Palestinian women’s resistance today: imperialism, Islamism and violence

Issue: 185

Katie Coles and Jane Hard

The history of women’s activism in nationalist movements in Palestine has been eviscerated or marginalised at best.1 Yet, women have played a central role in the Palestinian struggle against occupation by the British and then the Israelis dating back to the beginning of the 19th century.2 Peasant and working-class women, as well as those from elite backgrounds, played a key role in the Great Revolt against the British Mandate between 1936 and 1939. In the late 1960s, influenced by the upsurge against imperialism and the explosion of feminism across the globe, women were not only part of the armed struggle against occupation, but also fought against their own oppression raising demands for equality and personal freedom. In 1987, when anger once again exploded in a mass uprising against the Israeli occupation—the First Intifada—women took a leading role in grassroots neighbourhood committees, organised and led demonstrations and physically confronted soldiers who came to make arrests.

With the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993, the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) capitulated to Israel, which brought an end to the First Intifada.3 This was followed by a marked decline in mass struggle and the participation of women in resisting the occupation. The extent of this was so pronounced that Johnson and Kuttab asked “where have all the women gone?”.4 This article explores how the conditions for Palestinian resistance and for women in particular have changed since 1993. We argue that, despite a new set of obstacles, women have not disappeared from public and political spaces, but they continue to organise, to be active and resist.

The Oslo Accords (1993 and 1995): a watershed in struggle

The Oslo Accords were a watershed in the Palestinian struggle. This agreement between Israel and the PLO, negotiated in secret and without the participation or knowledge of women (and men) activists, brought the First Intifada to an end.5 Edward Said referred to the agreement as “an instrument of Palestinian surrender, the Palestinian Versailles”.6 Indeed, the agreement acted as a fig leaf for Israel, which doubled the number of settlers and consolidated their occupation of Palestine. The Palestinian Authority (PA) was established when Israel formally withdrew from the West Bank and Gaza but continued to have complete control over the majority of land, resources, trade and borders. The corrupt and nepotistic PA became Israel’s “enforcer” with very limited powers.

The surrender to Israel after 1993 led to increased support for Hamas, established in 1987. As the only serious opposition to the occupation, Hamas won the majority of seats in the Palestinian Elections in 2006 and became the governing party in Gaza in the following year. Israel responded with collective punishment by imposing a siege, which included the blockade of vital supplies and a series of protracted military attacks.

Edward Said argues that, by 2000, seven years after the Oslo Agreement, the so-called “peace process” had become “the most hated word in the Palestinian lexicon”.7 Accumulated frustration with the occupation, the encroachment of settlers and worsening poverty exacerbated by disillusion with the PA contributed to an outbreak of what became known as the Al-Aqsa Intifada, or the Second Intifada.8 Although women had been at the forefront of the First Intifada through the Union of Palestinian Women’s Working Committees, this new phase of the struggle was more militarised and dominated by the armed wings of Palestinian factions—women were much less visible.9 The fragmentation of the West Bank and the imposition of curfews dramatically reduced mobility and pushed women back into the home. The escalation of violence by the Israelis made it much more dangerous for women, men and young people to resist soldiers in the streets in same way as they had done during the First Intifada. The site of conflict shifted to borders and crossing points between areas in the geographical “checkerboard” of the Oslo Accords, where young men and boys were the main players.10

The impact of expulsion, spacio-cide and siege on women

The occupation of Palestine by Israel’s racist state is unitary. The specifics of the oppression of women and girls and their lived experience, however, have played out differently between generations and the regions to which they were forcibly dispersed.

In 1948, the Nakba or Palestinian tragedy brutally disrupted Palestinian society. The Israeli state was established on 80 percent of mandatory Palestinian territory, and between 80 and 90 percent of Palestinians were driven out of their homes by Zionist military forces. Five hundred villages were destroyed and Arab life in the coastal cities (especially Jaffa and Haifa) virtually disintegrated. Whereas the ruling class moved to Egypt, Lebanon and Jordan, the majority of peasants ended up in one of the refugee camps established by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNWRA) in Gaza (annexed by Egypt), the West Bank (annexed by Jordan) and Lebanon and Syria.11 Conditions were harsh. Initially, refugees lived in tents; after 1958 these were replaced by small houses of concrete blocks with iron roofs. Poverty and unemployment were widespread.

For the 1948 generation of women, ripping them from the land deprived them of a major part of their social, economic and cultural lives.12 The vast majority of them were peasants until 1948, and the land was the primary source of their survival, identity and community. During the olive and orange picking seasons, for example, women spent time in the fields working and socialising. This loss of land and forced relocation to squalid refugee camps plunged them into poverty and increasingly confined them to home—a stark change for rural women who were used to agricultural work and the status that brought.

Since the Oslo Accords, women have experienced siege and apartheid. In 2002, the fragmentation of territory within the West Bank was compounded by the construction of the 70-kilometre Apartheid Wall—something Hanafi describes as “spacio-cide”.13 The wall, which drew international condemnation, cuts deep into Palestinian territory and resulted in the confiscation of large swathes of fertile Palestinian land, the ghettoisation of Palestinian towns and villages, and the cutting off of thousands of Palestinians from social services, schools and farmland.

The fortification of barriers and checkpoints, alongside the draconian use of permits and curfews, restricts the movement of all Palestinians but especially of women. These checkpoints are often cramped and invasive. Women are forced to undergo humiliating body scans, are often deprived of toilet facilities and are also subject to varying degrees of harassment. Delays at checkpoints have forced women into giving birth there.14 “Flying” checkpoints, temporary and impromptu roadblocks, further deterred women’s mobility. Therefore, even the act of travelling to university outside one’s district or visiting family becomes an act of resistance in itself. This increased securitisation of the West Bank deliberately created fear and exclusion: Palestinians became increasingly penned in, surveilled and abused. This limited popular protest and revolt, particularly of women, by reducing their ability to move freely.

The experience of women and girls in Gaza has been equally brutal but different. Since Hamas won the Palestinian general elections in 2006 and took control of Gaza in 2007, Palestinians have been under siege from Israel. Cutting Gaza off from the main urban centre of Jerusalem resulted in losing access to specialised hospitals, foreign consulates, banks and other vital services. The siege caused shortages of basic items such as food and fuels and chronic problems accessing education, health and clean water. Israel’s blockade devastated the Gaza economy and led to what the United Nations (UN) called the “de-development’’ of the territory. Two million Palestinians live in 365 square kilometres, classified as uninhabitable according to a UN report.15 Since the beginning of the siege, Israel has launched protracted military assaults on Gaza in 2008, 2012 and 2014, which exacerbated an already dire situation. Thousands have been killed and there was limited possibility of rebuilding as construction materials, such as concrete and steel, were not allowed into Gaza. As the mainstay of the family, and with many men killed or imprisoned, the brunt of the siege fell on women to provide shelter, food and education for their families. The restrictions on mobility have meant that young women have not been able to complete their education. This was the dire situation even before Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza after 7 October 2023.

“Sumud” – Everyday resistance

Israeli settler colonialism and its logic of elimination means that simply trying to maintain some form of “normality” puts Palestinians in constant conflict with the Israeli state. This concept of everyday forms of resistance is encapsulated by the term sumud, loosely translated as “steadfastness”. As Khalili explains: sumud “is the only strategy of struggle when all other avenues are closed, when organisational infrastructures are destroyed, and when complete annihilation—not only of political institutions but of every person—is a real possibility”.16

Although women play a disproportionate role in maintaining family, domestic and community spheres of daily life, this does not result in passivity and indifference. Women have played a central role in protecting their homes against accelerating encroachment and violence in the West Bank as settlers attempted to evict Palestinians, to loot their belongings and to bulldoze their homes. Sireen Khudairy, an inhabitant of the Dhesishe refugee camp and member of the Jordan Valley Solidarity, describes how women have consistently and bravely confronted settlers:

[W]henever the army attacks, people resist. The women throw shoes at the army when they come to attack our homes… [I]f there is a house demolition, the first people who take stuff out of the house are the women. If the bulldozers come, then the women still make food for their sons and daughters. Then they build new houses ready to live again.17

The rebuilding of homes and community infrastructure thwarts Israeli settler efforts to expand and expel. Khudairy explains that “we managed to build five schools, five health centres in Area C and we laid water pipes into three different communities”.18 This directly undermines Israeli efforts to suffocate and stamp out glimpses of Palestinian self-sufficiency. The logic of settler colonialism demands the environment be re-written, and Israel’s “total victory” means not only eliminating Hamas but any prospect of Palestinian statehood altogether. Reconstruction, therefore, becomes symbolic of Palestinian perseverance. Mona Al-Farra, a doctor from Gaza working in grassroots health organisations, argues that “the occupation’s long-term strategy is to bring about another ethnic cleansing by making life unbearable for Palestinian people in our land”.19

During the 2023 invasion of Gaza, Israeli tactics of doctoring, falsifying and censoring reports coming out of the conflict are all too familiar. Women have been in the forefront of filming, recording and capturing events on the ground to expose the brutal reality of the occupation. Abu Rahmah, a filmmaker from Bil’in, describes her involvement in a campaign called We Refuse to Die Silently, in which she, along with three others, would travel close to settlements to help local Palestinians with the olive harvest by recording Israeli violations or incursions.20

Defending the land

The alienation of Palestinians, both from nature and from one another, has been a key method in which Israel has tried to enforce its occupation. The dispossession of Palestinians from their farmlands and the increasing geographical splintering of neighbourhoods has increased reliance on Israeli food. Therefore, working on the land is an important form of resistance for women. On a material level, it is crucial to the livelihood of their families, but it also undermines the Orientalist and Zionist myth that Palestine had been a barren, desert-like landscape before Israel had made it “bloom”.21 This is why the symbol of the olive tree is so profound: Palestine had neither been a land without people nor a land without nature.

Vivien Sansoour founded the Palestine Heirloom Seed Library. Through the recovery of ancient seeds, she exposed the effects of settler colonialism and unsustainable Israeli agribusiness on the biological diversity of the region, which saw “soil- and sun-based agriculture” eclipsed by a system of monoculture.22 All over the West Bank, women turned to permaculture and cooperatives as a means of re-asserting sovereignty and self-sufficiency. Sleiman Farm in Bil’in is one example. Despite belonging to Area C, the area under full Israeli control, the farm attempted to re-establish a direct relationship between Palestinian producers and consumers—bypassing Israeli businesses as well as non-governmental organisations (NGOs) in the process.

The farm and village more widely have become a crucial frontier of resistance for women in terms of self-sufficiency and their resistance to annexation and imprisonments. The village of Bodrus is teetering on the edge of the Israeli West Bank barrier. Here, “women, in particular, were strikingly active—regularly blocking bulldozers and marching at the front of protests”.23 After just under a year of protest, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) capitulated to the demands of villagers and decided to re-route the wall.

Women and the rise of Palestinian Islamic Nationalism

The rise of Palestinian Islamic Nationalism and the formation of Hamas in 1987 created a new context for women’s participation in the struggle against the occupation and against their own oppression. Some strands of Western feminism have crudely interpreted the rise of Islamic nationalism in Palestine as a backward step for women, seeing those that support Islam as “pawns in a grand patriarchal plan, who, if freed from their bondage, would naturally express their instinctual abhorrence for the traditional Islamic mores used to enchain them”.24 The conflation of Muslim women’s conservative dress with oppression and backwardness is particularly pronounced in France, where feminist groups supported the ban on the hijab in 2004. Even before that, some of France’s feminist groups would not allow scarf wearing women into their meetings.25 Feminist scholarship from women in the Middle East (or with their lineage from that region) have challenged this view and restored the absent voices of women to provide richer and more complex accounts of their relationship with Islam. They criticised it as an Orientalist interpretation.26 Lara Deep explains how the West, with its imperial interests, positions itself at the centre of a universal modernity that radiates outwards counterposing societies where Islamism prevails as backward and anti-modern.27

Muslims are engaged in practices that have a history and are interpreted and debated in different ways rather than striving for a blueprint of some imagined past.28 Chris Harman’s analysis of Islamism is that it is neither “reaction incarnate” nor universally progressive and has to be located in class relations and an understanding of imperialism.29 On a very basic level, he explains that, in order to survive, Islam has to adapt to different and shifting class interests. To obtain the necessary funding to build the material infrastructure of Islam, such as mosques and a power base, it appeals to merchants and landowners. At the same time, to gain the allegiance of the mass of people, it promotes messages of consolation to the poor and oppressed.

The need to engage with prevalent ideas about women in wider society, pressure from women activists themselves and garnering mass appeal are part of the context in which we need to understand Hamas’s vacillating and contradictory gender ideology. On the one hand, it preaches a reactionary commitment to women’s “purity”, domesticity and obedience and stresses their role in reproducing the nation. Yet, on the other hand, it highlights the role of women as activists and aims to incorporate them into Islamised Palestinian nationalism. From the outset, a Women’s Action Department was energetic in pushing boundaries for women. It aimed to integrate women into the political organs of Hamas as well as to increase women’s membership in the party. There was a huge expansion of cheap childcare to facilitate this—a provision offered to impoverished women and wives of political prisoners at no cost.

Hamas promoted an updated image of Islamic womanhood as “well educated, professional, political active and outspoken”.30 Even the veil is a signifier of modernity because it differs from the traditional dress, the colourful thud worn by peasant women. Jad describes the long robe of a plain colour and white or black hijab (headscarf) as an indication of education: “a uniform of conviction, unlike a blind adherence to tradition”.31 Women in Hamas have been central to recruiting and mobilising in universities, each of which had a female student committee.32 This influx of university graduates and professional women helped Hamas transition from a male-dominated underground paramilitary organisation to a popular political movement.

Perhaps surprisingly, the share of female political representation in Hamas was higher than respective figures in the PA or PLO political bodies. In 2003, the advisory council was composed of 52 members, eight of whom were women. The elected women were all well-educated, holding degrees in physics, chemistry, medical science, education and English from universities in Jordan, Egypt, Syria and Gaza.33 After the election of Hamas in 2006 and its formation of a government in Gaza, the Women’s Action Department became the Ministry of Women’s Affairs. No longer a division of the PA, it was reconstructed around the aims of women’s mobilisation and the provision of services. In 2010, the ministry implemented a plan with a budget upwards of $300,000 to expand job creation for female university graduates, to improve food security and to widen the legal framework to improve the rights of widows and wives of political prisoners.

Hamas has consistently criticised the liberal individualistic notion of rights used by feminist NGOs for ignoring the occupation and has delegitimatised their ideas as non-national and alien. However, the Islamist search for an alternative to the secular feminist platform brought them into continuous engagement with it. Hamas has borrowed ideas from secular feminism in response to women activists from below and as a political strategy to broaden their constituencies. These nuances are epitomised by the events of the 2016 Bir Zeit University elections, in which promotional videos for Hamas included endorsements from Western-dressed unveiled women in an attempt to add legitimacy to the organisation on a national and global stage.34

Through interviews with young women in the West Bank, Baldi exposes how, while often depicted by those in the West as oppressed victims, many “New Islamic Women” welcomed wearing the veil saying that it made them “freer”. It has enabled them to gain access to historically male spaces and made it possible for unmarried women to travel in the evening and to mix with men at work. By extension, this has had the effect of increasing women’s capacity to engage in political activism. Therefore, while actively promoting Hamas’s gender ideology in recreating the “pious female subject”, they are at the same time subverting Islamic norms.

This flexibility and expediency in Islamist doctrine is reflected in Hamas’s evolving attitude to women’s involvement in armed struggle. Reem Riyashi was the first female suicide bomber of Hamas. In response, the party stated that its employment of women in military activity was a matter of strategy, rather than ideological commitment. This caused a shift in attitude and, in April 2007, the movement’s military wing, Al-Qassam Brigades, announced the formation of the first women’s cell.35

Strict gender agendas softened as Hamas became more popular—and in response to pressure exerted by women in the organisation on their leaders and the confidence they gained from their activism in the movement. This ever-changing interplay between gender, nationalism and Islamism was reflected in revisions to Hamas’s charter in May 2017, which states:

[T]he role of Palestinian women is fundamental in the process of building the present and the future, just as it has always been in the process of making Palestinian history. It is a pivotal role in the project of resistance, liberation and building the political system.36

However, it was not until 2021 that two women were elected to the political bureau of Hamas: Jamila al-Shanti and Fatima Shurrab. Al-Shanti was placed on Israel’s assassination list in 2006, after she and other women broke the siege of the Al-Nasr Mosque in Beit Hanoun and helped the male occupants escape.37 Two women were killed and ten wounded by the IDF. Fatima Shurrab was the leader of the women’s section in Hamas and had a prominent position among its female members.38 The election of these women was not a painless task: it took years of arguing with the Hamas leadership. Moreover, while acceding to these demands, women were still deprived of an official vote in this decision.

The international media were quick to make assumptions about women’s lived experience under the Hamas government. One of their tactics to discredit Hamas has been to leverage “women’s rights” in Gaza, for example by reporting a ban on women riding motor bikes. In a story the BBC covered on restricting male hairdressers from cutting women’s hair (there were only five such hairdressers in Gaza), interviews with women in Gaza reported in the same article did not support their narrative.39 All women suggested that the implementation of dress codes was overstated or were reversed after protest. This happened, for example, when female lawyers were told to cover their hair. However, the overriding message of these women interviewees was that the major problem they faced was not the curtailment of their rights by Hamas. It was the brutal reality of the siege, with the extreme poverty and unemployment it brought in its wake. Blogger Yasmeen El Khoudary asks “Who is the real oppressor of Gazan women’s rights?” She castigates the international media for their distorted and distracting coverage stating:

The story of our life: the White Man (and Woman) come to Palestine to teach us about rights, while supporting the very entity that is continuously depriving us of them. In Gaza, add to that blaming the deprivation of the local government, and taking the burden off the real cause of this deprivation: Israel’s siege and occupation.40

Islamic nationalism has unleashed both repressive and emancipatory tendencies for women. There have been opportunities for women as activists and leaders, but there are threats of closure and retreat into a more reactionary interpretation of Islam, which affect women negatively. For example, in 2021, the same year women were elected to the political bureau of Hamas, a Hamas-run Islamic court in the Gaza Strip ruled that women require the permission of a male guardian to travel, further restricting movement in and out of the territory.41 Nevertheless, Hamas has opened up new spaces for women’s political involvement, pushed both by the activism of the women themselves and the necessity of engaging with and borrowing from secular feminism in order to secure a wider base of support.

The hijab

The hijab lies at the centre of accusations that Islam is a reactionary force for women. Yet, wearing the hijab in Palestine and across the Middle East has a long history as an act of defiance, resilience and resistance. In 1959, Frantz Fanon, a Martinique born psychiatrist and anti-colonial intellectual, described how unveiling women was central to the French colonial suppression of Algerian resistance:

If we want to destroy the structure of Algerian society, its capacity for resistance, we must first of all conquer the women; we must go and find them behind the veils where they hide themselves and in the houses where the men keep them out of sight.42

In 1958, during the Algerian war of independence, mass “unveiling” ceremonies were staged across Algeria. The wives of some French military officers unveiled some Algerian women to show that they were siding with their “sisters”. Later, historians found that some of the women who participated in these ceremonies had never even worn the veil.43 Many peasant and rural women wore the hijab. To receive a compulsory identity card, they had to take off their hijab and be photographed—a double humiliation.44 In a continuation of racist and colonial thinking, what Muslim women wear has been revived with vengeance as a political tool of Islamophobia in France, particularly since 9/11.45 In March 2004, a ban on wearing headscarves in schools was followed by a ban on wearing any face-covering headgear. In 2023, Emmanuel Macron’s government added a ban on the abaya (a long-sleeved dress of Middle Eastern origin) in state schools and intensified the oppression of Muslim women in the 2024 Paris Olympics, when hijab-wearing female athletes were banned from participating.46

Veiling in Palestine, as elsewhere in the region, has been mobilised as a nationalist issue. During the Great Revolt of 1936, women, remembering the uprising, stated that they veiled to avoid “look[ing] like Jews”, “to show they were Arabs” and “to look like other Arabs”.47 The wearing of the hijab has vacillated as a symbol of resistance. For example, from 1948 onwards, it was considered mainly the dress code of older Palestinian women. However, after the Second Intifada (2000-4) and the construction of the Apartheid Wall, the wearing of the hijab became commonplace as a symbol of resistance to the occupation in all parts of the occupied territories. One woman explained:

The Zionists want to kick us out of our land and become the majority in Palestine. They erected the Wall to impose a separation between in order to stop seeing us. My hihab is a tool for me to show them that we exist and will forever stay on this land.48

Nevertheless, although many women voluntarily chose to wear the hijab as an act of defiance, there was often family and societal pressure to abide by a certain dress code. Women interviewed reinforced the paradox discussed earlier: that the hijab was also experienced as liberating in many of the lives of the respondents allowing them to leave home go to college or university and work outside the house, allowing them to pursue everyday lives free from restrictions of society.49

Although there has been a tendency towards wearing the hijab across the whole region; state, capital, imperialism and resistance play out in different ways in individual societies. Take the example of Egypt in the 1980s. Anne MacLeod argues that the new reveiling among working women has to be understood in the context of dramatic changes in the economy.50 She looks at the way that women’s entry into the labour force opened up both new opportunities and contradictions. On the hand, they resisted their traditional role by working but, on the other hand, accommodated to “traditional” values by veiling in order to do so. Therefore, we do not have a blanket view on the hijab as either reactionary or liberatory. The wearing of it can be an act of defiance and anti-colonialism or rejecting its enforcement can be an act of rebellion in the case of the courageous Iranian young women who defied the Iranian state in 2022-23. Either way, women should not be told what to wear—and socialists are always on the side of the oppressed.

A sharpening of the class divide

Palestinian Women’s resistance in the 1970s and 1980s emphasised working-class solidarity and grassroots mobilisation. This was influenced by Marxist groups such as the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine. The signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993 marked a decisive end to this “revolution era”.51 Neoliberal restructuring in the West Bank, under the leadership of the PA, advanced the careers of elite urban professional women within the movement, while neglecting the rural and refugee population. There were profound implications for women’s participation and leadership with the advent of “soft imperialism” as donor money flooded in from the European Union, US and individual countries through NGOs to shape the “peace process”. The many projects that had a “feminist” agenda emphasised individual interests rather than collectivism, community and resistance. Professional NGOs run by urban elites either sidelined or coopted the women-based grassroots organisations and their leaders that had been so successful in mobilising resistance during the First Intifada. Intense competition for donor funding created a contest for survival and a hierarchy. The women at the top are those women who are most likely to subordinate themselves to neoliberal interests and Western ideology in order to receive funding.

These neoliberal colonial projects continue to be foisted on the people of the West Bank by Western international organisations, individual countries and organisations such as the Cherie Blair Foundation.52 The large majority of Palestinians refuse to participate in these initiatives and consider them to be window dressing that has no relevance for their day-to-day struggles. Above all, these projects remove women’s oppression from the context of the politics of the occupation and resistance to it.53

In the “peace building” process, which normalised Israel as a colonial state, women were dubbed as naturally non-militant “peacebuilders”.54 This is a convenient and divisive rhetoric that detracts from the role of women as activists in the resistance. In her detailed study of voting behaviour in Palestine, Minna Cowper-Coles documents how women overwhelmingly voted for Hamas, with men more inclined to vote for Fatah.55 The issue of dress code and western conceptions of gender rights were not central to women’s voting behaviour and far from the problems women experienced in daily life. Instead, little access to the system of patronage perpetuated by Fatah and the emphasis on welfare for ordinary women by Hamas were decisive in their voting decision’.

Although Hamas has never been explicitly or implicitly anti-capitalist, it has fashioned a sort-of skeletal welfare state, with a web of mosques, charities and schools designed to serve the poor. Israel’s blockade on Gaza worked to increase reliance on welfare, charity and service provision. It is this infrastructure, however feeble, that has bound the Gazan population, and particularly women, ever closer to Hamas. In this sense, Islamism manages to appeal to the poor and oppressed both through the material support it provides and ideologically, like other religions, through fulfilling the function of the “heart in a heartless world”.56

Hamas has been highly successful in targeting professional women, lawyers, writers, journalists, doctors and accountants, through certain programmes. Some of these programmes have a welfare focus aimed at mobilising the poor, such as al-multaqa al-nassawi (women’s encounters). However, Islah Jad explains that initiatives “tended to be revolving doors for less-educated women who were often less able to sustain an activist life and a career”.57 This contrasts sharply with the mass involvement of women from below in the 1970s and the First Intifada.

Violence against women and sexual harassment

In addition to ongoing resistance to the occupation, Palestinian women and girls have brought gender-based violence centre stage. In 2019, the Tali’at (“rising up” or “stepping out”) movement emerged from the demonstrations that swept across Palestine on 3 September. It was triggered by anger at the so-called “honour killing” of Israa al-Ghrayeb by family members.58 Palestinian women came out in droves in twelve major cities, including Jerusalem, Rafah, Haifa and Ramallah, with solidarity demonstrations in Berlin and Beirut.59

Palestinian women and girls experience high levels of violence, directly or indirectly linked to the occupation. Both the Israeli regime and the PA have used such gendered violence to deter Palestinian women from being politically active. Although there has been widespread attention paid to allegations of sexual violence during the Hamas attacks of 7 October 2023, the exposure of Palestinian women to sexual abuse in its aftermath was virtually absent from mainstream media. According to Azadeh Moaveni, abuses to the many Palestinian women arrested included “naked beatings and blows to genitalia, the use of degrading stress positions and threats of rape, and in two verified instances rape itself”.60

None of this is new. Sexualised violence has loomed over Palestinian women since the earliest days of the Israeli state. In April 1948, there were accounts of rape and sexual abuse, with more than a hundred civilians murdered, when the Zionist Irgun and Stern gangs attacked the village of Deir Yassin.61 John Fletcher-Cooke of the British delegation reported that “[w]omen and children were stripped, lined up, photographed, and then slaughtered by automatic firing and survivors have told of even more incredible bestialities”.62 The exploitation of isqat (which roughly translates as honour) and taboos concerning the bodies of Palestinian women has been part of the Israeli strategy for decades. This sexual violence has been obscured and understated, not only by the denials of Israeli perpetrators but also some in the Palestinian community have been reluctant to discuss the violation of women.

Women prisoners have consistently been subject to degrading treatment, sexual violence and threats of sexual violence.63 Azadeh Moaveni describes how sexualised abuse is part of life for Palestinian women, especially young women and activists:

[B]eing called a whore and strip-searched at check points on the way to work or school; being pulled out of bed and dragged barefoot through the streets wearing nightclothes and without a headscarf; being held up at a check point while pregnant, or forced to give birth behind a checkpoint wall; being subject to invasive and degrading strip searches during detention; facing the sexual blackmail of isqat, “the downfall”, where images or video footage showing women undressed or in degrading positions , were used to extract a confession.64

Despite Israel’s best efforts to present itself as a liberator of women and the arbiter of feminism in the region, its public discourse is laden with vile and graphic misogyny. This is particularly true of the IDF, which has circulated images on social media of depictions of “Gaza as a half-naked woman in a niqab with a caption calling on Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu to rape her”.65 In another case, soldiers wore “printed T-shirts that depicted a bullseye pointing at a pregnant Palestinian munaqqaba (a woman wearing a niqab) with the caption, ‘1 shot, 2 kills,’ implying that the Israeli soldier can kill both the woman and her unborn child”.66

The PA has been willing to use brutal techniques such as detention, interrogation, surveillance and gendered mechanisms similar to those used by Israeli forces to deter female participation in political activities. Ideas of shame and honour are mobilised against women’s families. PA security forces have been known to visit women’s and girls’ fathers to “discuss” their activism.67 On demonstrations, women are subject to verbal abuse. For instance, in June 2018, during protests demanding that the PA lift sanctions on Gaza, women were harassed and assaulted.68

Women have been among the hardest hit by the invasion and bombardment of Gaza after 7 October 2023. There is no safe place to give birth and no incubators for premature babies. Lack of access to water and lack of sanitary products affects the mental and physical health of women, exposing them to infection and robbing them of dignity. Displaced women are at an increased risk of gender-based violence and abuse.69

Palestinian women have long highlighted the relationship between the violence of the occupation and violence in the family.70 The 2019 Violence Survey, carried out by the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, found that 29 percent of married women in Palestine had experienced some form of violence by their husbands in the past twelve months (such as psychological, physical, sexual, social or economic violence); 18 percent of women reported physical violence.71 Among the 149 cases of femicide cases documented between 2015 and 2020, most were young women.72 During the lockdowns that followed the Covid-19 pandemic, as in Western and third world economies, there was a sharp increase in domestic violence and femicide.73

We should never be apologists for gender-based violence, whatever the source. Nonetheless, effectively criticising and challenging gender-based violence requires an understanding of the complex context in which it occurs. Here, the violence of the occupation and the genocidal assault on Gaza since 7 October 2023 intensified the oppression of women, rather than bringing closer their liberation.

With family members imprisoned and detained for long periods, extreme surveillance, no freedom of movement, increasing poverty and lack of work for women and men, the family bears the brunt of violence and repression. Even before the invasion and bombardment of Gaza after October 2023, Palestine had some of the worst rates of mental illness in the world.74 Dr Samah Jabr, chair of the Palestinian ministry of health’s mental health unit, describes trauma as being collective and continual.75 Inspired by the work of Frantz Fanon, she puts this in the context of the psyches of occupied and oppressed peoples. She describes young men as presenting with headaches, palpitations, backache—all physical manifestation of the racism, humiliation and joblessness they experience in their daily life: in other words, all symptoms of internalising their oppression. Coping with the intolerable political and living conditions has led to high rates of drug use and, after the Israeli offensive in Gaza in 2006, there was a significant rise in drug addiction.76 The fragmentation of territory and inability to move deprives women of the regular contact with their families that might give them some support and protection in the face of domestic violence.

Conditions of poverty and unemployment spawned an increase in gangs extorting protection money, hijacking tenders for public works and supplying drugs and resulting in violent inter-gang warfare. This was particularly the case among the “48 Arabs”—a term referring to the 21 percent of Arabs that live in Israel. Ilan Pappe writes that, since 2023, “nearly 160 Palestinians were killed by criminal gangs terrorising this community”.77 Many of these criminals had previously been informers for the Israeli security services. These collaborators turned criminals have free access to weapons and use them with impunity.

There is a long history of imperialists using the rhetoric of “saving” women to justify invasion and occupation. In her analysis of colonialism, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak refers to this as “[w]hite men [and women]…saving brown women from brown men”.78 As far back as the British occupation of Egypt in 1882, the consul Lord Cromer argued that the women needed to be liberated from oppression. Then, with breathtaking hypocrisy, he introduced fees in schools in Egypt that prevented young girls from attending. In Britain, he was one of the founders of The Men’s League for Opposing Women’s Suffrage. Similarly, the narrative that Afghan women needed saving from the backwardness of the Taliban was one of the justifications that was used to justify the invasion of Afghanistan by George W Bush. Using feminist rhetoric, Laura Bush and Cherie Blair jumped on this propaganda bandwagon to justify western intervention. Quoted in Socialist Worker, Sonali Kolhatkar, co-director of the Afghan women’s mission, states:

waging war does not lead to the liberation of women anywhere. Women always disproportionately suffer the effects of war, and to think that women’s rights can be won with bullets and bloodshed is a position dangerous in its naïveté.79

Yet, Palestinian women have shown that they can organise and fight against violence on their own behalf. They have not been deterred from coming out onto the streets by using tactics such as anticipating being on the receiving end of violence, remaining in groups on demonstrations and using their right to remain silent after arrests. Yara Hawari reports one activist telling her: “I have to mentally prepare myself before the demonstration, I tell myself, today my body is not my own”.80

With the slogan of “A Free Homeland for Free Women!” demonstrations by Tali’at demand that women’s liberation cannot remain an afterthought. The movement emphasises the link between colonial oppression and violence: “you can’t liberate the land without liberating women”.81 It has expanded to include queer struggles and transnational solidarity with, for example, Black Lives Matters, which erupted in the face of the murder of George Floyd.82 Tali’at co-organised the “A rallying cry for queer liberation” protest in conjunction with queer feminist Palestinian organisations, among them alQaws and Aswat. This acts as a counter to Israel’s “pinkwashing” to brand itself as enlightened and progressive in a sea of “backward” neighbouring states and challenges the Orientalist stereotypes of Palestinians as homogenously homophobic.

Women are caught in overlapping levels of violence. The primary cause is the Israeli occupation enforced by brutality, imprisonment, house demolition, poverty and land encroachment. After 2023, this escalated into a genocidal military assault on Gaza. In the West Bank, while attention was deflected to Gaza and emboldened by election of far-right figures from the settlement movement, violent campaigns of harassment and intimidation have increased in number and intensity. In the first half of 2024, settlers have carried out at least 1,334 attacks on Palestinians across the West Bank, killing at least seven Palestinians.83 The PA paid lip service to the tragedy facing Palestinians and continued to carry out its role as “subcontractor” for the Israeli occupation by suppressing protests and resistance in the West Bank. The PA has carried out a series of violent crackdowns and detentions, targeting not only those seen as threats to Israel’s security but also critics of the PA. This violence has been reflected in community violence between Palestinians, most prominent in Israel. The Israeli state has turned a blind eye to this criminal activity as it serves the interests of their occupation by dividing communities and subduing activism. Across the whole of Palestine, these tensions are played out within the family and are manifest in high levels of interpersonal violence where women bear the brunt.

Women are still on the streets

Although women’s involvement in collective political activism has waned since 1993, this is far from the whole picture. Women have successively been involved in large-scale protests since the Second Intifada. The 2011 protests against the PA in the West Bank, inspired by the region-wide revolutions in the same year, are a prime example. Men and women came out in cities and villages across the West Bank, from Jenin down to Dura. Marching and throwing stones, Palestinians demanded an end to the violence, coercion and corruption of the PA and specifically the resignation of its Prime Minister, Salman Fayaad. These were revolutionary in nature—not just sparked by a fury at their own status as second-class citizens, but also anger about the penetration of international institutions, among them the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, imposing their neoliberal agendas. Women, too, were empowered by these protests. As one activist put it: “we reclaimed a space for women that had been missing since the Second Intifada”.84

The Great March of Return (GMR) were civilian protests that began in the Gaza Strip on 30 March 2018.85 During weekly demonstrations until the end of 2019, thousands of Palestinians, including women and children, gathered near the Israeli-installed Gaza perimeter fence. They called for an end to Israel’s blockade and the return of refugees to their original towns and villages after more than 70 years of displacement. Huge crowds of people demonstrated in Ramallah to end the PA’s complicity in the siege on Gaza. The PA responded accordingly: “protesters were beaten, electric-shock batons were used on the street. They used tear gas, stun grenades”.86 Women were not spared from this violence.

These protests were a glimpse of what was to come in 2021, the Unity Intifada. This involved demonstrations all over Palestine, with people protesting in their thousands across the West Bank, coming face-to-face with Israeli soldiers and the brute force of the PA. Crucially, the Unity Intifada tore through the divisions Israel had been sowing for over 70 years within Palestinian society, thawing the imposed hierarchies between Palestinian citizens of Gaza, the West Bank and those inside Israel’s borders.87

Conclusion

After the First Intifada and the Oslo Accords, women’s political participation has declined. Despite this, women continue to play an important role in the resistance. They are in the forefront of the struggle to survive and meet the material needs of their families on a daily basis. In the face of Israeli encroachment and violence, this does not imply a passive role. They have confronted soldiers and Zionist settlers when they try to demolish their homes and villages, and they continue to be on the streets demonstrating against the Israeli occupation. Since 2019, women have organised against their own oppression and taken to the streets to protest the violence that they face in society.

The rise of Hamas and Palestinian Islamism presents a complex picture. Palestinian Islamism has strong conservative currents within it that hold reactionary views on the role of women in society. The role that women play in the major Islamist organisations, especially Hamas, reflects wider social change, including the mobilisation of women themselves, who are claiming spaces for their organisation. Within the strictures of Hamas’s interpretation of Islam, women have been part of the leadership and raised issues about gender equality and education.

Wearing a headscarf has not been a barrier to being on the streets or confronting Israeli soldiers and the bulldozers that come to destroy their villages. Neither has wearing a headscarf stopped women, young and old, from being at the forefront of the hundreds of demonstrations all over the world protesting Israel’s genocide in Gaza in 2023/24.

We should have no truck with faux feminists who use women’s rights as a divisive issue, an excuse to legitimate their colonial agenda and a diversion against the politics and violence of occupation. Violence has to be situated in the wider violence of the occupation. The emergence of grassroots, independent campaigns against domestic violence, such as Tali’at, are hugely encouraging and essential for the revitalisation of the political left. They are part of a process of rebuilding activism from below that is not dominated by failed nationalist projects.

If we understand Palestinian women’s liberation to be inextricably linked to anti-imperialist struggle, then it is not surprising Palestinian women increasingly feel an affinity to Hamas, regardless of its conservative moral code and vacillating gender ideology. As Marxists, it is crucial that we remain committed to our analysis of women’s oppression, which locates it within class society and the institution of the family. Yet, at the same time, we cannot make our own political principles a condition of another group’s national resistance.

Fighting for women’s dignity, safety and rights within Palestine does not undercut national struggle. Instead, the national question and women’s liberation should be fought for simultaneously. Soheir Asaad, a Palestinian human rights lawyer, declares that “[t]here is no free homeland without free women”.88

At the heart of the Palestinian struggle have been uprisings by workers and the poor, with women central to those struggles. Ultimately, Palestinian resistance must reach beyond the borders of historic Palestine. Its success depends on it becoming more deeply integrated in the struggles of the popular classes against the states in the wider region.89 Women have to continue to play a key role in those national and regional struggles but at the same time have to organise and fight against their own oppression.


Katie Coles works in the national student office of the Socialist Workers Party. Jane Hardy is a writer and researcher. She is a retired Professor of Political Economy and the author of Poland’s New Capitalism (Pluto, 2009) and Nothing to Lose but Our Chains (Pluto, 2021).


Notes

1 Many thanks to Anne Alexander for supporting this article from beginning to end, including with helpful comments on successive drafts.

2 See Hardy and Coles, 2024, for a discussion of women’s resistance in Palestine from the Great Revolt (1936-9) to the First Intifada (1987-93).

3 The Oslo Accords were signed in two stages: 1993 and 1995.

4 Johnson and Kuttab, 2001.

5 The First Intifada started in 1987 and finished 1993.

6 Said, 1993; see Said, 1996.

7 Said, 2000.

8 The Second Intifada lasted from September 2000 to February 2005, triggered by provocative visit of Likud Party leader Ariel Sharon to al-Asqa Mosque compound in Jerusalem.

9 See Hardy and Coles, 2024.

10 Johnson and Kuttab, 2001.

11 Of the one million Palestinians who were displaced between 1947 and 1949 more than a fifth left Palestine altogether fleeing primarily to Lebanon, Jordan and Syria.

12 Abdo, 2014.

13 Hanafi, 2012.

14 According to Palestinian Ministry of Health, between 2000 and 2007, 10 percent of pregnant Palestinian women were forced to endure labour or childbirth at a checkpoint, resulting in the death of at least 35 babies and five women during the seven-year period. See Powell, 2011, and Shaobi, 2011.

15 UN, 2012.

16 Khalili, 2009, p99.

17 Khudairy, 2021, pp34-36. In many Arab cultures, throwing one’s shoe is an insult, as it is regarded as unclean for its contact with the ground.

18 Khudairy, p24.

19 Al-Farra, 2021, p113.

20 Abu Rahmah, 2021.

21 In his work Orientalism, Edward Said’s shows how Middle Eastern people are constructed as inferior, backward and in need of saving to justify Western colonialism and imperialism. See Said, 1978.

22 Sansoour, 2024.

23 Kayali, 2021, p112.

24 Mahmood, 2005.

25 Delphy, 2015.

26 Deeb 2006; Mahmood, 2005; Hafez, 2011.

27 Deep, 2006.

28 Deeb, 2006.

29 Harman, 1994.

30 Jad, 2018, p110.

31 Jad, 2018, p111.

32 These committees were more concentrated and active in Gaza than in the West Bank.

33 Jad, 2018.

34 Baldi, 2022.

35 Reem Riyashi killed herself and four others at the Erez crossing on 14 January 2004.

36 Margolin, n.d.

37 Abu Amer, 2021.

38 Abu Amer, 2021.

39 Shawa, 2010.

40 El Khoudary, 2011.

41 Guardian, 2021.

42 Fanon, 1959, p35.

43 Falecka, 2017.

44 Naggar, 1990.

45 Boulange, 2002.

46 Diallo, 2024. While French athletes wearing the hijab were not able to compete in their own country, the International Olympic Committee rules allowed women from other countries to compete in hijabs.

47 Fleischmann, 2003, p133.

48 Interviewee of Alayan and Shehadeh, 2021, p1057.

49 Alayan and Shahadeh, 2021.

50 Macleod, 1991.

51 Jad, 2018.

52 For example, see www.usaid.gov/west-bank-and-gaza/news/mar-2022-palestinian-women-building-better-future

53 Richter-Devrou, 2018.

54 This was boosted with the adoption of the UN Security Council resolution on Women, Peace and Security in 2000 (UNSCR 1325).

55 Cowper-Coles, 2018.

56 Marx, 1943.

57 Jad, 2018, p116.

58 Marshood, 2019.

59 Saba, 2023

60 Moaveni, 2024, p16.

61 Moussa, 2022.

62 United Nations UN Palestine Commission, 1948.

63 Abdo, 2014.

64 Moaveni, 2024, p18.

65 Abdulhadi, 2019, p541

66 Abdulhadi, 2019, p541

67 Hawari, 2019.

68 Hawari, 2019.

69 Awadallah, 2024; Fayyad, 2024.

70 Studies show that exposure to violence and physical, economic and psychological insecurity correlates with an increase in male-female partner violence. Clark and others., 2010.

71 PCBS, 2019.

72 Šimonović, 2021.

73 Bdier, and others, 2022; Najjar, 2020.

74 Bdier and others., 2023.

75 McKernan, 2024.

76 In particular, the use of tramadol an opiate based pain killer. Progler, 2010; Massad and others, 2023.

77 Pappe, 2023.

78 Spivak, 1993, p93.

79 Socialist Worker, 2010.

80 Hawari, 2019

81 MENA Solidarity Network, 2020

82 Saba, 2023.

83 Shalash, 2024.

84 Nabulsy, 2018, p9.

85 Gadzo and Jnena, 2018.

86 Nabusy, 2018, p12.

87 Alexander, 2022.

88 Asaad, 2020, chapter 6.

89 For an extensive analysis on this see Alexander, 2002.


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