8

Multiple Jeopardy

Gender and Liberation in Palestine

Nada Elia

“We have more strength than any man. The strength that I showed
the first day of the protests, I dare you to find it in anyone else.”

—Razan Najjar

Palestinian women and queers in the homeland are often asked by concerned Westerners how we negotiate the challenges of living full, rewarding lives in a conservative society. Those of us in the Western diaspora are asked if we are not better off, really, living in “modern” societies where we can wear whatever we want and go wherever we want. These questions are misguided. Instead, Palestinians should be asked how we persist, how we continue to live, love, and care, in a society that is living under Israel’s brutal system of apartheid, intent on erasing our very existence and history. We should be asked how we persist under the rule of law of an ethno-supremacist country that views each and every one of us as a “demographic threat,” simply for being who we are. We should be asked how our youth retain the impulse to be free, when trigger-happy Israeli soldiers and snipers are ordered to kill unarmed children demanding their human rights. We should be asked how we continue to build community, nurture each other, and denounce settler colonialism in the same breath as we reject patriarchy. And anyone who is concerned that those of us in the diaspora are better off than in Palestine should stop and think about who is the greater oppressor of the Palestinian people, including women and queers: Israel, which denies every Palestinian their basic rights, or Palestinian society, with its at times stifling “traditional values,” which are often little more than an attempt to hold on to one’s culture, threatened with erasure.1 And they should consider that, for the millions of us longing for the homeland, our diaspora is not a choice but a reality imposed upon the Palestinian people by Israel.

I begin, reluctantly, with a brief discussion of the Western discourse on Palestine because I believe it is of critical importance to our circumstances, as the question of Palestine is a global one, with close to 80 percent of the entire Palestinian people forcibly displaced from their ancestral towns and villages, while Israel, which dispossessed us, receives financial support and political immunity from Western powers.² Indeed, the recognition of the West’s critical role in ending the oppression of the Palestinian people is implicit in the fact that the liberation strategy agreed upon by a broad coalition of Palestinian civil society organizations, namely the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions Movement (BDS), hinges on global solidarity by individuals living in those countries that can impact Israel—and these happen to be mostly in the West. Nevertheless, as far as the mainstream discourse in the West is concerned, Palestinian women and queers either do not exist or are oppressed by “Islamic fundamentalism,” with little recognition of Israel’s violence, much of which is gendered.

The longstanding Western refusal to address Palestinian women’s struggles was made clear in 1985, when a patronizing Betty Friedan, an icon of Western feminism, with its “the personal is political” rallying call, attempted to censor the prominent Egyptian feminist Nawal El Saadawi at the United Nations International Conference on Women held in Nairobi, Kenya. “Please do not bring up Palestine in your speech,” Friedan told El Saadawi. And in a stunning demonstration of bad faith and intellectual laziness, both stemming from unfettered racism, Friedan “explained” to the fiery Arab feminist that “this is a women’s conference, not a political conference.”³

Friedan obviously had no clue who she was dealing with. As El Saadawi later wrote, in a clear articulation of the political condition of Palestinian women:

Of course in my speech, I did not heed what she [Friedan] had said to me since I believe that women’s issues cannot be dealt with in isolation from politics. The emancipation of women in the Arab region is closely linked to the regimes under which we live, regimes which are supported by the USA in most cases, and the struggle between Israel and Palestine has an important impact on the political situation. Besides, how can we speak of liberation for Palestinian women without speaking of their right to have a land on which to live? How can we speak about Arab women’s rights in Palestine and Israel without opposing the racial discrimination exercised against them by the Israeli regime?4

White/Western feminism’s attempt at erasing the political context of Palestinian women’s oppression was evident yet again around the 2017 Women’s March on Washington, when liberal feminists objected to the leadership of Palestinian American organizer Linda Sarsour, and the newly minted “Zionesses” complained of “antisemitism” because Palestinian women’s circumstances were on the platform, as part of a broader discussion of US President Donald Trump’s Muslim ban and the overall Islamophobia he pandered to. Interestingly, the “Zioness Movement” sprouted on the US activist scene with the explicit intention to counter feminists who were successfully denouncing Zionism. It chose the slogan “Unabashedly progressive, unapologetically Zionist” in direct response to the growing, if belated, understanding among many Western feminists that Zionism is racism and has no place in progressive movements.⁵ This understanding had become obvious, for example, when the largest academic women’s organization, the National Women’s Studies Association, voted in favor of BDS at its November 2015 annual convention. Meanwhile, in street protests and at LGBTQ meetings, anti-Zionist activists in cities from Seattle, Washington, to Berlin, Germany, were also rallying in support of Palestinian rights, disrupting “pinkwashing” events, and leading major national marches.

Pinkwashing is Israel’s smoke-and-mirrors attempt to distract from its egregious human rights record by foregrounding its own supposed gender liberalism while directing an accusing finger at Palestinian society. Anti-pinkwashing activists have successfully disrupted such propaganda by pointing out that Israeli society overall is quite conservative; Israel is only “gay-friendly” when it serves its political purposes and only when individual gay people are Israelis or the much-coveted Western tourists.⁶ Simply put, Israel does not make exceptions for queer Palestinian refugees when it comes to the denial of their right of return; an Israeli soldier does not inquire about a Palestinian individual’s sexuality as they go through a checkpoint, letting queers through while detaining straight Palestinians; and house demolition crews do not spare the homes of gay Palestinians.⁷

It is in this context of the complete erasure of Palestinian women (and more generally, but not as consistently, Arab and Muslim women as well) that one must understand the statement made by former US secretary of state Madeleine Albright as she rallied for Hillary Clinton—a solid booster of the apartheid state—in the 2016 presidential campaign: “There is a special place in hell for women who do not help each other.”8 Albright later apologized for that comment, just as she had earlier apologized for answering a question about the deaths of half a million Iraqi children as a result of US sanctions with “We think the price is worth it.”⁹

Meanwhile, in Palestine itself, women and queers have all along been actively resisting their own “special place in hell,” battered by Western imperialism and Israel’s unrelenting genocidal intent on the one hand and Palestinian culture’s lingering patriarchal values on the other. In the masculinist, patriarchal dominant discourse, “struggle,” especially “national struggle,” is generally understood as armed resistance. Yet armed resistance is only one of many ways Palestinians have fought their oppression and certainly not the most effective, as it has never achieved any lasting victories. Another, more comprehensive understanding of “resistance” would take into consideration all the ways we persevere against the odds—that is, our sumoud (steadfastness) when Zionists are intent on erasing our very existence. As the popular Palestinian saying goes, “Our mere existence is resistance.”

Specifically, Palestinian women’s resistance is as old as the national struggle itself, predating the 1948 Nakba, and has taken on many forms, from the unarmed storming of British Mandate barracks, the sheltering of orphans, and the behind-the-scenes political organizing throughout the First Intifada to community building in the diaspora, fostering safe spaces for queers, providing Palestinian children access to playgrounds, and insisting on Palestinian rights to the US Congress. It is often observed that history is written by the victors. What is not sufficiently denounced, except in feminist narratives, is that history is also primarily a record of men’s fighting, with rarely any mention of women’s contributions unless these happen to have taken place in traditionally masculine fields. (Leila Khaled, for example, who hijacked planes, is much better known than Hind al-Husseini, discussed below, who sheltered orphans.) Nevertheless, knowing and understanding a society requires that we look to its alternative history, which only seldom makes it into textbooks. And while no list of Palestinian women’s accomplishments in this alternative history can possibly be exhaustive, it is helpful to give a brief sampling of such achievements so as to best illustrate the multiple ways we, as Palestinian women, are navigating the murky waters.

Beginning almost a century ago, when Palestine was still under the British Mandate, with a very strict martial law imposed on the Palestinian people, Palestinian women were already organizing against colonialism. In fact, throughout the 1920s, women were marching side by side with men in protests against Britain’s plan to give part of their homeland to European Jewish settlers—a plan first made public in the Balfour Declaration of 1917, which Britain promptly set into action by facilitating the influx of Jewish immigrants, even as it forcefully repressed Palestinian opposition to their dispossession.10 The harshness of the British Mandate may pale in comparison to the horrors of Zionism, with its insatiable expansionist ambitions, yet its impact should not be overlooked as we survey Palestinian women’s contributions to their society’s resistance to imperialism and settler colonialism. For example, members of the Arab Women’s Union in Jerusalem, established in 1929, were active participants in political protests; they provided shelter and medical aid to fighters and played a pioneering role in raising social awareness of the importance of women’s liberation to the overall well-being of their society. The General Union of Palestinian Women, an umbrella organization for various Palestinian women’s groups, founded in 1965, remains active today in both the social and political spheres and links gender equality with national liberation. The Palestinian Women’s Work Committees, formed in the late 1970s, focused on the mass recruitment of women; as a result, today many women’s organizations have memberships in the thousands, addressing the many challenges facing Palestinian women, from education to employment to national liberation.¹¹

One of the early examples of Palestinian women’s resistance to colonialism happened in the late 1930s,¹² when the British stormed the militant village of Baqa al-Gharbiya, near Haifa, burning down its houses and taking away all its men to a nearby camp—sadly, a common occurrence as the British were quashing Palestinian resistance to their imperial plans. That same night, the village women, “armed” only with rocks, descended upon the barracks and successfully secured the release of the men. Throughout the mandate, women continued to contribute directly to the resistance by selling their jewelry in order to purchase guns for fighters, even though there was a very strict British ban against Palestinians having any weapons, with hefty penalties for possession. Women also formed social clubs that acted as and evolved into fronts for political organizing. These groups maintained the social network essential for any functional society whose men had to go into hiding or were exiled for their participation in the revolt against the imperial plan to dispossess them.

The British Mandate gave way to Jewish Zionism’s stranglehold on Palestine, and any serious overview of Palestinian women’s contribution to the survival and well-being of our society must pay tribute to Jerusalemite Hind al-Husseini, who used her personal privilege to found Dar al-Tifel al-Arabi, an orphanage she established in 1948 and that continues to offer Palestinian children shelter, education, food, and fun to this day. In April 1948, after Zionist militia raided the village of Deir Yassin, killing, decapitating, and raping a majority of the adults in one of the many horrific massacres predating the bloody birth of Israel, the Jewish terrorists rounded up fifty-five orphaned children, most of whom were under nine years old, and paraded them in Palestine’s capital city to be stoned and spat on before abandoning them there, homeless, terrified, cold, and hungry.13 When Hind al-Husseini, a member of a prominent Jerusalemite family, saw the children, she took them all under her aegis, first housing them in two rooms in a nearby market, where she visited with them daily, comforting them and feeding them, then moving them to a convent before moving them one last time to her own family home, a mansion built by her grandfather in the Sheikh Jarrah area of Jerusalem. Al-Husseini went on to purchase two additional buildings and continued to take care of these children, and thousands more over the years, until she passed away in 1994. Her legacy lives on to this day, as Dar al-Tifel, or “the children’s home,” as it is better known, now has the capacity to board three hundred children, accepting only girls, either orphaned or from impoverished families, offering them shelter, education, food, sports, arts, and extracurricular activities. Its goals, according to its website, are: “Taking care of female Palestinian orphan and needy children, providing them with a good decent life. Establishing schools to teach and educate girls in addition to training them to be self-independent. Sponsoring extra curricular activities, establishing literary, scientific, and art clubs with sport activities towards developing their talents. Preserving the Arab and the Palestinian heritage and culture.” In addition to Dar al-Tifel, Hind al-Husseini also established a school for social work and a women’s college, which were later transferred to al-Quds University, as well as a museum and a cultural center.

Like many women of her generation, al-Husseini was also very active in a number of social organizations that evolved into more openly political14 work as Palestine was catapulted into survival mode after the Nakba—the catastrophe that befell Palestinians with the creation of Israel. These organizations remained active as Israel tightened its grip on Palestinian lives and land. This uninterrupted activism by women who had an experiential understanding that no nation can be “free” until all its members, men and women, are free and equal, is beautifully depicted in Julia Bacha’s documentary Naila and the Uprising. Bacha had not intentionally set out to make a feminist film, focused on women and gender dynamics, when she first decided to make a documentary about the First Intifada. Instead, she was primarily concerned with recording an important moment in Palestinian history that is frequently misrepresented. Her vision evolved as she conducted field research and interviewed participants in the grassroots movement. As Bacha writes in her director’s notes, what she discovered was that women were instrumental in coordinating the popular social upheaval and often exploited Israeli society’s own patriarchal assumptions to coordinate the uprising. Indeed, as one of the women in the documentary explains, women were less likely to be arrested after curfew and less likely to be searched, so they could transport leaflets or cloth with which to stitch together Palestinian flags.¹⁵ As the film’s website explains, “While most images of the First Intifada paint an incomplete picture of stone-throwing young men front and center, this film tells the story that history overlooked—of an unbending, nonviolent women’s movement at the head of Palestine’s struggle for freedom.”¹⁶ The women in this uprising, still referred to as “the intifada of the stones,” mobilized hundreds of thousands of civilians, ran mobile heath clinics, organized underground schools after Israel forcefully shut down Palestinian schools, and launched indigenous self-sustainability initiatives so as to allow Palestinians to boycott Israeli products.

Bacha writes:

The First Intifada was not only a vibrant, strategic and sustained nonviolent civil resistance movement; for months, it was also led by a network of Palestinian women who were fighting a dual struggle for national liberation and gender equality. We knew we wanted to bring this story to light by producing a documentary that could provide insight and wisdom from the veteran women activists of the First Intifada to today’s rising leaders…. From the First Intifada to the present moment, it’s clear: women’s leadership in civil society organizing is vital. But too often, their work is sidelined or ignored…. Women have consistently been a part of influential social movements coming out of the Middle East, but time and again, the cameras focus on armed men, leaving us with a narrative that not only erases women but also misrepresents the struggles themselves, as well as the demands behind those struggles.17

Just as the French colonizers had completely misunderstood Algerian women’s contribution to the Algerian Revolution, assuming that those in “modern” (Western) dress could not possibly be anti-French, so the Israelis did not suspect that some of the “well-dressed” Palestinian women were also radical activists and organizers. Eventually, as more Palestinian men were arrested and/or deported, women took the helm of most social organizations, from prisoners’ committees to community sustainability. These Palestinian women, the backbone of the First Intifada, had an incisive analysis of social norms and were intentional about resisting and challenging both Israel’s violations of their human rights and their own society’s restrictive gender roles. Today, along with the denunciation of the disastrous outcome of the Oslo Accords, which put an end to the First Intifada, there is a growing realization that the accords also dealt a serious blow to women’s emancipation and the social gains they had achieved as they led the grassroots social uprising. Bacha comments on that unfortunate development in the director’s notes about Naila and the Uprising: “The film is also a cautionary tale for what happens when women are stripped of their leadership roles and excluded from ongoing struggles.”¹⁸

Western feminists have been and remain quick to denounce the oppression of Arab women as a result of Islamic fundamentalism but not as a result of Israeli occupation, and they seem oblivious to the fact that occupation and militarism have gendered manifestations that aggravate women’s circumstances in Palestine, as they would anywhere else. This is all the more surprising when these feminist scholars are eager to analyze the feminization of poverty in other war-ravaged countries, the disenfranchisement of women as military institutions hold sway over a society, the violence inflicted on sex workers and sexual slavery in war zones, and the overall increase in sexual violence in communities that have experienced armed conflict. When it comes to Israel, however, many Western feminists’ critical analysis collapses into a reductionist binary that views Israel as “Western,” “modern,” “civilized,” and Palestinians as “backward,” and thus fails to grasp the gendered aspects of Israel’s oppression of the Palestinian people. The myopic lens looks only at the micro-environment, namely Arab society, and completely overlooks the macro-environment, namely Israel’s occupation. Yet, as many Palestinian feminists have documented over the past decades, Israel’s violence is gendered, impacting women in multiple ways, from the denial of health and reproductive rights to sexual torture in prison. And, in what can only be viewed as an extreme stretch of the definition of “gay-friendly,” Israel has also pressured queers in Gaza and the West Bank into collaborating with the occupiers by threatening to out them to their conservative families unless they spy on members of their own communities. And, of course, as psychological and physical torture are rampant in Israeli jails, so is sexual violence, including rape.

The documentary Women in Struggle, by Buthina Canaan Khoury, follows four Palestinian women political prisoners after their release from Israeli jail, as they narrate their experience in Israeli detention. One, Rasmea Odeh, was subjected to extreme torture and raped with a broomstick when her father, who was brought into the room with her and ordered to rape her, refused to do so. Forced to confess, Odeh was sentenced to life in prison for allegedly detonating a bomb in a café that resulted in the death of two Israeli students. Following her release after ten years, as part of a larger prisoners’ exchange, she emigrated to the US in 1995, obtained US citizenship in 2004, and became a cherished leader of the Arab American community in Chicago.

Catapulted into prominence by her struggle against a corrupt justice system that eventually stripped her of her citizenship and deported her on the basis of a confession made under torture, Odeh has become a symbol for millions of women who identify with aspects of her multifaceted experience.

Odeh represents today’s organic, grassroots leader. Her credentials come from decades of community work, empowering immigrant women and building political community. A criminalized, marginalized Palestinian immigrant survivor of settler colonialism, militarism, imprisonment, and physical, sexual, and psychological torture, she exposed Israel as a racist occupier and colonizer to communities of immigrants, feminists, and Black and brown people she had organized alongside for decades.

Meanwhile, back in Palestine, one group that has done important work in addressing the multiple jeopardy of Palestinian women and queers generally is AlQaws for Gender Diversity and Sexual Diversity in Palestinian Society (AlQaws is Arabic for “rainbow”), under the leadership of Haneen Maikey. Grounded in the understanding that there is no separating the personal from the political—the same understanding articulated by Nawal El Saadawi at the 1985 International Conference on Women—AlQaws’s statement on its political vision clarifies:

Our work strategies and programs emerge directly from our field experience and careful analysis of the concrete local reality that shapes current social and cultural attitudes around sexual and gender diversity. For Palestinian society, all grassroots work is affected by Israeli colonialism and occupation. And, alQaws has been demonstrating for over a decade that all political work intersects with issues that are sometimes dismissed as too personal, apolitical, or irrelevant to anti-occupation and de-colonial organizing, such as homosexuality and queer identity, non-normative gender, and so on. In all of our work, we aim to expand our impact on our society through an ever-increasing circle of partners and supporters who adopt our vision, while standing firm in our beliefs and values. Our commitment to supporting and strengthening Palestinian queer/LGBT communities cannot be separated from our vision for a self-determined Palestinian society free from all forms of oppression.19

The multiple forms of oppression became clear in the summer of 2019, when in response to AlQaws announcing that it would be running a number of workshops for queer youth in the West Bank, the group came under attack by none other than Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas, who would not be in (symbolic) power himself were it not for the US and Israel.²⁰

Earlier that summer, a young Palestinian had been severely stabbed in Tel Aviv by his own brother over suspicions about his sexuality. And shortly thereafter, the entire world heard the screams of the young Israa Ghrayeb as she was being beaten to death by her own family members, murdered for having gone to a café with her fiancé, not yet husband.²¹

These horrific incidents were loudly denounced by Palestinians within Palestine itself, who took to the streets in protests carrying signs proclaiming that “Patriarchy Kills” and “There is no honor in honor crimes.” Hundreds also joined protests specifically against homophobia, with signs highlighting that Palestinian queers should not have to take refuge in their occupier’s gay-friendly Tel Aviv to avoid their own society’s homophobia. Indeed, the popular outrage at the stabbing of the gay teenager and the murder of Israa Ghrayeb are indicative of the progress made within Palestinian society. The protests, and the nascent Tal’at movement,22 are indicative of a widespread understanding that patriarchy is oppressive, even murderous, rather than “part of our traditions,” and that it must be overthrown if Palestinian society is to be a healthy resilient one. Simply, we would not be where we are now—survivors, leaders, organizers—were it not for our Palestinian mothers, grandmothers, and great-grandmothers, who have upheld Palestinian society for the better part of a century, against tremendous odds from both within and without.

The memory of Razan Najjar is a reminder of this. On June 1, 2018, Razan was shot by an Israeli sniper while she tended to wounded protesters participating in the Great March of Return in Gaza. Razan was a paramedic, yet Israeli snipers still targeted her despite her visible white coat. Weeks before she was murdered, she explained to a New York Times journalist what made her go out day after day, knowing snipers were shooting indiscriminately: “In our society women are often judged…. But society has to accept us. If they don’t want to accept us by choice, they will be forced to accept us because we have more strength than any man.”

Today, Palestinian women and queers cross geographic, social, and gender borders as they proudly stand front and center in progressive causes everywhere, just as Palestine itself is finally understood as a progressive, decolonial, indigenous, feminist, and queer issue. And while it is only right that this understanding of the multiple jeopardy facing Palestinian women and queers comes from within these communities themselves, in the homeland as well as the diaspora, it is time for allies globally to also grasp that our circumstances can only be addressed through an anticolonial approach, free of imperialist feminism and Islamophobia.