Palestinian Women And Popular Resistance

This book explores Palestinian women’s views of popular resistance in the West Bank and examines factors shaping the nature and extent of their involvement. Despite the signing of the Oslo peace accords in 1993, the Occupied Palestinian Territories in the contemporary period have experienced tightened Israeli occupational control and worsening political, humanitarian, security, and economic conditions. Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted with women in the West Bank, this book looks at how Palestinian women in the post-Oslo period perceive, negotiate, and enact resistance. It demonstrates that, far from being ‘apathetic’, as some observers have charged, Palestinian women remain deeply committed to the goals of national liberation and wish to contribute to an effective popular resistance movement. Yet many Palestinian women feel alienated from prevailing forms of collective popular resistance in the OPT due to the low levels of legitimacy they accord them. This alienation has been made stark by the gendered and intersecting impacts of expanding settler-colonialism, tightening spatial control, a professionalised and depoliticised civil society, reinforced patriarchal constraints, Israeli and Palestinian Authority (PA) repression and violence, and a deteriorating economy - all of which have raised the barriers Palestinian women face to active participation. Undertaking a gendered analysis of conflict and resistance, this volume highlights significant changes over the course of a long-running resistance movement. Readers interested in gender and women’s studies, the Arab-Israel conflict and Middle East politics will find the study beneficial.

The Western media paint Palestinian resistance against Israeli occupation as exclusively violent: armed resistance, suicide bombings, and rocket attacks. In reality these methods are the exception to what is a peaceful and creative resistance movement. In this fascinating book, Dr Mazin Qumsiyeh synthesizes data from hundreds of original sources to provide the most comprehensive study of civil resistance in Palestine. The book contains hundreds of stories of the heroic and highly innovative methods of resistance employed by the Palestinians over more than 100 years. The author also analyzes the successes, failures, missed opportunities and challenges facing ordinary Palestinians as they struggle for freedom against incredible odds. This is the only book to critically and comparatively study the uprisings of 1920-21, 1929, 1936-9, 1970s, 1987-1991 and 2000-2006. The compelling human stories told in this book will inspire people of all faiths and political backgrounds to chart a better and more informed direction for a future of peace with justice.

This work provides a case study of the deleterious effects of patriarchy among Palestinians living in rural villages and refugee camps of the West Bank: its negative consequences for men as well as women, for democratization and for progress toward the creation of a more just society.

During the last twenty years, Palestinian women have practiced creative and often informal everyday forms of political activism. Sophie Richter-Devroe reflects on their struggles to bring about social and political change. Richter-Devroe's ethnographic approach draws from revealing in-depth interviews and participant observation in Palestine. The result: a forceful critique of mainstream conflict resolution methods and the failed woman-to-woman peacebuilding projects so lauded around the world. The liberal faith in dialogue as core of "the political" and the assumption that women's "nurturing" nature makes them superior peacemakers, collapse in the face of past and ongoing Israeli state violences. Instead, women confront Israeli settler colonialism directly and indirectly in their popular and everyday acts of resistance. Richter-Devroe's analysis zooms in on the intricate dynamics of daily life in Palestine, tracing the emergent politics that women articulate and practice there. In shedding light on contemporary gendered "politics from below" in the region, the book invites a rethinking of the workings, shapes, and boundaries of the political.

While the First Intifada (1987-ca.1993) in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT) is generally regarded as the peak of Palestinian women's participation in the Palestinian resistance movement, the post-Oslo period has been characterised by a dramatic decrease in women's participation. This decline stands at odds with the fact that the post-Oslo period has seen the consolidation of Israeli occupation and settler-colonialism in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT), and a substantial deterioration of the Palestinian situation. One school of thought attributes the decline of Palestinian women's participation in resistance to wider 'apathy' and 'stasis' amongst Palestinians in the contemporary period. However, such assessments are reductive and fail to apprehend the particularities and agency of Palestinian resistance and how Palestinian women, in particular, negotiate these complexities. This thesis thus aims to contribute a more nuanced understanding of how Palestinian women in the post-Oslo period perceive, negotiate, and enact resistance. In particular, it focuses on Palestinian women's involvement in nonviolent resistance, as although nonviolence is posited to open up spaces for women's involvement in resistance, Palestinian women have also retreated significantly from nonviolent actions in the contemporary period. To this end, the thesis is framed by a conceptual approach bringing together feminist, social movement, and nonviolent action theorising, and draws on extensive ethnographic fieldwork conducted with women in the Bethlehem governorate. The resultant analysis demonstrates that, far from being 'apathetic', Palestinian women remain deeply committed to the goals of national liberation and wish to contribute to an effective popular resistance movement. Yet many Palestinian women feel alienated from prevailing forms of collective popular resistance in the OPT due to the low levels of legitimacy they accord such actions in their current forms. This alienation has been made stark by the gendered and intersecting impacts of expanding settler-colonialism, tightening spatial control, a weakened and depoliticised civil society, Israeli and Palestinian Authority (PA) repression and violence, and a deteriorating economy - all of which have raised the barriers Palestinian women face to active participation. With any form of resistance (including nonviolence) now entailing great risk, women necessarily limit their participation to those actions they see as legitimate and likely to create meaningful change. For the women interviewed, the legitimacy accorded to particular resistance actions depends on a) the motives of those involved (e.g. whether they are seen to be acting out of national/community concern, or self-interest/ego); and b) whether activities are authentic (i.e. have not been influenced and/or funded by the PA or foreign donors). What the women perceive, therefore, is a legitimacy crisis within the Palestinian resistance movement. However, rather than turning away from resistance altogether, this study finds that Palestinian women envision and enact alternative nonviolent strategies whose methods are largely individualised, indirect, and incremental, but aim at a sustainable transformation of Palestinian society and polity. This thesis thus offers crucial insight into the current reality of Palestinian women's participation in resistance, and contributes an approach that moves beyond the 'visibility bias' of dominant approaches to social movements and nonviolence.

Gender in Crisis

The Western media paint Palestinian resistance against Israeli occupation as exclusively violent: armed resistance, suicide bombings, and rocket attacks. In reality these methods are the exception to what is a peaceful and creative resistance movement. In this fascinating book, Dr Mazin Qumsiyeh synthesizes data from hundreds of original sources to provide the most comprehensive study of civil resistance in Palestine. The book contains hundreds of stories of the heroic and highly innovative methods of resistance employed by the Palestinians over more than 100 years. The author also analyzes the successes, failures, missed opportunities and challenges facing ordinary Palestinians as they struggle for freedom against incredible odds. This is the only book to critically and comparatively study the uprisings of 1920-21, 1929, 1936-9, 1970s, 1987-1991 and 2000-2006. The compelling human stories told in this book will inspire people of all faiths and political backgrounds to chart a better and more informed direction for a future of peace with justice.

This book explores Palestinian women’s views of popular resistance in the West Bank and examines factors shaping the nature and extent of their involvement. Despite the signing of the Oslo peace accords in 1993 and 1995, the Occupied Palestinian Territories in the contemporary period have experienced tightened Israeli occupational control and worsening political, humanitarian, security, and economic conditions. Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted with women in the West Bank, this book looks at how Palestinian women in the post-Oslo period perceive, negotiate, and enact resistance. It demonstrates that, far from being ‘apathetic’, as some observers have charged, Palestinian women remain deeply committed to the goals of national liberation and wish to contribute to an effective popular resistance movement. Yet many Palestinian women feel alienated from prevailing forms of collective popular resistance in the OPT due to the low levels of legitimacy they accord them. This alienation has been made stark by the gendered and intersecting impacts of expanding settler-colonialism, tightening spatial control, a professionalised and depoliticised civil society, reinforced patriarchal constraints, Israeli and Palestinian Authority (PA) repression and violence, and a deteriorating economy - all of which have raised the barriers Palestinian women face to active participation. Undertaking a gendered analysis of conflict and resistance, this volume highlights significant changes over the course of a long-running resistance movement. Readers interested in gender and women’s studies, the Arab-Israel conflict and Middle East politics will find the study beneficial.

Palestinian Women is the first book to examine and document the experiences and the historical narrative of ordinary Palestinian women who witnessed the events of 1948 and became involuntary citizens of the State of Israel. Told in their own words, the women's experiences serve as a window for examining the complex intersections of gender, nationalism and citizenship in a situation of ongoing violent political conflict. Known in Palestinian discourse as the 'Nakbeh', or the 'Catastrophe', these events of 60 years ago still have a powerful resonance in contemporary Palestinian-Jewish relations in the State of Israel and in the act of narrating these stories, the author argues that the realm of memory is a site of commemoration and resistance.