"it is our belief that BDS is a feminist Issue"

Critical Legal Thinking– Law & the Political –

It is our belief thatPalestine is a feministissue .…by David Lloyd • 13 May 2014

So long as antiwar activists denounce the U.S.occupation of Iraq, but not Israel’s occupation ofPalestine, I will keep drawing the parallels. Solong as Western feminists denounce theoppression of Arab women as a result of Islamicfundamentalism, but not as a result of Israelioccupation, I will raise my voice. I will explainthat Palestinian women are without any doubtmore oppressed by Israel and Zionism than they

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are by their fellow Palestinian men, thata Palestinian woman’s freedom of movement,her right to an education, her right to vote, herright to work, her right to live where she wants,her right to sufficient food, clean water, andmedical treatment in her own homeland aredenied to her not by her fellow Palestinians butby the illegal occupying power, Israel.

In 1980, when Irish Republican women in NorthernIreland’s Armagh Gaol had gone on a “no-wash ordirty protest” against strip searching that theydefined as rape, Irish journalist Nell McCaffertypublished an article in the Irish Times that opened:“It is my belief that Armagh is a feminist issue.” Thenow celebrated article was motivated by theindifference, and sometimes explicit antagonism ofmost British and Irish feminist organizations to theplight of these female political prisoners because thenature of their political struggle  —  which had beencriminalized by British counter-insurgency policies  —  was not expressly feminist. McCafferty argued thatthe violation of the integrity of women’s bodies thatstrip-searching inevitably involved constituted anissue that was indubitably a matter of concern to anyfeminist. As we might now say, and as feministsociologists like Mary Corcoran have since shown inconsiderable detail, the treatment of women politicalprisoners in Armagh was a manifestation of thestructural violence of a political regime which, whileit impacted every member of the nationalist minorityirrespective of gender, affected with concentratedimpact the daily lives of women, political activists ornot.

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It is time for a similar statement regarding Palestineand the movement for boycott, divestment andsanctions (BDS) which, since it was called for in2003 by some 170 Palestinian civil societyorganizations  —  including virtually every Palestinianwomen’s organization  —  has proliferated globally. Itis our belief that the Palestinian struggle and thecampaign for boycott, divestment and sanctions isa feminist issue. It may be, indeed, above alla feminist issue. Yet, despite the increasingly broadappeal of this non-violent and rights-basedmovement, its implications for both global feministsolidarity work and for feminist social and politicalanalysis have not become generallyappreciated. While a number of academicassociations, in the United States and elsewhere,have endorsed an academic boycott, they havelargely done so in the name of anti-racist or anti-colonial solidarity. To date, apparently, no majorWestern women’s or feminist organization hasdeclared its solidarity with the Palestinianstruggle. Where this is not symptomatic of explicitlyZionist sympathies on the part of somefeminists, the lack of open feminist solidarity withPalestine may be in large part a consequence of thesuccess of state-driven Israeli messaging that NaderaShalhoub-Kevorkian here describes, which depictsIsrael as a liberal, democratic society that isexceptional in the Middle East for its openness towomen’s emancipation and full participation insocial and political spheres. What is in effecta propaganda or hasbara campaign of “feminist-washing”, akin to the “pink-washing” campaigns

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whose contradictions Brenna Bhandar discusses inher contribution, is shadowed by its implicitIslamophobia: it always implies the essentialincompatibility of Arab and Muslim societies withwomen’s emancipation, as it argues their incapacityfor democracy, while occluding the deeplyheteropatriarchal and homonational elements basicto Israeli state formation. Furthermore, as Shalhoub-Kevorkian argues, the Orientalist assumptions aboutArab society that underlie both forms ofnormalization of Israel actually endorse andexacerbate patriarchal elements within Palestiniansociety.

To some degree, such attitudes may also still informsome Western feminists’ lack of explicit engagementwith the Palestinian struggle, compounded by thelong and vexed history of nationalist movements’frequent marginalization of women as agents and offeminist issues as subsidiary to the nationalstruggle. Ironically, however, if feminists are leery ofgiving support to a Palestinian liberation movementoften defined in nationalist terms, their reluctance todo so tacitly lends their support to another and morepowerful nationalism, that of Zionism. But toconsider Palestine simply in the light of olderdecolonizing movements is to miss the significanceof the new conjuncture within a longer history ofcolonialism and of heteropatriarchal modes of socialcontrol that Israel’s system of dominationrepresents. As a settler colony, Israel depends on anddeploys strategies of domination that, as Rana Sharifand Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian show, are deeply


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structured by the gendered relations of power typicalof colonial societies. These modes of dominationpresent a peculiarly urgent field of theorization andof practical reconsideration for feminism,representing as they do a reconfiguration of modes ofbiopower that draws into the core of the neo-liberalstate the colonial operations of processes that bothSharif and Shalhoub-Kevorkian here invoke underthe name of necropolitics. And, much as it hasfunctioned as a laboratory for technologies ofmilitarized repression and surveillance that havefound increasingly widespread application inpopulation control and policing from the US borderto Brazilian favelas, Israel also offers a telling bodyof insight into emerging modes of biopoliticalpractice and necropolitical regimes that intervene inwhat I would term the expanded sphere ofreproduction.

In his indispensable work, Israel’s Occupation, NeveGordon argues that in the wake of the SecondIntifada that broke out in September 2000, Israel’scontrol over the West Bank shifted “from theprinciple of colonization to the principle ofseparation.” This entailed equally “a radical de-emphasis of disciplinary power and the accentuationof a particular kind of sovereign power, which inmany respects disregards the law”: as he puts it, “Inplace of the politics of life that had characterized theOT (Occupied Territories) until the second intifada,a politics of death slowly emerged.” Gordon doesnot examine in any depth, however, the quiteexceptional degree to which this shift from the

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biopolitical mode, in which Israel as a colonizingpower still regarded itself as responsible (as underthe Geneva Conventions it is in fact obliged to be) forthe continuing welfare of the occupied population, tothe necropolitical exercise of the sovereign power totake life, which targets the most fundamental formsof reproduction of Palestinian life.

What is implied here, drawing on the work ofMarxist theorists like Louis Althusser and materialistfeminists like Leopoldina Fortunati, is an expandedconception of reproduction that includes not only thebiological reproduction of life  —  birth, nurture, andthe maintenance of health  —  or of mere labourpower, but the reproduction of social and culturalrelations of every kind. Althusser refers to this inlimited fashion as “the reproduction of theconditions of production”, that is, not only of the“forces of production” (labour power), but alsoof “the existing [social] relations of production”.Fortunati in turn points out that this separation ofproduction from reproduction is the foundation of“the sexual division of labor”, within which the workof reproduction performed overwhelmingly bywomen appears as the “natural force of sociallabor”. Insofar as the reproduction of labor takesplace through the family, it draws into it the affectiveas well as the purely economic relations amongindividuals, those relations in which “nature” takeson the form of the social and the cultural. Theconception of reproduction in this expanded sensetransforms the sphere of reproduction froma function and space marginal to capital into one of

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primary contradictions and therefore of struggle. Inthe colonial sphere, I would argue, an expandedconception of reproduction designates the wholedomain of the social, the cultural and the affective asprincipal sites of struggle insofar as they bring intoplay not only the productive capacities of thecolonized  —  those capacities that, as Gordondemonstrates, the Israeli state in the mode ofdiscipline and biopower sought to exploit in the formof Palestinian labor  —  but their very survival as a“form of living”, precisely that which is targeted bythe “sovereign power” of the new Israeli mode ofdomination. This is, no less than the capitalist sphereof reproduction, a mode of domination in which  —  asShalhoub-Kevorkian here shows in painful detail  —  those who bear the brunt of its violence and theburden of survival are women.

The transition from a biopolitical state to one ofsovereign power, as Gordon describes it, is not anhistorical accident contingent on an unfolding“conflict”, but is, rather, symptomatic of thefundamental contradictions of Israel’s settler colonialregime, as Bhandar describes it in hercontribution. Even before the institution of the stateof Israel in 1948, which entailed the expulsion ofthree-quarters of a million Palestinians, Zionists hadconsidered the existing Palestinian populationa demographic threat to the exclusively Jewishcharacter of the state they imagined. As David Ben-Gurion saw it, a state that had more than 20% Arabpopulation would be unviable. Even without theintifadas, Israeli dependence on the exploitation and

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reproduction of Palestinian labor power wouldultimately have been in unsustainable contradictionto the Zionist project precisely because  —  as theintifadas demonstrated  —  the Israeli effort toassimilate Palestinians within a colonial statethrough the normalization of the occupation hadfailed. The evident capacity of the Palestinians toreproduce their culture and society  —  their samoud,or persistence  —  as a form of living distinct from andoppositional to the Zionist state and society wouldrequire their erasure rather than their adjustment toa normalized occupation.

But the corresponding shift from a biopolitical toa necropolitical state was by no means a radicaldeparture, but rather the intensification of a processthat had been continuous, as Shalhoub-Kevorkianmaintains, since Israel’s inception in the varyingforms of ethnic cleansing (or “transfer”), separationand containment through the fragmentation ofPalestinian territory, denial of freedom of movement,including access to basic resources like farmland orschooling, denial of access to fundamental services,from healthcare to adequate housing or watersupplies, denial of the right to family unification or toreturn freely to one’s place of origin, denial on anarbitrary basis of permits of all kinds, including theright to travel or to access healthcare or schooling towhich one is formally entitled. Indeed, as RanaSharif points out, it is frequently the right of accessto fundamental services that are theoreticallygranted by Israel  —  and which it holds out as indicesof the benevolence of its regime  —  that is

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withheld. As one of her seriously ill intervieweesrelates of his attempt to obtain routine treatment:

The Palestinian [office] handed the applicationover to the Israeli [HDCA]. Upon reporting tothe Palestinian [office] on the second day, mywife was told that the Israeli side was stillexamining the issue from a security perspective.Therefore, I lost my appointment. Because analternative treatment is not available in theWest Bank hospitals, my health condition hasdeteriorated.

For all the aggravating pettiness of such routinedenials  —  and they are innumerable in the experienceof Palestinians  —  their cumulative intent is clear: tomake Palestinian life intolerable and unsustainableand resistance accordingly unviable. And, as Sharif’saccount here indicates, even where the principalvictim may appear to be male, it is a Palestinianwoman who confronts and bears Israel’s relentlessassault on the Palestinian sphere of reproduction.

Angela Davis has written eloquently of the ways inwhich the formations both of slavery and of the era ofsupposed emancipation impacted the social andcultural structures of African American life in waysthat had peculiar effect on black women, precisely tothe extent to which “unfreedom” shaped the affectiveand institutional sphere of reproduction or “family-support systems”. By the same token, the Israeliassault on Palestinian life, on its capacity forreproduction, although it affects every Palestinianregardless of gender or sexuality, falls with particularweight upon women. Of course, the Israeli regime,

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predicated as it is on the essentially exclusionarypreservation and promotion of the “Jewish characterof the state”, is gendered and racialized at every levelin ways that do not target Palestiniansalone. Immigration law is profoundly discriminatorynot only against Palestinians, but also againstmigrants whose labor has increasingly displaced thatof Palestinian workers since the SecondIntifada. Notoriously, black migrants from North andEast Africa have been repelled or interned as“infiltrators”, under the recently amendedPrevention of Infiltration Act of 1954, a laworiginally directed at Palestinians, and that continuesto be applied, for example, both to Bedouins in theNaqab or to Palestinians from Gaza who seek tocontinue their studies in West Bank universities. Onthe other hand, immigrant workers from, forinstance, the Philippines, usually concentrated inhealth and domestic care, are permitted to come onshort term visas, and normally only if they are singleand do not have children. Those who becomepregnant while in the country may be expelled, forfear that their non-Jewish children would be able toclaim the right of citizenship and “flood thefoundation of the Zionist state.“ At the same time,Palestinian workers are permitted to enter Israel orits illegal settlements on the West Bank only oncondition of being a married father over the age of35. Palestinians who are citizens of Israel have, asBhandar notes, been deprived of the right to familyunification under the Citizenship and Entry intoIsrael Law of 2003, which bans Palestinians fromoutside Israel from gaining residency through

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marriage to an Israeli (a law comparable to one thateven the South African Supreme Court balked ataccepting). Meanwhile Filipinas who marry Israelimen may become citizens if they convert toJudaism. A complex network of differential anddifferentiating laws thus governs the variouspopulations of Israel and its occupied territories.

The effect of Israel’s “low-intensity warfare” againstthe persisting Palestinian communities in areastargeted for Israeli expansion or for “Judaization”falls, however, with especial weight on women. Itsmanifestations range from the very literaldestruction of the domestic space throughdemolition or eviction, usually under discriminatorylegal pretexts and even including the demolition ofentire villages and areas defined as “unrecognizedvillages” in the Naqab, to the brutal denial of accessto essential and often urgently needed care. NaderaShalhoub-Kevorkian documents in often painfuldetail the impact on Palestinian women of Israel’swill to contain and reduce the Palestinian populationin East Jerusalem in particular (an area currentlytargeted with particular intensity for settlementexpansion, given Israel’s determination toappropriate this historically Palestinian city as partof its “eternal capital”). Its impact ranges from theextremist “price tag” campaign that targets allPalestinians with vindictive violence, to theeviction of families from homes they have occupiedfor decades, with deeply traumatic effects onchildren. As Saree Makdisi explains, citing AmnestyInternational, “the deliberate demolition of

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Palestinian homes is a long-standing Israeli policy”and one that is “not justified by military necessity.”These assaults on Palestinian daily and domestic life,which extend to the often fatal denial of essentialtreatment to pregnant women, as if in an effort totarget the literal biological reproduction ofPalestinian life, have shaped, Shalhoub-Kevorkianargues, a “death zone” for Palestinians that haspeculiar impact on women even if it is one part ofa larger, ongoing process of dispossession thatBhandar here sees as continuous with settlercolonialism practices elsewhere. This death zone,the material instance of what Sharif, citing AchilleMbembe, calls the “necropolitical state”, is thespace where the biological, material and culturalreproduction of Palestinian social life is put at dailyand intimate risk.

Israel’s war against the continuance of Palestinianlife targets women in every sphere. Certainly ittargets women as potential or actual agents of thereproduction of life itself, as mothers and ascaretakers, but it also targets women as reproducersof social and cultural life, as if the targeting ofwomen  —  as so often in colonial regimes  —  wereunderstood to be the royal road to the destruction ofindigenous social and political life. Living underIsraeli occupation or within the borders of its racialstate has been devastating for all Palestinians, but isespecially destructive for Palestinian women as theessays collected here all demonstrate. If, asShalhoub-Kevorkian argues, the analysis of thelarger “physics of power” that organizes the settler

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colonial project of Zionism is essential to anyfeminist understanding of the condition ofPalestinian women and of the nature of theirstruggle, it is no less the case that the samestructures of domination must be analyzed andcontested from a feminist standpoint. This is, inBhandar’s words, a fundamental task of any “anti-colonial, feminist politics of solidarity”. Feminism,according to Shalhoub-Kevorkian, “entailsunderstanding the nature and significance ofsolidarity with the dispossessed, something thatglobal feminism, international law, and Israelifeminism have so far failed to do” in the case ofPalestinian women.

Palestinian women’s and feminist groups, includingthe General Union of Palestinian Women (GUPW)and Palestinian Federation of Women’s ActionCommittees (PFWAC), have been an integral elementof the Palestinian call for BDS against Israel since itsinception. This non-violent and human rights-basedcampaign makes three basic demands of Israel,calling for broad boycotts and divestment initiativesagainst Israel until it meets its obligations underinternational law by:

Ending its occupation and colonization of allArab lands and dismantling the Separation orApartheid Wall;

1.

Recognizing the fundamental rights of the Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel to full equality;

2.

Respecting, protecting and promoting the rightsof Palestinian refugees to return to their homes

3.

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and properties as stipulated in UN Resolution194.

The guidelines for the implementation of BDSmeasures are deliberately flexible and context-sensitive, allowing for local solidarity organizationsto determine the most effective measures to pursuein any given situation. Actions have ranged fromconsumer boycotts of agricultural products grown insettlements on the West Bank, to campaigns againstcompanies like Veolia, which runs transport systemsin Occupied East Jerusalem and bus routes andwaste disposal facilities in the settlements; fromdivestment campaigns by churches or universitiesthat target corporations who profit from theoccupation, like Caterpillar, Elbit Systems, orHewlett-Packard, to demands for the suspension ofcontracts with firms like global security company G4Sthat runs Israeli political prisons and engages in thetorture of prisoners. One cornerstone of the BDScampaign in recent years has been the boycott ofIsraeli academic institutions, a specific campaignthat has been endorsed by an increasing number ofacademic associations, from the Teachers’ Union ofIreland to the US American Studies Association,or supported by more specific measures, like theRoyal Institute of British Architects (RIBA)’s passageof a motion urging the International Union ofArchitects to suspend the Israeli Association ofUnited Architects (IAUA) from the world body ofarchitects, the International Union of Architects(UIA).

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Much as the sports and cultural boycott of SouthAfrica had an impact on the apartheid regime out ofall proportion to any economic impact it could have,the academic boycott is of particular significance intargeting a core element of Israel’s efforts tonormalize its regime of occupation and apartheid byprojecting the image of its liberal and democraticinstitutions and by integrating its intellectual andresearch agendas with academic institutions in theUnited States and Europe. Critics of the academicboycott campaign frequently argue that targetinguniversities and academics threatens to isolate oneprincipal space where dialogue and the critique ofIsraeli state practices take place. They ignore the factthat the boycott does not target individualacademics, but specifically academic institutions,which, far from being sites of liberal critique, aredeeply complicit in maintaining the technical andresearch infrastructure of the occupation. Theirassertion that the academic boycott undermines thepossibility of dialogue is strikingly belied by the factthat in the wake of recent endorsements by academicassociations in the United States, public debate onPalestine and Israel has opened up to anunprecedented degree in virtually every medium,from the blogosphere to mainstream media, despitevigorous efforts on the part of the Israeli lobby tocensor and stifle debate. This outcome has beena singular and important effect of BDS, a civil societymovement necessitated by the exceptional closure ofthe public and political spheres in the US and Europeto any critical discussion, let alone sanction of,Israel’s ongoing breaches of international law and

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human rights conventions. This is a movement thathas begun to correct what Shalhoub-Kevorkian hererefers to as the long-standing practice of“invisibilizing Palestine”, evicting it from the publicsphere.

It is significant that the first US academic associationto endorse the academic boycott was the Associationfor Asian American Studies, and that those thatfollowed included the Native American andIndigenous Studies Association and the AmericanStudies Association. All are associations whosemembers have a long history of analysis and critiqueof imperialism, settler colonialism and the racialstate. All voted to endorse the boycott as an act ofsolidarity, recognizing that what they were doing wasnot singling Israel out, as some argue  —  amisconception that Bhandar here critiques  —  butrather recognizing that Israel’s colonial project iscontinuous with and a crucial model for the ongoingracial domination that characterizes the era of neo-liberalism. Their solidarity with Palestine did noteclipse their concern with racial oppression in theirown colonial or racial-state contexts, but enhancedtheir analysis and linked their concerns to the globalnetwork of power, accumulation by dispossession,hetero-patriarchal and racial domination, andtechnologies of control within which Israel isa crucial node. Indeed, many proponents of theboycott at these associations saw in both the debatesit occasioned and in the engagement of scholarshipwith political solidarity a moment of renewal of theirfaith in intellectual work.


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The argument made by the participants in this forumis that feminist movements, and feminist scholarswithin the academy internationally, likewise stand togain from a commitment to solidarity with thePalestinian struggle.

First published on Feminists@law.

David Lloyd is Distinguished Professor of English atthe University of California, Riverside, USA, anda founding member of the US Campaign for theAcademic and Cultural Boycott of Israel. [email protected]. He has published numerousarticles on Palestine and Israel, including “In theLong Shadow of the Settler: On Israeli and USColonialisms”, written with Laura Pulido, in AudreaLim, ed, The Case for Sanctions Against Israel(London: Verso Press, 2012) and “SettlerColonialism and the State of Exception: TheExample of Israel/Palestine” in The Journal ofSettler Colonial Studies 2.1 (2012). He has alsopublished with Malini Johar Schueller an essay onthe rationale for the academic boycott of Israel inthe AAUP’s Journal of Academic Freedom. Lloydworks primarily on Irish culture and onpostcolonial and cultural theory. His most recentbook is Irish Culture and Colonial Modernity: TheTransformation of Oral Space (CambridgeUniversity Press, 2011). My thanks to BrendaBhandar, Nadine Naber and Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian for help in shaping and revising thisintroduction.

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