Across the Middle East, there has been a strong tradition of women’s resistance and activism against imperialism for more than a century.1 In Palestine and the Palestinian diaspora, this resistance against colonial oppressors was first against the British and then the Israeli state. Through their colonial projects, and central to bolstering the occupation and repression of Palestine, these oppressors have sought to impose a Zionist version of history and to distort and eviscerate that of the Palestinian people.2 The role of women and their resistance in the national struggle has been expunged to an even greater extent from the historical narrative. Their history has been hidden—sometimes not recorded, sometimes destroyed and at best poorly acknowledged.3 Orientalist thinking, a current in some “feminist” movements from imperialist countries, has portrayed Palestinian women as lacking agency and being “the silent victims of the religious, patriarchal and cultural oppression, as lacking control over self and body” and in need of rescue.4 Yet, despite this rhetoric depicting Palestinian women as passive bystanders, with their role in resistance invisible or marginalised, they have consistently been activists in Palestine’s history of struggle, often at the forefront.
This article explores how Palestinian women’s activism in the national liberation movement is intertwined with the struggle against their oppression—a history of activism and rebellion that can be traced back to the 1920s and earlier. We focus on three high points of the resistance of Palestinian women: the “Great Revolt” from 1936 to 1939, when Palestinians rose up against the British occupiers; the late 1960s with a shift towards armed struggle and feminism; and the First Intifada from 1987 to 1993, when women from the grassroots took the lead in the fight against the Israeli occupation. A second article, which will appear in a forthcoming issue of this journal, will cover the period from 1993 onwards.
The birth of women’s activism: 1920-36
The wider context of the emergence of the women’s movement in Palestine was the imperialist carve-up of the Middle East in the wake of First World War. Anticipating the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, France and Britain made a secret pact, eager to get their hands on oil and advance their economic interests: the Sykes-Picot Agreement.5 This gave control of what is now Lebanon, Syria, Kurdistan and parts of Turkey to France, while Britain grabbed most of what is now Iraq, Jordan and Palestine. Outraged at being double crossed, nationalist movements sprung up to demand the independence and self-determination that they had been promised.6 Women’s movements were formed in every country, both as part of these emerging nationalist movements and also to make demands about their own oppression.7 In Egypt, for example, women of all classes were significantly involved in cultural, social and political activity as part of the 1919 revolution against the British—they were on the streets and gave speeches in mosques and churches.8 Hoda Shaarawy, a leading woman activist, founded the Egyptian Feminist Union as early as 1923.9 The Egyptian Revolution had a profound effect on Palestine and encouraged Palestinian struggles against colonialism and Zionism.
Since the beginning of the 20th century, Palestinian women’s activism was linked to the national resistance struggle. Women were part of the demonstrations that broke out against the Balfour Declaration of 1917, when Britain publicly pledged to establish “a national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine, which set the stage for the Nakba (“catastrophe”)—the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948.10 Britain subsequently received a Mandate to administer Palestine and Transjordan from the League of Nations in 1920. The Palestinian national movement was born, and with it the Palestinian women’s movement. In the 1920s, the leadership of the women’s movement derived from the same class of urban traders and rural landowners that produced the leadership of the national movement. In 1929, mainly middle- and upper-class women from established influential families founded the Arab Women’s Association (AWA). They laid the basis for a women’s programme of confrontation with British policies facilitating Zionist immigration and repressing Palestinian demands for national self-determination.11
The AWA emerged out of the escalating crisis from the repercussions of the Buraq Uprising or Wailing Wall Riots, as it is often known. This was provoked after the British Mandate authorities increased the number of Jewish worshippers allowed access to the Buraq or Western Wall of the Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, a holy site which had been under the Muslim authority for centuries. On 15 August 1929, a group of Zionists led by the members of Betar (“fortress”)—a right-wing youth organisation—marched to the Wall. They raised Jewish flags, sang the Zionist anthem and shouted, “the Wall is ours!”.12 In response, there was an uprising by Palestinians, leading to a week of violence in which 113 Jews and 116 Palestinians were killed. The bulk of the clashes were between Palestinians and the British police, although Zionist terror groups also attacked British forces. However, of the 1,330 arrested, most were Palestinians, and three death sentences were upheld.13
The first conference of the AWA, held in Jerusalem in 1929, protested the Balfour Declaration and Jewish immigration, the mistreatment of Arab prisoners by the police and the enforcement of collective punishment.14 From the 1930s onwards, the AWA was actively involved in demonstrations, fundraising and support for prisoners and their families, bombarding the press about the Palestinian national cause, offering services such as medical care and education, and participating in regional, pan-Arab and international women’s conferences. In June 1931, the AWA called on women to strike on the anniversary of the execution of Palestinians convicted of rebellion during the Buraq Uprising by the British authorities—even after the male-led national movement abandoned plans to do so.15 The increased participation by women in demonstrations in the early 1930s laid the foundations for militancy among women during the Great Revolt.
The Great Revolt (1936-39)
In 1936, simmering resentment at the British Occupation turned into widespread anger and erupted into open rebellion.16 Workers and peasants pushed a “reluctant elite leadership to take more radical positions”.17 The revolt was viciously repressed by the British, often with the help of Zionist militias, using collective punishment, detention centres, deportations, mass arrests, house demolitions, raids on villages, air strikes, restrictions on movements and martial law.18 There has been a tendency to downplay the differences between the elite and grassroots activists “to minimise popular initiatives and to stress the unity under the Higher Arab Committee”.19 In the same way, women’s activism, militancy and radicalisation during the revolt has been marginalised. Urban elite women took part in demonstrations, collected significant amounts of money to fund the rebellion and formed women’s committees in the villages. They held secret meetings to support militants and barraged the government with written protests and condemnations. Women’s committees sprang up in regions of the country that had previously seen little organised activity. The revolt began with a general strike. Members of the AWA toured the towns and cities convincing shopkeepers to observe the strike and smashed the shop windows of those who did not comply.20
While members of the AWA were educated, urban women from middle- and upper-class families, outside of formal organisations, peasants (fellahin), including peasant women (fellahat), played a crucial role in the revolt. These women withstood the worst of the British suppression of the revolt as it was their communities in rural areas that came under physical attack. They hid guns in their clothing or in the fields and traversed the terrain, sharing information with guerillas, such as the location and supply routes of British troops, and were often caught in crossfire. The British branded peasant women as “bellicose” agitators who instigated young men to become combatants.21
From the start of the revolt, peasant women were prepared to use violence to defend their villages and the men in their community by resisting searches and raids. For example, women stoned the police from rooftops when it came to make arrests. Unlike urban women, some peasant women joined the revolt in a military capacity, for example Fatma Ghazzal, who was killed in the battle of Wadu Azzoun in 1936.22 The frequency with which peasant women were arrested for arms smuggling or possession suggests that women had a greater military role than has been assumed or recorded. Overall, women took substantial risks, and when prosecuted on weapons charges, they were given heavy prison sentences of seven to ten years.
A new phenomenon during the revolt was the organisation and mobilisation of female students.23 In the Galilee region, schoolgirls went out on strike, prevented other students from attending school, and demonstrated throughout late May and April 1936. This caused such problems for the police that the British threatened to close schools and informed fathers that they would be fined if their daughters committed offences.
The pan-Arab women’s movements, which had exploded across the region, were vital in supporting Palestinian women. Whereas in other countries, such as Egypt and Tunisia, early women’s organisation made political demands such as the abolition of polygamy and summary divorce and the right to vote, Palestinian women focused on nationalist demands. Women from the pan-Arab movements stood with their Palestinian sisters in bringing the Palestinian cause to the forefront of both regional and international arenas.24 These women’s organisations were highly conscious of each other’s struggles, and there were reciprocal expressions of solidarity, particularly in their condemnation of the British repression of Palestinians during the Great Revolt. In the early 1930s, Arab (and Eastern) women began to cooperate more formally on a regional level, and conferences were held in Damascus, Beirut and Baghdad between 1930 and 1932. This culminated in a call by Hoda Shaarawy for a conference that was held in Cairo in October 1938. Delegations from Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and Palestine demanded the abolition of the Mandate, the abrogation of the Balfour declaration and the prohibition of Jewish immigration and land sales to Jews.25 This pan-Arab support “injected adrenaline into the Palestinian women’s movement”—it boosted the Palestinian women’s morale, reduced their isolation and bestowed international standing on their movement.26
One notable woman activist during the Great Revolt was Sadhij Nassar. She was co-editor and writer for the El-Carmel newspaper established in Haifa in 1908, which by the early 1920s dedicated a section to discussing women’s issues. Her articles ranged from focusing on equality between the sexes to the need for revolutionary struggle against colonialism. Her name crops up frequently in the British archival record as an organiser of demonstrations and as a strike enforcer. She was a thorn in the side of the British, who described her newspaper articles as “incendiary” and the marches that she organised as being particularly “virulent and dangerous”.27 This resulted in her being arrested and detained in Bethlehem women’s prison for nearly a year.28 It comes as no surprise that, after the revolt, the British colluded with conservative elements in Palestinian society as a means of quashing the militancy of women and getting them off the streets. Women, particularly in towns, were increasingly admonished for wearing Western clothes and being engaged in political work outside the home without an escort.
This conservative turn extended to other elements in the nationalist movement, which tried to enforce norms that related to the behaviour, movement and dress of women.29 However, calls to wear more traditional attire were also extended to men, and so these edicts were intertwined with exhortations to demonstrate allegiance to the nationalist cause. Ellen Fleischmann reports that Christian Palestinian women, remembering the revolt, stated that they veiled to avoid “look[ing] like Jews”, “to show they were Arabs” and “to look like other Arabs”.30 Even the AWC was divided over the correct approach to women’s dress: between those who wanted to signify emancipation by wearing modern clothing and those who considered that this might alienate them from the masses.
When the revolt ended in 1939, many Palestinians had been killed, were imprisoned or went into exile—their leadership virtually destroyed. Jewish settlers, who had fought alongside British colonialists to repress the revolt, were able to consolidate their position, arm themselves and gain experience in military tactics. However, the women’s movement remained active and viable until the events of 1948 violently disrupted Palestinian society and its social and political institutions.31
The Nakba
The Nakba of 1948 ripped apart Palestinian society. The Israeli state was established on 80 percent of mandatory Palestinian territory, and between 80 and 90 percent of Palestinians were expelled and dispersed to refugee camps in Gaza (annexed by Egypt), the West Bank (annexed by Jordan), Lebanon and Syria. This had devastating consequences for resistance and the social and institutional infrastructure that the women’s movement had built in the preceding decades.
Middle-class women continued the long tradition of charity work in establishing soup kitchens and orphanages to fill the vacuum created by the collapse of services. However, the gap between elite women and those from rural or poor background persisted—the latter were often marginalised and seen as the passive recipients of elite charity. In the West Bank, political organisations were banned and expressions of Palestinian identity suppressed. Although this had the effect of inhibiting the political activism of women’s organisations, the rise of pan-Arab nationalism drew some women to underground political groups like the Arab Socialist Ba’th Party (resurrection) founded in Syria, the Jordanian Communist Party and the Arab Nationalist Movement, where women became a noted presence.32 Women’s more widespread entry into mixed-gender organisations marked a change in their involvement. The experience that women had in these parties led them to play significant roles in the struggle against Israeli occupation after 1967.
Struggling against occupation: 1967-82
The tactical turn in the Palestinian fight against occupation towards guerrilla warfare and armed struggle at the end of the 1960s was broadly influenced by two factors. First, any illusions that Arab states were either able or willing to bring about the liberation of Palestine were shattered. This was due to Israel’s humiliating and swift defeat of the Arab armies in 1967, and its invasion and occupation of the remaining territory of historic Palestine, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Second, the Palestinian Resistance Movement came of age during a period of global political and social upheaval, when revolutionary and liberation movements waged anti-imperialist resistance in the Global South, for example in Vietnam and Algeria. Civil rights, student and feminist movements exploded all over the globe.
These factors contributed to transforming the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) from a mere handmaiden of Arab regimes to an independent and mobilising political organisation. The Arab League under the leadership of the president of Egypt, Gamal Abdel Nasser, had established the PLO in 1964 in an effort to control Palestinian nationalism while appearing to champion its cause.33 Yet, at the same time, Palestinians at the grassroot level organised themselves in groups and called for armed struggle against Israel. By 1968, the dominant group in the PLO was the Palestinian National Liberation Movement (Fatah; harakat at-tahrir al-watani l-filastini), but the number of factions and guerilla groups increased dramatically.34
Many Palestinians were influenced by this new culture of resistance, including a younger generation of women who turned to more militant tactics. This second generation of women refused to accept the dominant idea of women in Palestinian society as only that of care-takers of the nation—echoed in sections of the nationalist movement—and argued for putting emancipatory social change on the agenda.35 This was the context for the formation of the General Union for Palestinian Women (GUPW) in 1965, which brought together several women’s organisations under its umbrella, reviving the Palestinian women’s movement. Although affiliated to the PLO, according to Jehan Helou, the GUPW had to struggle for independence within it.36
The Israeli invasion and occupation of the West Bank, Gaza and the Golan Heights in 1967 created an additional 250,000-300,000 refugees. It put Palestinians under direct military rule and produced new forms of social, economic and political oppression. The GUPW began responding to the immediate needs of Palestinian women and children, including establishing health centres, orphanages, day care and subsidised meals. However, women were not prepared to confine themselves to a “social work” role. Instead, they were also involved in armed resistance. The major factions established camps for the military and political training of female revolutionaries in Jordan and then Lebanon.
The enduring image of female fighters such as Leila Khaled in global iconography is a testament to the shift that took place in this period. She was a member of the leftist Palestinian Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and a commander of the Dawson’s Field operation, which made her the first woman to hijack an airplane.37 Shadia Abu Ghazalah, another active member of PFLP, refused to leave Palestine and was killed in her hometown of Nablus in November 1968, at the age of 19, when the bomb she was preparing accidentally detonated. These women were part of an intense critique of the Arab regimes, Yasser Arafat (leader of the PLO) and the Palestinian bourgeoisie. Khaled saw the “misery, hunger and humiliation” in the refugee camps at an early age. 38 In her autobiography, she contrasts the fortunes of many women living in camps under atrocious conditions with that of the Palestinian bourgeoisie, who lived in towns and cities with a higher standard of living, greater mobility, better access to education and a measure of immunity from violence. This led her to develop a sharp class analysis of national liberation with regard to the agents of change and the goal of struggle. Khaled believed that workers and peasants in a revolutionary political organisation were the only force for change.39 For her, the ultimate aim of Palestinian struggle was “the construction of a socialist society in which both Arabs and Jews can live in peace and harmony”.40
Although the attention given to female icons, including Leila Khaled, was disproportionate to the relatively small number of women involved in armed struggle, history has largely overlooked the prominent role of masses of women at the centre of resistance in the refugee camps in Lebanon between 1969 and 1982.41 Participant and eyewitness Jehan Helou recalls how the Palestinian refugee camps rose up in 1969 to expel the Lebanese state’s notorious intelligence service, the Deuxieme Bureau (Second Bureau), which surveilled and controlled every aspect of the lives of camp inhabitants. These women, from peasant backgrounds, were fearless in barricading the entry to the camps with their bodies when the Lebanese army attacked.
The PLO had no central vision or programme addressing women’s issues and the resistance movement never developed fully formed ideas on gender equality. Some currents continued to espouse a traditional role for women. Leftist parties, such as the PFLP, the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP) and the Communist Party, had a more positive approach to gender. Yet, like their counterparts in the West, they saw women’s oppression only as a by-product of colonial and class oppression and subsumed accordingly.42
Participation by women in armed resistance helped to challenge traditional assumptions about gender roles. Nevertheless, tensions around women’s emancipation in sections of the nationalist movement remained entrenched, and many women reported on the sexism that they faced within the movement.43 Khaled describes the response to her demand to be involved in armed struggle in the summer of 1968:
it was suggested we could perform two important tasks—assisting overworked mothers in refugee camps and visiting the families of our martyrs. “Social work”, I scoffed, “is not social revolution, I want to participate fully in the revolution”.44
Although many young women wanted to be activists, they had to face a struggle with their parents, with society in general and within the resistance movement itself. For example, women who were well-established in the resistance often needed to seek approval from their family to be able to involve their daughters in activism. Julie Peteet argues that, while most women agreed that they should play a role in the struggle, the relationship between politics and domesticity was contentious. For example, there was a widespread belief that being an activist should not compromise a woman’s ability to carry out duties as homekeeper and carer. Therefore, in order to take part in struggle, women had to “confront the full brunt of cultural rules governing women’s behaviour”.45 This was reflected in different attitudes to male (al-fida’i) and female (al-fida’iyya) heroes who were elevated to celebrated status in nationalist narratives. The contradictory image of the traditional mother protecting the home persisted and was more socially acceptable than that of the female militant. These women fighters were not given the same status as male militants and sometimes had difficulty in reintegrating into their communities.46 Khaled understood this and argued: “While sisters in the West speak of class and sexual oppression…I had to face four kinds of oppression: national, social (the weight of traditions and habits), class and sexual”.47
Despite these obstacles, being part of the struggle transformed women’s confidence. As Jehan Helou writes, “Vanguard women tore up the oppressive traditions, broke out of their cage and introduced their own conventions and norms, thus taking control of their lives”.48 This included rejecting constraints on their mobility, taking up opportunities to travel, including taking up scholarships offered by the Soviet Union, as well as choosing their own husbands or not to marry at all. Julie Peteet describes how young camp women and activists began to describe themselves and other women with a whole new vocabulary,
using a repertoire of intensely active, political and nationalistic terms and categories—such as activists (nashitat), politicised (musayyasat), fighters (fida’iyyat), workers (‘amilat), strugglers (munadilat), and martyrs (shahadat). These new concepts of self were squarely located in a sense of national pride and involvement in struggle and, most important in their sense of empowerment.49
However, the struggle for women’s liberation was firmly and inextricably linked to national liberation. Peteet quotes Samireh, a Fatah activist, who expresses this common sentiment:
I think that because women fought side by side with their husbands, their brothers or with their other comrades, after national liberation women’s liberation is a natural result. They have the right to say, “I did the same as you; I will take my liberty”. We don’t say “Men are our enemy; we should fight men.” This is wrong. The man himself is not liberated. He is disinherited, uprooted; he doesn’t have a state; he has no rights. How can we take our rights from a man who has none?50
When the centre for resistance, including the PLO, shifted to Lebanon, the establishment of the Palestinian National Front (PNF) organised and strengthened mass-based struggles inside the occupied West Bank.51 The PNF was set up as largely a youth initiative in 1972 and spread throughout the West Bank by supporting civil society organisations and voluntary work movements. In 1976, when for the first time tens of thousands of West Bank women were qualified to vote in the municipal elections, women and youth played a major part in electing young and progressive nationalists to town and city councils all over the West Bank. This constituted a shift from the traditional dynamic of top-down politics towards more inclusive organised activism and contributed to the birth of a new women’s movement in 1978.52
The birth of the new women’s movement: 1978
The founding of the Women’s Work Committee (WWC) was announced on International Women’s Day in 1978. 53 In contrast to the relatively small number of women involved in armed struggle, this was established as a new mass-based organisation focused on mobilising women in villages and camps. The birth of this new women’s movement was influenced by the growth and dissemination of feminist ideas across the globe, the increased participation of women in the labour force and improved access to university education in the West Bank from the mid-1970s.
These new women activists from Ramallah and al-Bireh, some of them students at Birzeit University, were mainly from petit-bourgeois families involved in commerce or in the professions. However, they broke with the previous tradition of charitable work of women of middle- and upper-class families by addressing the problems of working women and village women informally employed in agriculture. The WWC operated nationally to educate and involve women in activism, demanding the right to struggle, to work, to be educated and to be represented equally in decision making. Recognising the illiteracy, overwork, poverty and economic dependence of women in the villages as a barrier to political activism, they introduced projects to address the daily material problems faced by women. This included establishing health centres and childcare facilities.
As the economy of the West Bank became annexed to that of Israel, more women were drawn into the workforce. The WWC encouraged women to join unions with which they coordinated to improve the working conditions and rights of working women. For example, the Textile Workers Union experienced an influx of women in this period as a result of the efforts of the WWC, particularly in Ramallah. In 1983, the Ramallah Textile Workers Union supported a strike by women workers at the Danaji factory in Ramallah. The workers won a 50 percent increase in average salaries and an even larger rise in starting salaries.54
Most of the founding members of the WWC were inspired by the political programme of the left-wing DFLP. However, in the early 1980s, tensions inside the Palestinian nationalist movement in the Occupied Territories and the PLO produced a split in the women’s movement, as well as in the labour movement. Nevertheless, the four women’s committees that emerged, loosely affiliated to four political factions, were not afflicted by the same level of factionalism present in other nationalist organisations.55 They managed a high degree of coordination in practical projects and political activism. For example, they jointly organised a sit-in at Red Cross Offices to support hunger strikes by political prisoners.
By 1987, membership of the women’s committee had grown to thousands throughout the West Bank and, in the case of three left-wing committees, in the Gaza strip as well.56 Their success attracted surveillance and repression by the Israeli authorities, which tried to close exhibitions of folklore and handicraft products, confiscated materials and closed offices. Many committee members were regularly called in for questioning at local military headquarters, and leaders faced travel restrictions or were put under house arrest. There were even reports of activists having their employment threatened if they refused to become informers. As Rita Giacaman notes, the fact that the movement was large and amorphous meant that it was hard to repress: “This kind of movement doesn’t depend structurally on the presence of two or even ten people. And you can’t put sixty to seventy thousand peasant women in jail”.57
The women’s committees were a turning point for women’s activism in Palestine. Their outstanding achievement was that of expanding the class base of activists to include village and working women in its organisation and leadership. Women’s involvement in struggle laid the foundations for their participation in the First Intifada.
Women during the First Intifada: 1987-93
In December 1987, an Israeli vehicle rammed into cars transporting Palestinian workers back to Gaza, killing four Palestinians. This was the trigger for a mass uprising against Israeli occupation—the First Intifada. When demonstrations broke out, women took part: they marched, threw stones at soldiers, transported stones, built roadblocks and physically struggled against soldiers to prevent arrests.58 At least in the early stages, the action was spontaneous. Looking back, activist Zahira Kamal comments: “For the first time we weren’t waiting for instructions from the leadership abroad”.59 Women were drawn out of their homes, in villages, refugee camps and poor areas. Confronting soldiers became a collective act in which women would call on each other in the community during raids to protect those being arrested. Women were the mainstay of demonstrations, and by March 1988, women-organised demonstrations numbered 115 per week.60 The Israeli Defence Force (IDF) responded with harsh repression. There were mass expulsions and detentions and women were subjected to live fire, tear gas inhalation, and beatings with scores arrested and imprisoned while trying to protect others. Sixteen women died on marches.61
Women were at the forefront of the popular committees that proliferated in towns and villages to sustain the intifada. They managed strikes and physically resisted arrests despite curfews and restrictions on movement. These committees dealt with all aspects of everyday life, including food storage and distribution, healthcare and the provision of clandestine schools. Daycare facilities extended their hours to support women’s activism outside of the home. Agricultural cooperatives and projects of self-reliance were promoted, which loosened dependency on the Israeli economy, strengthened women’s confidence and gave them a certain material independence.
One activist, Naima al-Sheikk Ali, explains that although social work activities were necessary to sustain the intifada, they were also window dressing for political work and building resistance. Moreover, they were particularly important for organising and galvanising the boycott of Israeli goods.62 A documentary, Naila and the Uprising, demonstrates the central position that women played—at the forefront of the struggle, by organising protests and defending their communities at grassroots level in villages and neighbourhoods. It also shows the personal cost to women through their imprisonment and detention.
Nevertheless, women’s participation in activism challenged ideas about socially acceptable. Penelope Strum explains how women’s participation in the intifada “shook old ideas of dependent women whose honour lay in remaining behind the public eye”.63 Cultural barriers were broken or at least stretched. Women were able to be more mobile and present on the streets; they asserted more choice over marriage partners and the bride price custom was abandoned.
After an initial spontaneous phase of the uprising, resistance became institutionalised as the popular committees came under the auspices of the newly formed Unified National Leadership of Uprising (UNLU) in the Occupied Territories. Although this step had popular support, the active participation of women and their leading role in the neighbourhood committees in the intifada did not translate into women activists taking a prominent role in the leadership of the national movement. Strum describes UNLU communiqués as “profoundly traditional, patriarchal and condescending”.64 Men are referred to as “brother doctors” and “brother workers”, whereas women are mentioned only in relation to others, lumped in with children or old people and commended for their steadfastness (sumud). By the third year of the intifada, steps forward in women’s social position had not translated into concrete gains. The following years saw the resurgence of forced early marriages, and the old concept of isqat (“loss of honour” or “shaming”) reared its head more forcefully. As a result, more women and girls dropped out of their education in schools and universities.
Pressure on women was compounded by the increased use of sexual assault or threats of sexual assault by the IDF to deter younger Palestinian women from activism. The Israeli authorities’ exploitation of enduring notions of family honour in Palestinian society and practices of sexual abuse, harassment and blackmailing of women meant that notions of honour and purity received even greater attention. A study found that young women and teenage girls were most likely to report fear of isqat during the intifada.65
Despite these obstacles, sections of women looked beyond their activism in the struggle against occupation and raised questions about the social problems that they faced during the intifada. In December 1990, the women’s conference The Intifada and Some Social Problems, held in Jerusalem, was attended by 500 women from different organisations and political currents. The conference raised issues about low levels of women’s participation in decision-making; the importance of education; the impact of early marriage; objections to the imposition of the veil; the problems of women prisoners; and discrimination in education and work.66 A left-wing element of the women’s resistance, the Union of Palestinian Working Women’s Committees, raised more radical issues relating to birth control and started holding lectures about early marriage, divorce and the division of labour at home.67
The experience of the intifada opened up the possibility of social transformation, but the gains women made in their expanded political activism and transgression of social boundaries were too easily reversed. The institutionalisation of the uprising, the intensification of Israeli repression, and rising influence of conservative campaigns had negative repercussions for women’s political participation. Women were lionised as “the mother of martyrs”, “the makers of generations” and “sacrificers of the nation” rather than being applauded for their activism. Echoing the experiences of women at the end of other high points of struggle, Yara Hawari points out that although women were glorified during their incarceration, they often faced social obstacles on their release, including finding it difficult to marry or find employment.68
Unremitting Israeli oppression intensified the decline in women’s militancy by weakening the women’s and neighbourhood committees, leading to the loss of support networks and coordination capacities. With increasing insecurity, the family emerged as the primary source of protection and stability and reinforced women’s traditional domestic role.
The formation and growth of Hamas
The formation of Hamas in 1987, at the beginning of the First Intifada, created a new context for women’s leadership and participation in struggle. The roots of Hamas lay in the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, which hitherto had been a welfare and charity organisation. However, the explosion of the intifada prompted a dramatic shift in their tactics. They became vociferous in their criticism of the PLO and rejected the two-state solution as well as any compromise with Israel. Like many other contemporary Islamist movements, Hamas also put forward conservative views about women’s role in society. This was reflected in a campaign, which started in Gaza from 1988 onwards, to impose the wearing of the headscarf on Palestinian women. However, it is too crude to understand this simply as anti-modern and anti-women. First, aside from the religious associations of the hijab, it soon began to take on nationalist significance, as had been the case during the 1936-9 revolt. Hamas made direct links between the wearing of the hijab and resistance to occupation, national heritage and protection from Israeli soldiers. However, its justification relies on the importance of women’s “purity”, where the “immodest” dress and conduct dishonours the martyrs and unwittingly aided the enemy’s design to corrupt the nation.69 Second, as Jad points out, Islam is not a fixed set of edicts, its specific form emerges from particular social and political circumstances.70
Some Islamists held quite reactionary views on women’s role in society. Yet, at the same time, the role played by women in the major Islamist organisations, especially Hamas, reflected wider social changes and the mobilisation of women themselves to claim spaces to organise. The phenomenon of women adopting modern forms of the hijab was visible across Muslim majority societies and contained contradictory impulses of both accommodation to a sexist society and protest against it.71 As Jad suggests, rather than emphasising the theoretical aspects of Islam, attention needs to be given to the actual lived experience of women and how it affects their daily lives.72 Jad presents a fascinating account of how the necessity of recruiting women to Hamas, combined with their own expectations about political participation, has led to them play a significant role within the organisation.73 Some of these arguments will be more fully developed in a second article.
Conclusion
The brutal and relentless repression of the Israeli state during the First Intifada took its toll on Palestinians, who were exhausted after six years. Leaders of the Fatah faction of the PLO, with Yasser Arafat as the most notable name, wanted to control the grassroots movement that had exploded in 1987. He entered “peace talks” known as the Oslo Accords (1993), which brought the mass movement to an end. The Oslo Accords, which established the Palestinian Authority in 1994, had a profound effect on women’s activism. It was externally negotiated and signed off without any consultation with those women that had put themselves in the frotn. It was an agreement by two vastly unequal sides that fragmented Palestinian territory by reshaping the land and economy of the Occupied Territories to the benefit of Israel. The aftermath of the First Intifada, therefore, marked a new context for the struggle against occupation. The influx of aid from countries and organisations to bolster the Palestinian Authority in line with imperialist interests undermined women’s grassroots struggles. This aid is part of a neoliberal agenda that individualises the fight for women’s rights and sets conditions for the receipt of project funding, detracting from more militant and collective responses.74 The PLO negotiation of the Oslo Accords vindicated Hamas’s criticism of their collusion with Israel and solidified its position as the only serious opposition to occupation. As we have briefly discussed, the rise of Palestinian Islamism has contradictory and complex consequences for women’s participation in activism
Nevertheless, the challenges after 1994 in the wake of the Oslo Accords do nothing to undermine the fact that women have been, and continue to be, involved in the struggle against the occupation of Palestine. As Ted Swedenburg points out, there are parallels between the Great Revolt in the 1930s and the First Intifada in the late 1980s, when women “left their homes to enforce pricing, boycotts and strikes: to organise demonstrations, smuggle supplies; confront soldiers…”.75 There is an important class element to both of these uprisings. Although the role of middle-class women in the resistance dominates the literature, it was peasant and village women and women in the camps, who were at the sharp end of the repression and physically confronted the British and Zionists. Women from the bourgeoisie and professional middle classes had more choices in terms of where they lived and access to education that protected them to some extent from the full force of repression.
Although some women raised issues about their oppression, even in the early days of the nationalist movement, these ideas were mainly subsumed by the nationalist agenda. However, this changed in the late 1960s, when the explosion of radicalism in the form of anti-imperialist movements and the growth of feminism influenced the Palestinian struggle. This gave confidence to some sections of women to raise and articulate issues about their own liberation more forcefully in relation to expectations about marriage, behaviour, work and their role in the nationalist movement.
From the early 20th century through to the end of the First Intifada, women’s political activism has enabled them to destabilise existing gender roles and create space for themselves in the public sphere. Yet, gains at the high point of struggle were fragile and needed to be constantly defended. There were tensions between the participation of women in the struggle and the persistence of conservative ideas about women’s role. Nevertheless, women continue to physically resist on a daily basis in the defence of their villages against incursion and demolition and have been part of street protests in Gaza.76 In the cities and towns of the West Bank, women have taken to the streets to protest against domestic violence, and there is a complex story to be told about women’s continuing role in Hamas and the Islamic nationalist movement.
Acknowledging and learning from these high points of struggle challenges the invisibility or marginalisation of women in the history of Palestinian resistance and provides inspiration for current and future generations.
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).Katie Coles works in the national student office of the Socialist Workers Party.
1 Many thanks to Bayan Haddad and Jehan Helou for agreeing to be interviewed and commenting on the text. We would also like to thank Judy Cox, Phil Marfleet and Manal Shqair for their comments. Anne Alexander was generous in supporting the article from beginning to end and providing comments on successive drafts.