to keep alive a sense of Palestinian identity and to regain the Palestinianhomeland by all means possible – and in both areas women were active. At thistime, Islam was not a significant factor in political resistance. Instead, secular left-ist groups, such as the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), theDemocratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP) and the PalestinianCommunist Party (PCP), provided spaces in which female activism developed.For women, ‘carrying arms signified their full participation in the national strug-gle on a basis of equality with men’.59 Layla Khalid is a good example of a womanwho participated in Palestinian armed activities in the early 1970s as a member ofthe PFLP. The involvement of women such as Khalid in military and other aspectsof the Palestinian struggle raises an interesting paradox; although they tend to beregarded as ‘symbols of the land’, the ‘mothers of sons’, the ‘sisters of men’ andthe ‘widows of heroes’,60 Palestinian women also joined the Resistance in largenumbers and, in some cases, performed the same roles as men. Their participation‘became an indicator of modernization, radicalism, progressiveness, and socialdevelopment’;61 it has been understood as an authentic expression of feminism,

54Souad Dajani, ‘Between National and Social Liberation: the Palestinian Women’s Movement in theIsraeli Occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip’, in Tamar Mayer (ed.) Women and the Israeli Occupation: thePolitics of Change (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 35.55Ellen L. Fleischmann, The Nation and its ‘New’ Women: The Palestinian Women’s Movement 1920–1948(Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2003), p. 7.56Souad Dajani, ‘Palestinian Women under Israeli Occupation: Implications for Development’, inJudith E Tucker (ed.) Arab Women: Old Boundaries New Frontiers (Bloomington, IN: Indiana UniversityPress, 1993), p. 115.57Fleischmann, op. cit., p. 174.58Dajani, ‘Palestinian Women under Israeli Occupation’, op. cit., p. 115.59Rosemary Sayigh, ‘Palestinian Women and Politics in Lebanon’, in Judith E. Tucker (ed.) Arab Women:Old Boundaries, New Frontiers (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, published in association withthe Center for Contemporary Arab Studies, Georgetown University, Washington, DC, 1993, p. 177.60Najjar, op. cit., p. xii.61Rubenberg, op. cit., p. 144.

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which prompts the question of how this process of modernisation was subsumedinto the ‘grand narrative’ of Islamist discourse.

The Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip in 1967 ‘generated aradical transformation in the positions and roles of Palestinian women’.62 Byintroducing ‘a more intimate form of oppression’,63 it ensured that the mass ofordinary women in these areas had little choice but to become involved ‘in resist-ing changes imposed by the Israeli military government’.64 Resistance in theOccupied Territories ‘predominantly took the form of grassroots, professional,and electoral organizing’.65 This was a period of increasing fear and despair butalso of rising levels of female education and engagement. It witnessed the begin-nings, on the one hand, of female political participation but, on the other, of a lackof consensus between those who:

… felt that women needed to be mobilized on gender issues at the grass-roots level and some of the active women working in political committeeswho preferred not to define the women’s movement in terms of equalityand personal status laws; these women argued that ‘if you mobilizewomen solely on those terms, you would be telling them that their fight isnot with the Israeli occupation, but inside their homes, when their dailylives tell them otherwise’.66

When the first Intifada started in 1987, the focus shifted from passive to activenon-violent resistance and women emerged ‘from the shadows into the politicalspotlight’.67 Aimed at undermining the Occupation, they became instrumental inactivities such the provision of alternative educational facilities (as schools wereclosed by the Israelis or journeys for children became too hazardous), the creationof a home economy and participation in mass demonstrations and civil disobedi-ence. Coping with ‘the burden of occupation’ gave ‘Palestinian women a politicalvoice and strengthened their role in society as heads of households, as politicaland environmental activists, and as intermediaries between the Israeli army andPalestinian youth’.68 There is no doubt that, with ‘their resistance activitieswomen not only confronted the occupation, but also challenged societal normsand patriarchal practices which hinder their more personal liberation aswomen’.69 However, while the ‘large-scale political mobilisation of Palestinianwomen was not perceived as a challenge to social stability but rather as a neces-sary and valuable contribution to the national struggle’70 and, it is clear that the

62Dajani, ‘Palestinian Women under Israeli Occupation’, op. cit., p. 109.63Cynthia Cockburn, The Space Between Us: Negotiating Gender and National Identities in Conflict (London:Zed Books, 1998), p. 118.64Suha Sabbagh, ‘Palestinian Women and Institution Building’, in Suha Sabbagh (ed.) Arab WomenBetween Defiance and Restraint (New York: Olive Branch Press, 1996), p. 107.65Hasso, Resistance, op. cit., p. 22.66Interview with Mona Rishmawi, in Najjar, op. cit., p. 172.67Milton-Edwards, Beverley, The Israeli–Palestinian Conflict: A People’s War (London: Routledge, 2009),p. 152.68Tamar Mayer (ed.) Women and the Israeli Occupation: The Politics of Change (London: Routledge, 1994),p. 2.69Sophie Richter-Devroe, ‘“Here it’s not about Conflict Resolution – we can only Resist”: PalestinianWomen’s Activism in Conflict Resolution and Non-violent resistance’, in Nadje Al-Ali and Nicola Pratt(eds) Women and War in the Middle East (London: Zed Books, 2009), p. 161.70Simona Sharoni, ‘Gendering Conflict and Peace in Israel/Palestine and the North of Ireland’,Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 27:4 (1998), p. 1064.

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Intifada ‘created a new discursive … space’, the power ‘of traditional gender hier-archies and discourses closed this space quite quickly’.71 One should note that themilitarisation of the Intifada had a negative impact on its grassroots character, byexcluding not only women’s voices but also those of children, the elderly andgenerally non-violent activists.

A key factor was the involvement of an increasingly militant Islamic resistance,which started to place restrictions on women’s dress and mobility.72 Hroubargues that Hamas related appeals to women ‘to be modest and wear hijab … toresistance against the occupation’ and made a link ‘between victory and adher-ence to Islamic faith’.73 Islam ‘demands respect for women and offers themopportunities, to be learned, educated and trained, while at the same time provid-ing an honoured space for them to become mothers, wives and home-makers’.74

Nonetheless, public opinion polls during the first Intifada showed consistentpopular support for the more ‘secular’ Palestinian parties, under the umbrella ofthe PLO, regarded by the majority of Palestinians at this time as the key resistancemovement. At the same time, despite the growth of female education and anattachment to Islamic values, it became apparent that large numbers of womenwere ignorant of their rights according to Islamic legal tradition and, in theabsence of legal protection, practices that owed more to traditional and patriar-chal custom. In Baffoun’s words, a desire to restrict women to the position of ‘aguardian of a lost [or perhaps Utopian] identity’75 became widespread in theOccupied Territories.

With the 1993 Declaration of Principles, the so-called ‘Oslo Accords’, betweenthe PLO and the government of Israel and the establishment of a PalestinianNational Authority (PA) in 1994, the women’s movement began to organise interms of female participation and women’s rights in the anticipated independentPalestinian state. Women worked hard to have their concerns incorporated intothe constitutional and legal framework of the state. In the first parliamentary elec-tion, in 1996, five women were elected to the Palestinian Legislative Council(PLC). However, after years of fruitless discussion, Israeli and Palestinian negoti-ators were unable to reach an agreement over difficult ‘final status’ issues76 andlarge-scale violence resumed in September 2000 in response to what some havedescribed as ‘the profound inequalities and apartheid policies rooted in the Osloyears and before’.77

The al-Aqsa Intifada changed the dynamics of the struggle. It has been notablefor provocative and sometimes controversial forms of Islamic militancy and thishas had an impact on how women take part in the resistance. According to UmmNa’im, a retired school teacher in Ramallah, the secular political groups and the

71Rubenberg, op. cit., p. 218.72For an account of this, see Rema Hammami, ‘Women, the Hijab and the Intifada’, Middle East Report(May–August 1990).73Hroub, op. cit., p. 237.74Haleh Afshar, ‘Islam and Feminism: An Analysis of Political Strategies’, in Mai Yamani (ed.) Feminismand Islam: Legal and Literary Perspectives (Reading: Ithaca Press, 1996), p. 200.75Alya Baffoun, ‘Feminism and Muslim Fundamentalism: The Tunisian and Algerian Cases’, inValentine M. Moghadam (ed.) Identity Politics and Women: Cultural Reassertions and Feminisms inInternational Perspective (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1994), p. 168.76Final status issues refers to the questions of Jerusalem, refugees and borders.77Lamis Abu Nahleh, ‘Six Families: Survival and Mobility in Times of Crisis’, in Lisa Taraki (ed.) LivingPalestine: Family Survival, Resistance, Mobility under Occupation (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse UniversityPress, 2006), p. 104.

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original Palestinian Authority were ‘a disaster’; they achieved very little andpeople became increasingly frustrated. Many poor and desperate people, sheobserved, saw Islamic groups such as Hamas as ‘more honest’.78 However, therewere also concerns, as a human rights campaigner in Gaza observed, that Hamas‘will undermine the freedoms currently enjoyed by more secular women’.79 Thisraises the dilemma that, although ‘the women’s movement has a relatively highamount of popular legitimacy in Palestine’,80 women continue to be largelyexcluded from playing a part in efforts to resolve the conflict. The reasons fortheir exclusion stem from the patriarchal structure of society and the extremeviolence of the conflict. However, since women are increasingly recognised asbeing ‘effective agents of change’,81 their absence from efforts to end the conflictshould be regarded with concern.

Yet, in spite of traditional notions of propriety, as I have illustrated, womenhave been keen to join in the anti-Occupation struggle, and, as a result of theirefforts, they feel entitled to contribute towards the articulation and representationof Palestinian identity. At the same time, the focus of their resistance has shifted.In the old days, according to Umm Nader:

… everyone took part because the Israelis were at our doorsteps. Womenconfronted them face-to-face and we didn’t need to leave our neighbour-hoods. Now they’re only at the entrances of the cities. So we have totravel to confront them, and very few women will do that.82

Since the outbreak of violence in 2000, as fear and the absence of hope havebecome increasingly prevalent, the ‘culture of resistance’ has been weakened andwomen’s space for manoeuvre has become even more restricted. The overalleffect, it has been suggested, has been highly negative for women in terms ofrights and entitlements and has also tended to separate their areas of activity fromthose of men. While acknowledging this separation, it is important to distinguishbetween, on the one hand, the resistance as ‘a new vision of modernity’, whichincorporates all Palestinians and, on the other hand, the divisive tactics of conflict,which mark women out as ‘reproducers of ethnic and/or national collectives andrepresentatives of the nation’.83

This would appear to throw into question Hanan Ashrawi’s claim that struggle‘is one area exempt from traditionalism and conservatism’.84 On the contrary, theefforts of women have been overshadowed, as Umm Nader observed, by thechanging nature of the conflict. For example, in the June 2007 ‘civil war’ betweenHamas and Fatah, which resulted in the takeover by Fatah of the West Bank,women sought to defuse the violence. According to former PLC member DalalSalameh, women went into the streets of Gaza and told the combatants to stop

78Interview, Ramallah, 13 June 2007.79Lama Hourani, campaigner for the rights of working women in Gaza, quoted in Alan Johnston,‘Women Ponder Future under Hamas’, BBC News, 3 March 2006.80Rema Hammami, ‘Women’s NGOs and the Campaign to Reform Personal Status Law: The Case ofthe Women’s Model Parliament’ (undated).81Scilla Elworthy and Gabrielle Rifkind, Making Terrorism History (London: Rider, 2006), p. 69.82Ramallah Umm Nader, quoted in ‘Palestinian Women Help Behind the Lines’, 13 November 2000,www.indiainfo.com.83Martina Kamp, ‘Fragmented Citizenship: Communalism, Ethnicity and Gender in Iraq’, in Nadje Al-Ali and Nicola Pratt (eds) Women and War in the Middle East (London: Zed Books, 2009), p. 197.84Hanan Ashrawi, quoted in ‘Palestinian Women Help Behind the Lines’, op. cit.

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firing at each other. These were not only activist women, she said and added:‘Women used to be strugglers, nationalists. They are very strong, and went to thestreets to try to disarm the fighters, but the firing was louder than their voices’.85

Her words suggest that the mass of ‘ordinary’ women in Gaza used to be moreactive but have been marginalised by the militarisation of the conflict.

Violence Against Women

Women’s efforts to involve themselves in the national struggle have been inhib-ited by the violence of everyday life. They suffer as a result of practices and tradi-tions which discriminate against women. Palestinian society is a patriarchal andconservative one and this means that the ‘burden of living under military occupa-tion is compounded by the additional responsibilities imposed on them by theirown society’.86 In Palestinian

… patriarchal culture, women and children have always been in a weakerposition than the patriarch, the male head of the family. When a husbandcan no longer contain his anger, his humiliation, his frustration due to theconditions of occupation, he is likely to find an outlet for his anger withinthe home. Women are often the victims of this anger.87

Cockburn agrees that domestic violence ‘often increases as societal tensions growand is more common and more lethal when men carry weapons’.88 On the whole,however, Palestinians have not perceived ‘masculinity as a quality that was …expressed by violence […] Palestinian masculinity was reflected in men’s ability toprotect the family and meet familial and social demands’.89 However, unable toprovide this protection, male frustration is likely to turn inward in the victimisa-tion of female family members. Violence against women ‘is often the result of themen being oppressed and humiliated not only by the Israelis, but also by socialinequalities within Palestinian society’.90 According to a West Bank academic,‘male power is not about dominance over women’ and control of one’s anger isexpected. The vast majority of Palestinian men find the idea of hitting a womanabhorrent and regard domestic violence as a deviation from Islamic teachings.91

Beyond the specific practice of domestic violence, it has been suggested thatviolence ‘becomes a means not only to defend against a military or security threat,

85Interview with Dalal Salameh, Nablus, 16 June 2007.86A report on the situation of women’s human rights during the ‘second Intifada’, presented by theWomen’s Centre for Legal Aid and Counselling and the Women’s Studies Center to the UN HumanRights Commission Fact-finding Mission on 16 February 2001, p. 2.87Suha Sabbagh, ‘An Interview with Dr Eyad el-Sarraj: Gender Relations during the Three Psychode-velopmental Phases under Occupation’, in Suha Sabbagh (ed.) Palestinian Women of Gaza and the WestBank (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1998), p. 175.88Cynthia Cockburn, ‘The Continuum of Violence: A Gender Perspective on War and Peace’, inWenona Giles and Jennifer Hyndman (eds) Sites of Violence: Gender and Conflict Zones (Berkeley, CA:University of California Press, 2004), p. 32.89Shalhoub-Kevorkian op. cit., p. 99 (italics added).90Nahla Abdo and Ronit Lentin, ‘Writing Dislocation, Writing the Self: Bringing (Back) the Political intoGendered Israeli-Palestinian Dialoguing’, in Nahla Abdo and Ronit Lentin (eds) Women and the Politicsof Military Confrontation: Palestinian and Israeli Gendered Narratives of Dislocation (New York: BerghahnBook, 2002), p. 21.91Interview, Ramallah, May 2001.

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but more profoundly, against any action that is or may be interpreted as an act ofopposition. Violence is [therefore] a tool to preserve the status quo in terms ofpower, values and priorities’.92 In cases of marital breakdown, for example, it isconsidered inadvisable for a woman to seek a divorce as she may lose herchildren, her home and even the respect of the community. According to ShadiaSarraj of the Women’s Empowerment Project in Gaza, there is no acknowledge-ment of the honour or dignity of women. Since Palestinians lack a functioninglegal system, some men have taken advantage of the situation in order to reinstatetraditional modes of behaviour, which are less likely to take into accountwomen’s rights or entitlements.93

In Hawwara village near Nablus, I met Umm Anas, an unschooled 63-year-oldmother of three children. At the insistence of relatives, she had married her cousinbut, after four years, her husband announced that he wanted to marry someoneelse. Umm Anas pointed out that Islam permits a man to marry more than onewife as long as he is fair with them, but her husband did not behave fairly; helavished all his money and attention on his new wife and refused to support hisother family. Umm Anas was 25 years old and could not ask for a divorce. If therewas an Islamic state [dawla Islamiyyah], she concluded, it would force him tobehave correctly towards her.94

As Umm Anas’s narrative well illustrates, for Palestinians living under militaryoccupation, there are few legal mechanisms in place to defend women victims ofdomestic violence. In recent years, a number of significant studies have beenconducted into gender-based violence in the Palestinian territories,95 which revealthe extreme vulnerability of women to violence of all kinds and, in response, anumber of organisations have been set up, such as the Women’s EmpowermentProject in Gaza and the Palestinian Working Women Society in the West Bank, toassist women who are experiencing violence in the home and which also seek toeducate women about their rights according to shari’a law and internationalhuman rights legislation. Patriarchy in the Palestinian territories, as in the widerregion, ‘has in recent decades been challenged by social transformations’.96

For Palestinians, an additional problem is that gender issues have generallybeen subordinated to the national struggle. According to a woman in Gaza, sincethe nationalist discourse is the predominant one, no woman can speak out aboutthe personal violence she faces.97 Safa, an activist in Jerusalem, agreed that politi-cal priorities, rather than social or gender ones, have permitted violence againstwomen to take place.98 Women are caught in a contradiction between wanting tocontrol their own movements and having to follow the lead of men, both in publicand private matters. Since the start of the second Intifada, there is evidence that

92Women’s Centre for Legal Aid and Counselling, ‘The Second Palestinian Intifada: Social andPsychological Implications of the Israeli Escalation of Violence’, April 2001.93Interview with Shadia El Sarraj, Women’s Empowerment Project, Gaza City, 2 May 2001.94Interview, Hawwara village, West Bank, 19 June 2007.95Research has been carried out by the Palestinian Working Women Society, which with the PalestinianCenter for Public Opinion conducted a Public Opinion Survey on the issue of violence against women;the Women’s Studies Programme at Birzeit University; the Women’s Empowerment Project in Gaza;the Women’s Centre for Legal Aid and Counselling in the West Bank, which aims to promote socialjustice and equality between women and men; and the Women’s Affairs Center, Gaza, which hasproduced reports on early marriage and domestic violence.96Abdo and Lentin, op. cit., p. 1897Sh’hada, Nahda, ‘Women in Gaza’, www.zmag.org, 27 November 2000.98Interview, Jerusalem, May 2001.

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violence against women has increased and this is reflected in street life, which hasbecome increasingly aggressive and male-dominated.99

The other major constraint is the behaviour of the Israelis. Despite their non-participation at flash points, women have not been able to avoid the violence and,as one commentator remarked, women are the victims of double discrimination –‘at the hands of male society and by Israel’.100 Israeli violence against populationcentres since September 2000 has created terror and despair among Palestinians.In the words of a woman in Beit Sahour whose home was shelled for five straightdays:

The tension has taken over my life – I no longer have the patience orstamina to help my children with their homework, and I am overly sensi-tive about the most trivial things … What happened has taken a piece ofmy heart and has severely altered my state of mind … . The cruelty of theshelling, and the terrible fear for our lives have robbed me of my ability tobe happy.101

Umm Riad, in Gaza City, described feeling helpless in the face of Israeli aggres-sion; she said she sat and watched the television for hours, crying and ignoringher children. People feel desperate, she explained, even if they have jobs andfood.102 During the Al-Aqsa Intifada, most of the several hundred women andgirls who were killed or injured as a result of Israeli actions were ‘accidentalvictims’,103 attempting to go about their daily business, in schools or even insidetheir own homes. Women have died or been forced to give birth at Israeli militarycheckpoints because access has been denied to ambulances. A small but signifi-cant number of women have been incarcerated in Israeli prisons.

In response to feelings of insecurity, some parents have sought to protect theirdaughters by keeping them at home. Aziza, a schoolteacher in Nablus reportedthat, since the Intifada began, many girls have not been able to continue with theireducation after the age of 15; instead they leave school early to marry. She addedthat, because of their economic and social conditions, families worry about theirdaughters’ future.104 According to a member of the Women’s Studies Programmeat Birzeit University in the West Bank, when the economy is bad, women are thefirst to be asked to stay at home; many women students have been forced to giveup their university studies because of financial difficulties and also problems ofmobility; she added that female students are sometimes harassed by Israelisoldiers as they try to reach their universities.105

The harassment of Palestinian women by an army of occupation is a particularand insidious form of violence; it seeks to challenge the masculinity of thePalestinian nation by undermining the malehood of the nation. The construction

99Interview, Ramallah, 18 June 2007.100Malek Shubair, assistant public relations coordinator, Gaza Community Mental Health Project,quoted in ‘Palestinian Women Use Intifada to Better their Lot’, 11 November 2000.101Quoted by Women’s Centre for Legal Aid and Counselling, ‘The Second Palestinian Intifada’.102Interview, 4 May 2001, Women’s Affairs Center, Gaza Strip.103Between 28 September 2000 and 30 July 2010, out of a total number of 7383 Palestinian deaths, 582women have been killed by Israeli security forces and settlers, http://www.miftah.org (accessed 6August 2010).104Interview with UNRWA teacher, Balata refugee camp, Nablus, May 2001.105Interview, Women’s Studies Programme, Birzeit University, West Bank, August 2004.

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of the colonial subject, as Bhabha observes, ‘demands an articulation of forms ofdifference – racial and sexual’.106 When colonised people ‘experience subjectionand humiliation at the hands of powerful, aggressively masculine enemies whorepeatedly tell them they are not real men, it is not surprising that shame shouldresult’.107 However, one should not be too quick to reduce the interactionsbetween women and the military and the responses they provoke to culturalstereotyping. Although outsiders have tended to interpret Palestinian women’s‘behaviour, activism and resistance … in a racist manner’, portraying women ‘aseither the “passive victim” or the “terrorist Other”’,108 it is important to appreci-ate women’s situation not simply in terms of victimisation but also of agency.

Islam as Faith and Mobilisation in Palestinian Society

If a woman leaves her house for jihad and in order to uphold right andjustice, then she is not a disobedient woman. If she is killed, she will beconsidered a martyr, winning God’s acceptance.109

A few months after the start of the al-Aqsa Intifada, I spoke to a group of womenin the Nuseirat refugee camp in the middle of the Gaza Strip. The predominantemotions they expressed were fear, helplessness and hopelessness. Althoughsome said that they ‘trust God will solve the problem’, there was little sense ofempowerment through Islamic activism. Instead they described mounting inse-curity, terrible anxiety about the safety of their children, an increasingly desperateeconomic situation and a growth in psychological problems among both adultsand children.110 At that time, it seemed that the principal benefit derived bywomen from the Islamist trend in Gaza had been the creation of networks thatprovided much-needed services to a population suffering economic deprivation,and also a sense of solidarity with the larger community. However, while onecould argue that such benefits have unfolded within a conservative Islamicframework and it is likely that some of the gains made by women will be reversedonce the conflict is over, it is also possible to discern the emergence of an alterna-tive ‘grand narrative’ which challenges secular modernism. This has becomemore pronounced as Hamas has seized the initiative in the struggle with Israel.

In this section, I will consider the Islamisation of Palestinian society both as asource of resistance and as a challenge to assumptions of modernised modes offemininity. It has traditionally been the case that Palestinian women ‘are eitherpresented as passive victims of war or their alleged peaceful “feminine” nature isshowcased as a counter-model to … masculine violence’.111 However, as I have

106Homi K. Bhabha, ‘The Other Question: Difference, Discrimination and the Discourse of Colonialism’,in Russell Ferguson, Martha Gever, Trinh T. Minh-ha and Cornel West (eds), Out There: Marginalizationand Contemporary Cultures (New York: The New Museum of Contemporary Art/Cambridge, MA: TheMIT Press, 1990), p. 72.107Martha C. Nussbaum, The Clash Within: Democracy, Religious Violence and India’s Future (Cambridge,MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007), p. 196.108Shalhoub-Kevorkian, op. cit., p. 19.109H. Al-Husayni, ‘Interview with Ghazi al-Qusaybi, Saudi Ambassador to the United Kingdom’, Al-Sharq al-Awsat (London, 5 June 2002).110Meeting with female kindergarten teachers and children, Islamic Association, Nuseirat Camp, GazaStrip, 3 May 2001.111Richter-Devroe, op. cit., p. 166.

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illustrated, this is a misleading dichotomy. Women are neither inherently ‘peace-ful’ nor inevitably victimised; they too are able to ‘imagine themselves’ and, moreimportantly, ‘reimagine themselves’. Majid argues that one of the effects of colo-nialism has been to retard ‘the legitimate struggle of women by subsuming it inan uncritical Islamic ideology of resistance’.112 In the Palestinian case, however,the ‘Islamic ideology of resistance’ is regarded by some women activists as ‘aforce that supports women, advances their position in society, and protects them,as well as the larger society, from the ills of modern life’.113 One such activewoman asserted that ‘only through Islam can women fight against reactionarytraditions that discriminate against women in education, health, and theworkplace’.114

In 1993, with the unveiling of the Oslo Accords between the PLO and thegovernment of Israel, public opinion surveys revealed significant support for thePLO but, as the Oslo process faltered in the late 1990s and was failing to deliverall but the most cosmetic improvements to Palestinian daily lives and aspirationsfor the future, disillusion set in once more and support for the more confronta-tional tactics of Hamas and Islamic Jihad grew. The al-Aqsa Intifada has beencharacterised by what the Israeli government and its supporters define as ‘Islamicterrorism’. The 2006 Palestinian parliamentary election resulted in an overwhelm-ing victory for Hamas. Out of a total of 74 Hamas members elected to thePalestinian Legislative Council, six were women. According to one of the electedwomen, Huda Na’im:

A lot of things need to change. Women in Gaza and the West Bank shouldbe given complete rights. Some women and girls are made to marrysomeone they don’t want to marry. This is not in our religion, it’s ourtradition. In our religion, a woman has a right to choose.115

The phenomenon of the Palestinian female suicide bomber has focused atten-tion on one of the choices a small number of women have made in the twenty-firstcentury. Although, out of the many suicide attacks against Israeli military andcivilian targets carried out by Palestinians since 2001, very few have been bywomen and even fewer of these have been orchestrated by Islamist groups,116

these acts have been subjected to intense scrutiny, almost to the point of fetish bysome in the West. In the context of this essay, I want to understand these women’sactions from the perspective of liberation and agency. Some scholars have arguedthat Palestinian women are using suicide bombing as a method of challenging the

112Anouar Majid, ‘The Politics of Feminism in Islam’, in Therese Saliba, Carolyn Allen and Judith AHoward (eds) Gender, Politics and Islam (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2002), p. 61.113Anan Ameri, ‘Conflict in Peace: Challenges Confronting the Palestinian Women’s Movement’, inAsma Afsaruddin (ed.) Hermeneutics and Honor: Negotiating Female ‘Public’ Space in Islamic/ate Societies(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 43.114Interview with Iffat al-Jabari, Hebron, June 1995, quoted by Ameri, op. cit., p. 43.115Chris McGreal, ‘Women MPs vow to Change Face of Hamas’, The Guardian, 18 February 2006.116The Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, which is part of Fatah, started to recruit women to carry out suicidebombings at the beginning of the second Intifada and claimed responsibility for the first four femalesuicide bombings between January and May 2002. To begin with, Hamas and Islamic Jihad were hesi-tant about using women; Reem Raiyshi, a 22-year-old woman who blew herself up in January 2004, wasdescribed as the first female Hamas suicide bomber.

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patriarchal structures of their society.117 In some cases, however, their analysislacks objectivity; Israeli, for example, concludes that the ‘Muslims who encouragethe women are also those who would deny them the equal status sought’.118

Similarly Beyler, who asserts that female suicide bombers ‘appear to be one of themost extreme forms of exploitation of women, who become objectified, even ifthey think that their choice is subjective … they become weapons in the hands ofthe men of the terrorist organisations’.119 By dismissing these women as‘exploited’ or the ‘tools of men’, this type of analysis fails to take seriously eitherwomen’s own agency or the pressures of the conflict. In reality, the situation ismore complex; Palestinian women, as Shalhoub-Kevorkian argues, face threeconnecting forms of oppression: internal patriarchal structures that call for ‘thepreservation of cultural authenticity’; the external Israeli Occupation that violatestheir human rights; and external ‘Western myths and prejudices against Arab/Palestinian women’.120

Berko and Erez identify several ‘pathways to terrorism’; some women, theysuggest, act ‘out of religious conviction’ or feel the need to avenge the death of afamily member,121 while for others it is seen as a way ‘to rebel against a strict patri-archal regime’; some regard it as ‘an opportunity to resolve a personal or familialproblem’.122 An example of the second ‘type’ was 29-year old lawyer HanadiJaradat who killed herself in a restaurant in Haifa in October 2003 ‘in revenge forthe killing of her brother and her fiancé by the Israeli security forces’ but also ‘inrevenge for all the crimes Israel had perpetrated in the West Bank’.123 This indicatesanother motivation for female self-sacrifice, the embodying of national pride andhonour; it supports the claim that Palestinian women are writing ‘the history oftheir liberation with their blood’.124 For example, Andaleeb Takatkeh, a youngWest Bank woman who killed herself in 2002, was shown on Arabic satellite tele-vision reading from a prepared statement in which she asserted: ‘I’ve chosen to saywith my body what Arab leaders have failed to say’.125 For women to succeed intheir attacks, ‘they must appear unthreatening to Jewish bodies’126 and it wascertainly the case, in the early days at least, that Israelis were less likely to regarda ‘submissive’ Palestinian woman with suspicion.

117See, for example, Anat Berko and Edna Erez, ‘Gender, Palestinian Women, and Terrorism: Women’sLiberation or Oppression?’ Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, 30:6 (2007),, pp. 493–519; Claudia Brunner,‘Female Suicide Bombers – Male Suicide Bombing? Looking for Gender in Reporting the SuicideBombings of the Israeli–Palestinian Conflict’, Global Society, 19:1 (2005), pp. 29–48; Raphael Israeli,‘Palestinian Women: The Quest for a Voice in the Public Square through “Islamikaze Martyrdom”’,Terrorism and Political Violence, 16:1 (2004), pp. 66–96.118Israeli, op. cit., p. 93.119Clara Beyler, ‘Messengers of Death: Female Suicide Bombers’, International Institute for Counter-Terrorism (12 February 2003), http://www.ict.org.il/Articles (accessed 24 January 2009).120Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, ‘Liberating Voices: The Political Implications of Palestinian MothersNarrating their Loss’, Women’s Studies International Forum, 26:5 (2003), pp. 391–407 at 393.121Anat Berko and Edna Erez, ‘“Ordinary People” and “Death Work”: Palestinian Suicide Bombers asVictimizers and Victims’, Violence and Victims, 20:6 (2005), pp. 603–623 at 606.122Berko and Erez, ‘Gender, Palestinian Women, and Terrorism’, op. cit., p. 503.123Riaz Hassan, ‘What Motivates the Suicide Bombers?’ YaleGlobal online, http://yaleglobal.yale.edu(accessed 28 January 2010).124Al-Akhbar (Egypt), 1 February 2002.125H. Hendawi, ‘Palestinian Father Expresses Shock over Daughter’s Suicide Bombing’, Associated PressWorldstream, 13 April 2002.126Hasso, ‘Discursive and Political Deployments’, op. cit., p. 26.

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Agents of Defiance and Despair 415

Conclusion

In this article, I have argued that Palestinian women reveal themselves as agentsof defiance and despair. Their despair stems from what has been described as‘triple patriarchy’; women face the oppression not only of ‘internal patriarchalstructures’ and the violence of the Israeli Occupation, but also the prejudices ofthe West which tends to define Palestinian resistance as ‘terrorism’ and to dismissArab-Muslim women as powerless. The reality of women’s situation is consider-ably more complex. While they have been actively involved in resisting the colo-nisation of their land since the 1920s, it is true that they are inhibited by theconstraints of a conservative society. Palestinian patriarchy expresses itselfthrough control of the female; it ‘sanctions male control of women through physi-cal abuse’.127 However, as I have argued, ‘male control’ is by no means absolute; itis conditioned by the framework of the Israeli Occupation and by women’sactions on their own behalf that challenge unquestioning male dominance notrooted in authentic cultural practices. While it may be true that ‘the leadership ofthe nascent Palestinian state [which] never developed a vision that acknowledgedwomen’s diverse roles’,128 women’s own efforts are placing significant pressureson an unrepresentative system. However, despite their political organising sincethe 1970s and the efforts made by the women’s movement in the 1990s to mould afuture Palestinian state based on equality and women’s rights, political leadersstill tend to rely on traditional values and networks.

Despite these internal constraints, negative Israeli policies were identified bymost of my interlocutors as posing the greatest source of inhibition. Women areinhibited by Israeli violence, which does not discriminate between Palestinianmen, women or children but, as I have illustrated, this has not prevented somewomen from playing a constructive role in resisting the Occupation. A largeproportion support or take an active part in the Islamic resistance movementwhich, as many of the women I interviewed attested, respects the dignity ofwomen and, as Salwa observed, has permitted women to engage in a wide rangeof social, political and even military activities. On the other side of the story, avery small number of women have chosen to sacrifice their lives through thedubious practice of suicide attacks, which are justified as a response to Israeliprovocation but also undermine the Palestinian ‘cause’ and expose women tocritical international scrutiny as ‘exploited’ or ‘unnatural’; by failing to heedPalestinian women’s voices, international actors contribute towards the reinforc-ing of patriarchal structures.

However, women remain defiant. They display agency, resilience and ingenuityin the face of Israeli violence and repression and of international demonisation.With their choices and their bodies, they are ‘destabilizing dominant notions ofmoral order and duty with respect to gender’.129 Even in the context of patriarchalrelations, ‘women are not completely powerless in their own homes’,130 and havebeen enabled by Islamic resistance movements to take their place in the publicsphere. In the sense of re-defining and re-imagining women’s roles, as I haveargued, the resistance is contributing towards an alternative form of ‘modernity’.

127Rubenberg, op. cit., p. 144.128Sherna Berger Gluck, ‘Palestinian Women: Gender Politics and Nationalism’, Journal of PalestineStudies, XXIV:3 (1995), p. 13.129Hasso, ‘Discursive and Political Deployments’, op. cit., p. 44.130Rubenberg, op. cit., p. 145.

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