Transnational Feminist Perspectives on Terror in Literature and Culture

5. Armed Struggle and the Search for State, 144.

13. In her book Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times Jasbir Puar, in the context of the War on Terror, asserts: “The historical and contemporaneous production of an emergent normativity, homonormativity, ties the recognition of homosexual subjects, both legally and representationally, to the national and transnational political agendas of U.S. imperialism” (9).

18. Milton-Edwards and Farrell 3.

22. I draw this from the title of an essay by Simona Sharoni called “Every Woman is an Occupied Territory: The Politics of Militarism and Sexism and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict.”

23. Hochberg, “Check Me Out.”

24. More recent statistics gathered in May 2008 by the Israeli Human Rights organization B’Tselem inform that “the Israeli army has 62 permanent checkpoints inside the West Bank and 40 permanent checkpoints managing movement between the West Bank and Israeli sovereign territory. In addition to these permanent blockades, Israel operates temporary, or ‘flying,’ checkpoints, which are randomly set up throughout the West Bank and East Jerusalem” (“Check Me Out” 578). Danny Rubinstein’s 2006 essay underlines how the grimness of the landscape has increased even further with the new checkpoints. Unlike the old checkpoints that Amal encounters right after the 1967 war where one could negotiate with the officer, the new checkpoints, monitored by “a network of cameras and loudspeakers,” are “a maze of iron fences, leading to revolving gates” which allow one person through at a time. Beyond the gates are three or four examination centers, and from a hidden post “a soldier can stop the movement of the gate at any moment or trap the person inside.” On the other side a military police officer, who “cannot hear you unless he presses the right button,” calls out for an identity card over a loudspeaker as the detainee inserts the identity card and travel permit into the slot (140). Kotef and Amir point out that checkpoints can also be roadblocks, metal gates, or earth mounds. Most of them are located inside the occupied territories, obstructing traffic from entering or leaving villages, encaging the cities, disconnecting them from towns and villages dependent on them, and “fracturing the few roads” where Palestinians are permitted to move. Checkpoints hinder “any real possibility of maintaining normal daily lives (getting to work, school, the doctor, the market) and of establishing a viable political existence of an independent Palestinian entity (maintaining a political community and territorial continuity)” (974).

25. Michael Omi’s and Howard Winant’s work on racial formation in the US.

26. This is a reference to Chandra Mohanty’s essay “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses,” first published in Boundary 2 and later reproduced in her book Feminism Without Borders.

27. Here I have extended Joseph Massad’s use of the term “weapon of culture” in the context of Palestinian cinema to define a broader repertoire of cultural resistance against the Israeli occupation.

31. I first saw this video at UC Berkeley in 2011 during AATW activist Abrasha Blum’s presentation. Law Students for Palestine organized this event.

32. “The Wall” <http://www.stopthewall.org/the-wall>

33. I have subsequently drawn from Blum’s presentation at Berkeley where I was among the audience. I was researching Palestine and Arab North Africa at Berkeley during Blum’s US tour.

HISTORY OF DISPOSSESSION AND TERROR

The Balfour Declaration of 1917 initiated the Palestine/Israel crisis. Approved by the British cabinet, it declared: “His Majesty’s Government views with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object.” Arab resistance to the Declaration prompted British Secretary of State for the Colonies, Winston Churchill, to validate the Declaration in the British White Paper of 1922. With Churchill’s justification of a Jewish national home in Palestine, the League of Nations, true to its colonial character, accepted the Balfour Declaration and granted Britain an administrative mandate over Palestine in 1922. On the other hand, the refusal of the French, Swiss, and Czechoslovakian governments to take in any more Holocaust refugees on economic grounds, and their resistance to help resolve a European crisis, were seen as legitimate (Refugees 6). The Arab resistance of 1936–1939 against Zionist appropriation of Palestinian land and labor that began with six months of a general economic strike finally compelled Britain to retract support for unlimited Jewish immigration to Palestine in its 1938 Macdonald White Paper. The White Paper subjected immigration to “economic absorptive capacity,” limiting it to 75, 000 for the next five years. After that Britain would not facilitate such immigration without Arab consent. In resistance the Zionist paramilitary organization Irgun Zwei Leumi in its August 1939 Geneva bulletin underlined its responsibility “in organizing and conducting the mass extra-legal immigration to Palestine” (Irgunpress 4). The bulletin claimed “every Jew has a right to come to Palestine … in defiance of the new laws, until we will transform what Britain calls ‘illegal’ immigration into our recognized legal right before the whole world.” In 1939 G.R. Warner of the British Foreign Office shared with H.L Baggallay, First Secretary, British Foreign Office, extracts from a letter to Warner by a Times correspondent in Geneva whom he refers to as Daniels. According to Warner, Daniels described Irgun as an “extensive secret organisation throughout Palestine formed on Nazi lines” (1). Among the British Mandate government’s list of “Jewish Illegal Organizations in Palestine” the Haganah, established in 1923, was the largest and was “described as the secret army of the Centre and the Left” (2). According to British administrative records: “Among prominent Palestinian Zionist leaders believed to be associated to a greater or less extent in the control of the Hagana are Ben Gurion, Shertok, Eliahn Golomb Remez and Zazlani.” The other organizations on this list include Palmach, Ofra, Mishmar Moledeth, Mishmeret Tzeira ‘Shel Mapai, Irgun, and Stern Group—the last two being extremely militant. British administrative records testify to British Mandatory Palestine’s serious concern with Zionist terrorism. The British would officially leave historic Palestine in 1948, but not before facilitating the partition of Mandate Palestine into the new Israeli state and the Arab-controlled West Bank and Gaza. In the Arab-Israeli partition war the massacre of the Palestinian village of Deir Yassin by Irgun and the Stern Gang would come to represent for Palestinians the face of Israeli terrorism. Palestinians would become refugees in their own homeland and across the world. The British military actively assisted the Yishuv’s (Jewish residents in Palestine before the formation of Israel) paramilitary organization Haganah to facilitate the 1948 ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, but also assailed right-wing Yishuv organizations, labeling them as terrorists. Earlier, during the 1936–39 Arab resistance, the British recruited thousands of Jewish police, “encouraging the activities of the Special Night Squads, Jewish murder gangs, trained by a British officer with strong Zionist sympathies, Orde Wingate” (Newsinger 4). However, with British anticipation that Palestinians would join Hitler against the British as a response to British support of Jews, the Haganah was driven underground, its cadres were imprisoned and arms seized.² British policy again changed with the German threat to the Middle East during the Second World War when the Haganah was again acknowledged. The Special Operations Executive of the British Army offered military training to Haganah members to form the elite organization Palmach to support the British war efforts. Irgun, which would later assassinate the British Minister Resident in the Middle East, Lord Moyne, was also absorbed into the British war efforts. Only the Stern Gang remained active against the British throughout the war, even supporting the German conquest of Palestine in lieu of resettling more European Jews in Palestine to jettison the immigration cap in the Macdonald White Paper.

As British diplomats had excused European countries from absorbing Jewish refugees, the American diplomat James McDonald, the League of Nations High Commissioner for Refugees from Germany (1933–1936) who eventually became the first US Ambassador to Israel (1949–5), excused the US because it “was too far distant from Germany” (7). However, in a telegram to Sol Bloom, a member of the Jewish-American House of Representatives, McDonald would state: “Palestine though small has already given permanent homes to more refugees than all the rest of the world and it still offers the best hope for refugees today and tomorrow.” In response to McDonald’s 1946 memorandum as a member of the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry into Palestine, President Harry Truman “called for the immediate admittance of 100, 000 Jews to Palestine, a proposal supported both by Congress and a majority of Americans” (Dinnerstein 28). Zionists influenced Truman through Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau Jr., Truman’s advisor on minority affairs David K. Niles, as well as through their funding of Democratic election campaigns.³ On November 27, 1947 the UN General Assembly voted 33 to 13 for the partition of Palestine, the vote heavily influenced by the networking of the UN’s American delegation and prominent Jewish figures across the world.⁴ The US became an even more significant defender of Israeli state terrorism after the six day Arab-Israeli War of June 1967 when Israel seized the Jordan-controlled West Bank and the Egypt-occupied Gaza. The Lyndon Johnson administration, concerned with the Vietnam situation, lifted the embargo over US arms to Israel, no longer requiring nuclear non-proliferation by Israel as a condition for receiving US arms.⁵ The subsequent administration of Richard Nixon would be invested in bilateral talks with the Arab states and Israel because Vietnam, arms control, and the Middle East became linked priorities in US policy toward the USSR. In 1974 Nixon waived Israeli repayment of $2.67 billion of a total of $4.42 billion in military assistance in the Israeli War of 1973 against the combined forces of Syria and Egypt, supported by the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) from Lebanon.⁶ During the Israeli Defense Force’s (IDF) invasion of Lebanon in 1982 to decimate the PLO, the US suddenly withdrew its peacekeeping forces from Beirut, leaving the PLO and Palestinian refugees to face terror, torture, and massacre at the hands of the IDF.

Unlike Palestinian armed resistance or Nazism, Anglo-American displacement of Palestinians and enabling of Zionism to terrorize Palestinians out of their homeland did not become part of the official history of terrorism in Palestine/Israel. In the previous chapter I elaborated on the empire’s insistence that fighting terrorism of the otherized Muslim male is about fighting for women’s rights. As such, women’s acts of resistance against the empire are crucial in deconstructing the gendered logic through which terrorism is defined. Likewise, it is vital to illuminate Palestinian women’s and queer opposition to the empire and its obligations to Zionism to dismantle Zionist pretensions to gender liberation.

In the Arab resistance of 1936–39 urban elite women sent written condemnations to the government for terrorizing the resistance through detention, deportation, “civilian bomb attacks … searches, house demolitions, internment camps, [and] death sentences” (Fleischmann 128–9). Schoolgirls from the cities “strew nails in the streets to puncture the tires of British vehicles” and went on strikes, boycotted foreign goods, and courted arrest through street marches with Arab flags. However, it was really the peasant women who sustained the Palestinian armed struggle by providing “food, water, concealment, and information” to fighters hiding in the mountain villages (126). Some of them fought in a military capacity as well. Fatma Ghazzal was killed in the Battle of Wadi Azzoun in 1936, and “Muhammad Bashir al-Safuri’s female relative … worked with the rebels, bore arms, [and] wore a uniform.” Women hid “weapons or ammunition behind infants in arms or among the folds of children’s clothing,” and Ruqiya Huri, another peasant woman, “while traveling to the mountains with a doctor to dispense medical aid and deliver arms, hid weapons under her clothes, groaning and pretending to be in labor when at a British checkpoint” (127).

As Palestine became iconic of Arab disenfranchisement in the pan-Arab consciousness, within the larger transnational feminist movement Arab feminists clashed with the International Alliance of Women (IAW), dominated by Europe, which refused to criticize the imperialistic and pro-Zionist policies of European and American governments.⁷ Ellen Fleischmann has pointed out imperialist feminism’s contradictions then and now in supporting “imperialist projects of certain Western democracies and their selectivity in upholding in international arenas so-called democratic principles for some nations and not for others” (187). In response, the Egyptian feminist Huda Sharawi, who sat on the IAW board, called the 1938 Eastern Women’s Conference in Cairo where Palestine would be the central focus. This would strengthen the ties between Palestinian women and the pan-Arab feminist movement.

With the 1948 partition and the formation of the paramilitary PLO in 1964, women’s participation became more militant. Fatah and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) joined the liberation movement in 1958 and 1967 respectively, and were united under the PLO umbrella. The Hamas that has governed the Gaza Strip since 2006 was constituted in 1987 during the Palestinian uprising in the First Intifada (1987–1993). All these parties have been considered terrorist organizations without recognizing how the Euro-US empire sustains Palestinian acts of violence through its support of Israeli state terrorism. During the 1967 Arab defeat (naksa or disaster), which led to the Israeli occupation of the Arab-controlled West Bank and Gaza, West Bank women were told to collect arms the Jordanians abandoned and to conduct the initial acts of resistance.⁸ Secret cells for women were formed in Jordan, and resistance groups recruited women globally as cross-border transactions of the Palestinian women’s movement became militarized. The PFLP challenged the bourgeois leadership of the women’s movement by emphasizing women’s political and military labor as a way to end dependence on men.⁹

Similarly, it is crucial to examine queer politics in the region in order to dismantle Israel’s colonial logic that it is the only bearer of queer rights in the Middle East, and hence deserves support against Palestine. Both the women’s and queer rights movements in Palestine/Israel refuse a neoliberal logic separating “rights to [gender] identity, from ‘political justice,’ understood as the continuous participation in the reconfiguration of power and the grammar of life that it licenses.”¹⁰ The 1990s were celebrated as the “gay decade,” with the parliamentary amendment of the Equal Employment Opportunity Act, the Parliament (Knesset) hearing of out gay soldiers, the Supreme Court rulings in favor of equal employment benefits for a same-sex partner and in favor of the broadcast of a TV program on gay Israeli youth. These gestures paralleled the further decline of Palestinian rights after the 1993 Oslo Accords between Israel and Palestine.¹¹ Oslo led to more poverty, unemployment, militarized checkpoints, and decreasing job visas for Palestinian laborers inside Israel.¹²

More recently, in 2009 the state memorial service of a lesbian and a gay teenager shot at the Tel Aviv GLBT Association—HaAguda—was hijacked to promote Israel as an inclusive modern democracy. President Shimon called Israel a “Thou-Shall-Not-Kill Nation” and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called Israel “a country of tolerance” and said murder was “anti-Israeli” (Hochberg 494). However, when the Israeli Palestinian Knesset member Issam Makhol was denied participation, the HaAguda spokesperson said: “We didn’t want [him] to make any connection between our memorial ceremony and the occupation” (495). However, Jasbir Puar, who was a part of the US LGBTQI delegation to the West Bank and Israel between January 7 and 13, 2012, preceded by the US Women of Color delegation to Occupied Palestine between June 14 and June 23, 2011, offers other insights into how the occupation is deeply intertwined with queer lives. In the online journal The Feminist Wire, Puar writes from the West Bank about “the constraining and suffocating spatial and economic effects of apartheid” that are pinkwashed or masked by Israel’s “purported concern for the status of homosexuals in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.” Such pinkwashing declines “to take into account the constant and omnipresent restrictions on mobility, contact, and organizing necessary to build any kind of queer presence and politics.” Nonetheless, through a counter-movement—pinkwatching—groups such as PQBDS, Al-Qaws, and Pinkwatching Israel have been monitoring Israel’s pinkwashing efforts. Pinkwatching is especially crucial amidst the Islamophobic homonationalism and homoimperialism of a post 9/11 world.¹³

RECOGNIZING TERROR: WHOSE DEFINITIONS ARE AT WORK?

A gendered lens is particularly helpful in understanding how definitions of terror in the context of Palestine/Israel work through a power differential. In my work, gendering terror not only means examining the experiences of Palestinian women as women and Palestinian queers as queers and the consequences on them of Israeli apartheid. It is also about the violent relationship in which the privileged masculinity of Israel stands, as a national security state founded on settler colonialism, with regard to an occupied and feminized Palestinian population of refugees, as well as the Palestinian queered as the quintessential terrorist. In this gendered discourse of terror it is even more important to inquire into the figure of the woman terrorist, who is seen as even more gender transgressive. Another question that remains vital to the examination of gendered terror is how transnational feminism allows us to understand the ways in which terror is deployed. An important site of engagement for transnational feminism is the border and women’s experiences at borders, as well as the gendered subjectivities that emerge at such contact zones in their struggles against racism, nationalism, classism, and heteronormativity. As such, checkpoints become important sites for the examination of the deployment of Israeli state terror. Narratives of occupation and partition are also narratives of nations within nations and of border crossings within nations. Hence they are also about gendered spaces of unequal power relationships such as land and homes left behind by refugees in the face of terror as well as refugee camps on occupied land and in other countries. All these spaces provide powerful transnational feminist sites of critical inquiry into the deployment of terror.

To recognize the gendered workings of terror it is crucial to discuss how terror has been used by the mechanisms and everyday practices of the Israeli state as an organizing category. The machismo of the national security state of Israel is well brought out in the authoritativeness with which it champions its own impunity and lack of accountability. Menachem Begin, twice prime minister of Israel and a member of the Likud party, proudly declares in his 1930 memoir The Revolt that he was a terrorist in the cause of Zionism. In his address to the Parliament in 1950, Israel’s first Prime Minister, David Ben Gurion, declared Israel a national security state (Address to the First Knesset of the Prime Minister):

The establishment of the state of Israel depends first of all on security, immigration, and settlement. … These three matters need laws—fundamental laws and ordinary laws. The question is whether the rule of democratic law which Israel needs can be assured better by a constitution, supreme and privileged, or a series of fundamental laws functioning in the same way as all other laws. (13)

Ben Gurion had asserted that laws could do what no constitution could—“laws that can be changed and amended from time to time as the need arises, that cannot be frozen by their supporters, and that are binding for every citizen of the state as long as they are in force” (10). He had cited as a model for Israel the legal precedent in England’s internment of parliamentarian Captain Archibald Ramsey in 1940. Ben Gurion had extolled the power of the state of exception by referring to how Ramsey was imprisoned “for a number of years, under an order issued by the Home Office, and without any reason being stated, on the strength of an emergency law made for the security of the state” (14). Thus Ben Gurion, in the early days of state formation, laid out the relationship between the national security state of Israel and a continuous state of emergency, accompanied by violations of habeas corpus. It is against these early legislative moments of Israeli state-sanctioned impunity that the concept of terrorism, differentially applied to Israel and the Palestinian resistance, needs to be understood. The key questions here are: What epistemologies of terrorism are at work? How and by whom are such epistemologies generated so that they selectively capture some acts of violence within their frame of definition and do not capture others? What is the relationship between such definitions and the power structures of the state?

To understand the politics of terror in Palestine/Israel, it is important to trace the masculinized raison d’être of Israeli state formation. David Lloyd argues that “every time Israel assaults Gaza or invades Lebanon on the grounds of a defensive counter-terrorist response” (62–3), it can be traced to Israel’s grounding in the 1648 Westphalian political system. In this order, European nation-states recognized each other’s sovereignty while continuing to consider the land of uncivilized, feminized non-European others as land free to be penetrated and occupied because they “are not understood as moral actors” (63). There is an inherent contradiction within Zionism, embedded in the secular Westphalian nationalisms as well as in a quasi-religious philosophy of redemption through the return of the diasporic Jews to Zion, linked to the return of the Messiah. This long predates the Holocaust.¹⁴ Lloyd points out: “Ultimately, the institutions of Israeli secular democracy rest upon the most extreme claim to a divine or messianic exception no longer allowed to any other state in the world.” This situates Israel’s claim within a “colonial genealogy” of expansionism through settler colonialism.¹⁵ Here the comparison to apartheid South Africa—which I discuss in a later chapter—is unavoidable. The apartheid in Palestine/Israel is marked by “the construction of walls and barriers, separate areas for residence and movement, and tightly controlled bantustans” (67), as well as the “draconian laws” that maintain the “state of perpetual siege” in Gaza and the West Bank (69). In the absence of a formal constitution, Israel’s Basic Laws, precedents in court cases, and the colonial Emergency Regulations of the British Mandate guide the daily affairs of the state, the latter being regularly deployed for censorship, house demolitions, and deportation of Palestinians.¹⁶ Like all settler colonies empowered to declare a perpetual emergency in the interest of a counter-terrorism state, Israel implements a leviathan of existing or new laws that encage and divide the enemy in fenced and walled prison-like plots of land, without access to basic rights. In fact, the third Russell Tribunal on Palestine, also known as the International War Crimes Tribunal, met from November 5–7, 2011 in Cape Town, South Africa. Its main goal was to investigate if Israel were an apartheid state, despite international laws that prohibit such practices.

The state of exception has been an important mechanism in sustaining imperialism, as is evident in concentration camps such as Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, and Auschwitz, as well as the apartheid systems of South Africa and Palestine/Israel. That state of exception is evident in Israel’s “disproportionate rage” against the enemies who are reconfigured as terrorists for daring to resist Israeli practices.¹⁷ The hypermasculinity of Israel is especially discernible in its military attacks on a feminized Palestinian population rendered vulnerable by its refugee status and with no state behind them to protect them from Israel’s military capability. However, the use of terror as an organizing category of the Israeli state has changed from the early years of state formation when Israeli terror groups carried out contained armed attacks and bombings, subsequently giving way to Israeli air strikes and chemical warfare. The Israeli Defense Force (IDF) massacred one hundred times more Palestinian civilians in Gaza than there were Israelis killed in the conflict. Among its other acts of state-sanctioned terrorism are the 2006 mayhem of civilians in Lebanon and “the repeated use of illegal weapons like white phosphorus and DIME, or Dense Inert Metal Explosive, from Beirut in 1982 to Gaza in 2009” (Lloyd 70).

Judith Butler in Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? questions the presuppositions that constitute the “frames of recognition” through which we come to distinguish 9/11 terrorism from other acts of violence, such as the US War on Terror. For Butler such frames of recognition are based on what lives are considered grievable:

Forms of racism instituted and active at the level of perception tend to produce iconic versions of populations who are eminently grievable, and others whose loss is no loss, and who remain ungrievable. The differential distribution of grievability across populations has implications for why and when we feel politically consequential affective dispositions such as horror, guilt, righteous sadism, loss, and indifference. (24)

Within this frame the right to life only incurs on those whose existence is defined as “lives”—in the eyes of Israel, Israeli nationals. So then one can ask: What happens to Palestinian “lives that are not quite lives”? (31)—lives that have been feminized and queered in Israeli discourse and practice. Refusing to recognize the personhood of Palestinians, the Israeli state has pushed them to survive without sustaining life conditions such as shelter, work, food, medical care, and legal status. In place of a liberal, individualist view of personhood divorced from social structures, Butler argues for the recognition of precarious life based on a social ontology. Such an ontology takes into account the social and environmental conditions and relations that variably sustain life within “global interdependency and the interlocking networks of power” (31). It is by recognizing the social and environmental conditions of Palestinians through such an ontology that Palestinian lives can be recognized as precarious, and hence will become imminently grievable. In the absence of such frames of recognition, Israeli state violence against Palestinians is justified as acts of national security because Israeli lives are considered precarious and grievable. Hence they are justifiably defensible by military means, while Palestinian lives are not since Palestinian personhood is not recognized by the Israeli state. Thus Palestinian resistance to precarity gets defined as terrorism.

In this regard it is vital to address the way in which the label of “terror” has shape-shifted when it has been applied to left and secular Palestinian organizations of the 1960s and 1970s and then to the Islamist ones in the 1980s and after. The secular leftist PLO of the 1960s was regarded as a terrorist organization till the Madrid Conference of 1991 that attempted to initiate a peace process in the Palestine/Israel crisis. It led to the Oslo 1 Accord of 1993 when PLO President Yasser Arafat recognized the state of Israel without Israel granting statehood to Palestine. With Oslo, the PLO came to be recognized across the world as the only legitimate representative of the Palestinian people. On the other hand, though Hamas—the 1980s Islamist organization—was democratically elected in Gaza in 2006, the Hamas government is not recognized as a legitimate government because Hamas is listed as a terrorist organization. Hamas, however, argues that it has the right, recognized by the UN, to resist an occupying force like Israel far superior in military might than the millions of Palestinian refugees it has rendered stateless at home and abroad.¹⁸

Here a reflection on the relationship between “terrorism” and state-sanctioned counter-terror violence or war is particularly helpful. Terror, as signified by Hamas, collapses the distinction between combatants and non-combatants that characterized traditional warfare until the nineteenth century, as well as the paradigm of just wars and the Geneva conventions.¹⁹ Spivak asserts: “[I]t has seemed increasingly clear to me that ‘terror’ is the name loosely assigned to the flip side of social movements—extra-state collective action—when such movements use physical violence” (91). Referring to the continuing sexual violence against women by UN peacekeeping forces and the US army, she questions the arbitrary and naturalized distinctions between different forms of violence, calling “terrorism” an antonym for “war,” “which names legitimate violence, but also, paradoxically, for peace” (92). Spivak points to the oxymoron “peacekeeping forces” associated with the UN. Her argument about the slippage between war and peace finds a curious resonance in the context of the Israel-Palestine conflict when read against how the image of the suffering Palestinian woman became iconic of Israel’s humane approach. The Israeli media had long circulated the image of the Palestinian woman in labor, often delivering her dead baby at the checkpoint.²⁰ This was not to underscore the wrongdoing of Israeli occupation of Palestinian land but to indicate that surplus violence on Palestinian women should be eliminated. In the process “[o]ther forms of violence are erased, denied, or routed back into the figure of terror” and are seen as justifiable because they prevent terror (Kotef 180). The national security state steps in to protect more than just its own noncombatant women and children from terrorism—an argument that I have made in the context of the War on Terror earlier. This is the national security state’s struggle not merely against terror but also against Islamo-fascism; it sees itself as also “defending ‘their’ women and children (the women and children who must be freed from oppressive regimes, from burkas and stoning)” (183). This split not only “breaks the link between [Palestinian] suffering and terror, victims and perpetrators” (180) but also hijacks Palestinian women and children to divide and conquer the Palestinian liberation movement. Thus it is vital to disarticulate the discursive links that Israel has established between Palestinian women-and-children and Israeli benevolence. In fact, this discursive link is most effectively severed by the figure of the Palestinian woman terrorist who articulates how the aspirations of Palestinian women are tied to those of the entire nation rather than being at cross purposes with those of Palestinian men. Laura Sjoberg states:

[V]iolent women, whether terrorists, suicide bombers, war criminals, or perpetrators of genocide, interrupt gender stereotypes about women, their role in war, and their role in society more generally: women who commit proscribed violence are not the peaceful, war-resistant, conservative, virtuous, and restrained women that just warriors protect from enemies. … Instead these women are a security threat themselves. (14)

Thus the discourse about Israel being a just warrior protecting the laboring Palestinian woman at the checkpoint from the Islamo-fascism of the enemy normed male is violently interrupted by the figure of the Palestinian woman who engages in political violence against Israel—the perpetrator of terror rather than its target.

Similarly it is crucial for gender scholars and activists to disjoin Israeli neoliberal politics from the queer issue. Such politics allow Israel to justify state violence against Arabs, and argue against Palestinian sovereignty by constructing Israel as a safe haven of modernity for Palestinian queers who are fleeing queerphobia in their communities. Jason Ritchie has foregrounded the irreducible differences that the material and discursive practices of Israel creates between the lives of Palestinian and Israeli queers.²¹ Ritchie claims that the checkpoint (with its humiliation of strip searches and violent Palestinian deaths) more appropriately captures the experiences of Palestinian queer lives than the US and Eurocentric narratives about “ ‘coming out of the closet’ into full citizenship and national belonging” of many queer Israelis. The inextricable link between queerness and the Israeli politics of terror is clear in the utilitarian value of the queer Palestinian for Israel in sustaining the apartheid: “The queer Arab/Palestinian, here, is little more than a narrative device for conjuring up the specter of his oppressor, the all purpose enemy of the liberal state and its liberal queers: the dangerous, illiberal Arab [terrorist]” (567). Amal Amireh unravels a different logic for queer Palestinian existence in the West Bank and Gaza:

In the testimonies I read gathered by various Palestinian political organizations during the first Intifada, young men “confessed” that the Israeli Secret Service photographed them having sex with women and sometimes with men and were then pressured into collaboration to avoid public exposure. (638–9)

It is a vicious cycle where Israeli police blackmail Palestinian queers into becoming collaborators by banking on their dread of the Palestinian Authority. This in turn “gives much credence to these fears” about Palestinian queers being Israeli informants—the fears of a traumatized “society under siege” (639). At the same time Israel systematically refuses asylum to gay Palestinians and deports them for national security. So, Amireh argues: “[a]ny understanding of Palestinian homophobia, then, cannot limit itself to references to Islam and culture …, but has to take the context of military occupation as a constitutive element of this homophobia.”

Thus recognizing terrorism in Palestine/Israel automatically carries with it the burden of unraveling how and by whom the definition and discourse of terrorism have come to be constructed. Tracing Israel’s Westphalian tradition is important in arguing how Zionist entitlement to a mythical claim to Palestine—an anomaly in the history of modern state formation—can also be read as terrorism. The Butlerian question “When is life grievable?” disentangles how the Israeli state, by depriving Palestinians of personhood, has managed to erase the recognition of the precarity of apartheid-controlled Palestinian lives. At the same time the state has been able to label Palestinian resistance to Israel as terrorism and justify its own regime of violence as national security since Israeli lives are recognized as precarious, and hence grievable, in the politics of terror. Spivak draws this politics of terror out by jumbling the received notions of war and peace vis-à-vis terror. Likewise, Ritchie and Amireh delink the war-terror dichotomy through queer interventions that underline the terror perpetuated in Palestinian queer lives by Israel.

SPACIO-CIDE, MILITARIZATION, WOMEN AND QUEER REFUGEES

Criticized as a neologism because space is not murdered but appropriated, Sari Hanafi’s concept of spacio-cide nonetheless captures the terror of Palestinian refugee lives by verbalizing the exterminating modality of Israeli settler colonialism. It can be argued that land appropriated by the Israeli state from Palestinians annihilates the space that Palestinians owned. In fact, land appropriation as murder is aligned with Judith Butler’s argument about social ontology, discussed earlier. Appropriating land denies Palestinians life-sustaining conditions, and is hence equivalent to the annihilation of a community—ethnocide. Spacio-cide can thus be read as a transferred epithet in which the annihilation of a population becomes equivalent to the appropriation of land. Hanafi argues: “[T]he Israeli colonial project is ‘spacio-cidal’ … in that it targets land for the purpose of rendering inevitable the ‘voluntary’ transfer of the Palestinian population, primarily by targeting the space upon which the Palestinian people live” (107). Spacio-cide harnesses a three-pronged strategy of which the annihilation of Palestinian space is the first. Secondly, the forced expulsion of 800,000 Palestinians between 1948–49, the continuing impoverishment of Palestinians, and denial of medical treatment to them are tantamount to ethnic cleansing. Finally, spacio-cide depends on a “creeping apartheid [that] utilizes increasingly impregnable ethnic, geographic, and economic barriers” between Israelis and Palestinians (108).

However, the Israeli spacio-cidal project has managed to mask itself as a transcendental phenomenon. In Parliament in 1950, Prime Minister Ben Gurion said that the battle of Israel against Amalek depicted in the Torah was “Israel’s first battle, 3,300 years ago, and it was fought in the same area as the last battle of the State of Israel 13 months ago” (16). Thus, the Palestinian nakba of 1948 was reconstructed by Ben Gurion as the last battle in the Jewish passage back to Zion. Such discursive formations, as Oren Yiftachel underscores, were marked by “an unproblematic historical linearity of ‘forced exile’ and subsequent ‘return,’ nearly 2,000 years later,” and led to the “unquestioned gospel” of Jewish national security (9). While recognizing the effects of spacio-cide on Palestinians as a people, it is crucial to illuminate the distinctive ways in which it operates on Palestinian women, children, and queers to show the intractable integration of the occupation and the gender question. A focus on women, children, and queers does not imply that non-queer Palestinian men did not experience Israeli violence. In fact, hundreds of thousands of non-queer Palestinian men have been beaten, arrested, dispossessed, detained, imprisoned, and killed. Through a focus on women, children, and queers in the entire book the project attempts to challenge the dominant paradigm of the non-queer male as the political actor, and hence the subject of political violence. The vast majority of texts written from supposedly non-gendered perspectives are written with the male as the norm because of the patriarchal underpinnings of epistemology itself. In that sense a feminist, queer, and children’s perspective is an attempt to balance that inequity in knowledge systems. Illuminating the agonized lives of Palestinian queers also directly challenges the Israeli strategy that sets up a causal link between gender rights and the occupation, eloquently traced by Jasbir Puar on the panel “How Now BDS?” in the 2011 Israeli Apartheid Week in New York City:

[T]here is not necessarily anything new nor even exceptional about these forms of pinkwashing and homonationalism. We can see these phenomena as part of the contemporary logic of neoliberal capital that seeks to interpolate consumer subjects through the instrumentalization of queer identities. And, we can also read it historically in line with older colonial strategies. For example, the woman question that dominated the colonial period, the question of how well do you treat your women, as a determining factor of a nation’s capacity for sovereignty, has now been appended with a barometer of how well do you treat your homosexuals.

Literature and art that voice the agony and resistance of Palestinian women, children, and queers under Israeli occupation thus become vital in confronting the Israeli colonial practice of spacio-cide as well as its propaganda of humanitarianism. Such cultural productions attempt to deconstruct a politics of terror marching forward under the Israeli imperial banner in the name of women’s and queer liberation.

Susan Abulhawa’s Mornings in Jenin depicts how the lives of Palestinian women, intimately tied to their olive plantations in the prosperous Abulheja family, are transformed by the 1948 nakba. The novel begins with a poetic description of the dignity of olive harvest in the November dawn: “As the dark sky gave way to light, the sounds of reaping that noble fruit rose from the sun-bleached hills of Palestine” (4). As men like Yehya, the family patriarch, toil on the land, “women sang the ballads of centuries past and small children played and were chided by their mothers when they got in the way.” As the state of Israel comes into being through days of terror in 1948, the olive plantations that afforded a prosperous, idyllic lifestyle to the Abulheja family have to be abandoned. Israel’s “massive artillery and aerial bombardment” raze to the ground the Abulheja village of Ein Hod (28). Soldiers infiltrate the village and Palestinians have to bury the charred bodies of their own in a mass grave under pointed guns before being herded out of their land. In this partition Palestinian women experience uniquely gendered trajectories of loss, terror, and trauma. Yehya’s daughter-in law, Dalia, along with her food, clothes, and blankets loses her economic assets—“the golden jewelry that had weighed her down on her wedding day” (31). Pregnant women, like the wife of Yehya’s younger son, Darweesh, are marched relentlessly out of their land with the other refugees into Jenin. Old women who fall by the wayside are dependent on the mercy of others to be picked up as soldiers on loudspeakers yell, “Go, go!” (31). As a “diabetic boy and his grandmother fell and died” and “[o]ne woman miscarried and the dehydrated bodies of two babies went limp in their mothers’ arms” (34), the cruelty of the Zionist militia is transferred to the landscape. The refugees marched “up and down unforgiving hills, under the sun’s glare” for three days and two nights (34). In this exodus, soldiers of the conquering Israeli army, such as Moshe, steal Palestinian children from their mothers. Moshe will raise Dalia’s son, Ismael Abulheja, as David Avaram—a Zionist who will later fight against his own brother, Yousef Abulheja, in the Palestinian resistance.

Like Mornings in Jenin, Leila Khaled’s autobiography My People Shall Live depicts the “atmosphere of terrorism” that marked the nakba (25). By examining the nakba through the eyes of the traumatized four-year old girl Leila, the book testifies against Israel’s claim as the sole bearer of women’s rights in the Middle East. Leila’s fourth birthday—April 9, 1948—marks the bloodbath and death of her people as “Zionists massacred in cold blood the people of Deir Yassin—a crime which was cruelly magnified to frighten the remaining population into submissive departure.” Two-hundred-and-fifty-four people are massacred and hundreds injured in the siege of Leila’s hometown of Haifa. She hears exploding bombs as “[m]ost of the 80,000 Arab inhabitants of Haifa left without battling to the death for their city.” In this exodus Leila’s mother and her eight children cross the border to the city of Sour in Lebanon. For Leila, the staircase of her house and the receding figure of her father, who stays behind, become iconic of the nakba. Later on when her father “arrived penniless [in Sour] after working hard for three decades as a storekeeper,” Leila hears from him how Zionists seized their family home and business, carted off their furniture, and deported him to Egypt (26). Like many, Leila’s family becomes part of the refugee population outside the borders of historic Palestine.

Herself dependent on UN Relief and Works Agency’s international charity, Leila tours a refugee camp in Lebanon where images of dismemberment and decay capture the dehumanization of Palestinian lives under Zionist terrorism. She sees “the maimed, the diseased, the broken-hearted” (35), “bare-footed children with swollen stomachs, fathers with heads bowed, pale mothers with sickly babies, grandparents in despair” (35–6). Feeling the poverty, hunger, and “the despair of deprivation to … [her] bones,” taking in “the sight of filthy tents,” undeterred by the “sight of death,” Leila is radicalized at the age of eight and “intoxicated by the wine of reality” (36). For Leila, the filth and death charge the camp with a spatial poetics and politics interwoven with the palpability of loss and reclamation of Palestinian land. As Israel confiscated Palestinian land and homes, the Palestinian refugee camp “as icon of the nation became central to the Palestinian imaginary” (Farah 85). Camp meant merely camping, and carried the political and symbolic weight of the Palestinian Right to Return (87). Refugee camps were mapped onto the national liberation narrative as “symbols of fellahin (peasants) turned fedayeen (freedom fighters)” who would ensure that return (80). My People Shall Live fractures such a nationalist imaginary with the little refugee girl from the petit bourgeoisie as the feda’iyya (feminine for freedom fighter).

Raymonda Tawil’s memoir My Home, My Prison portrays how the terror of Zionist occupation repeats itself in the 1967 naksa (disaster) when Israel occupies the Jordan-controlled West Bank, and how the plight of Palestinian women under occupation jettisons Israel’s claim that it upholds women’s liberation. The naksa was the Six-Day War between Israel on one hand and Jordan, Syria, Iraq, and Egypt on the other. With 75 percent of the orange grove surrounding town of Kalkilya demolished, Palestinian refugees who lost their homes start pouring into Tawil’s town, Nablus. Tawil sets out in a red-cross-painted car with three others amidst the terror-laden landscape of curfew, tanks, roadblocks, barbed wire, and armed soldiers to bring resources from the Social Welfare Department to the refugees. Amidst the war she accompanies a women’s delegation for Israel-controlled Jerusalem to report to the foreign consuls about the West Bank, and the urgent need there of the Red Cross—not permitted by Israel in its occupied territories. After the naksa, the first large demonstration by women in 1968 is met with brutal, interrogative torture of protestors. The demolition of the family homes of the detainees is key in the repression. Along with 20 other houses, the three Nablusi sisters’ home—“a veritable showpiece, featuring exquisite Oriental architecture and mosaics”—is destined for demolition (133).

Abulhawa’s Mornings in Jenin unravels the extraordinary survival capacity of poor Palestinian women at the Jenin refugee camp in the West Bank in the face of Zionist terror during the 1967 war. Through the eyes of a little girl, Amal, we see the transformation of ordinary Palestinian men into militants under Israeli atrocities. Amal sees her sensitive father, who she knows as “the intellectual, solitary man who spent his time with books or in communion with the land,” transform into a fighter, distributing weapons to other revolutionaries “until then only known as fathers, brothers, uncles, and husbands” (65). For years her father collected weapons in a kitchen hole since King Hussein of Jordan was “disarming Palestinians, leaving … [them] defenseless against Zionists who were amassing more and more weapons with the help of the West.” Amal recalls that while the men armed themselves for a confrontation with the enemy soldiers, “[w]e could not see the enemy’s face, but we heard them: airplanes, so many, flew close to the earth and dropped bombs” (67). Her mother, Dalia, during one such bombing shoves Amal and her friend Huda into the kitchen hole her father made for storing firearms and closes the tile. After a long time in the hole, which “was as deep as I [Amal] was tall, and wide enough that Huda and I could crouch at its bottom,” Dalia hands them Amal’s three-month-old cousin, Aisha, found wrapped in a blanket on the East Bank, with her family dead around her. Abulhawa depicts the girls screaming in unison with the baby as they hear “blasts of fire” and smell “the odor of burning flesh, fermenting garbage, and scorched foliage mixed with the smell of … [their] own excrement in the dust” (69). But soon a “gurgle of terror” sweeps through the hole as an explosion blows off the tile cover, leaving the bleeding Huda “suspended in mid-scream” (69) and the dead baby’s abdomen “a gaping hole cradling a small piece of shrapnel” (70).

Here the inseparability of the plight of Palestinian women from their men is especially significant for a transnational feminist perspective of Palestine/Israel. Liberal feminism that individualizes women and places them merely in opposition to patriarchy here fails as an analytic. It cannot render the suffering of Palestinian women whose agonies are inevitably tied to Palestinians as a people. On the other hand, a transnational feminist analysis situates gender vis-à-vis other social locations such as race, ethnicity, nationality, and class, among many others. Israel’s brutality visited on Palestinian men, such as Dalia’s husband, Hasan, and son, Yousef—both of whom disappear during the 1967 war—leaves women like Dalia alone to support the family. In fact, Dalia never recovers from the shellshock of the raids and the loss of her husband. She hallucinates and withers away, refusing to bathe and eat, smelling like “fermented misery,” her lips “a web of cracks,” her body shrunk, eyes vacant, “betraying a mind that would henceforth slowly forfeit its charge of reality” (86). The bond of pain that Palestinian men and women share is obvious when Amal learns about the disappeared men of the Jenin camp, including her brother Yousef. They are stripped of their clothes by the Israeli forces and return naked after 40 days of curfew. Though Amal sees Yousef clothed in brown pants and a ruffled green shirt by the kindness of some stranger, “the scars and fresh markings”—“nature’s brazen testimony of regular beatings,” and Yousef’s frail body put “an awful pain in … [her] heart” (88). Such cords of suffering which bind Palestinian men and women together defy Israel’s colonial policy of dividing and conquering Palestinian women and their men, resisting the logic of Israeli exceptionalism in the Middle East as the bearer of women’s rights.

The Israeli national security regime sustains its politics of terror by arbitrarily restricting the mobility of Palestinians in public spaces through various mechanisms for detention and confinement, such as checkpoints, curfews, and arrests. Thus, along with Palestinian land, Palestinian bodies become occupied territories with no state behind Palestinians to intervene for them. When Palestinian women and queers are strip-searched at Israeli checkpoints, in the face of Israel’s vociferous claim of being the bastion of women’s rights and gender justice in the Middle East, every Palestinian woman and queer becomes an occupied territory.²²

In Mornings in Jenin, Amal’s first menstrual cycle, during which her privacy is brutally invaded by a bullet from an Israeli watchtower, provides a vital site for an analysis of Palestinian women’s bodies as occupied territories under securitized regimes of terror. Distraught with the news that her brother Yousef is leaving after the 1967 Arab-Israeli war to avoid possible abduction and captivity by the Israeli police, Amal finds solace as she slumbers in a peach orchard that has become “off-limits to Arabs” after the war (116). Waking up, she savors “the arrival of the mysterious and long-awaited menstrual cycle” (117). Soon three soldiers stop and interrogate her endlessly as they pass “the stack of [her] identity papers between them” (118). When the ordeal is over and Amal sprints toward her refugee camp in Jenin, the bullet from the tower rips open her belly in “a colossal menstruation” as she loses consciousness with “a wild scream” (118). This vivid depiction of the violent Israeli penetration of Palestinian women’s sexualized bodies offers a powerful tableau of the terror of occupation as rape. On account of being Palestinian corporealities, the bodies of girls like Amal are embodiments of death since all such bodies are potential suicide bombs—“bodies that can explode at any moment and thereby terminate themselves as they terminate others” (Kotef and Amir 979). Hence, such bodies always have to carry identity papers on them to validate their non-violent identities, and can be shot even when their identities have been verified as non-violent since “[t]he logic and the grammar of the checkpoints reduce all Palestinians to perilous corporeality.” Drawing on Azmi Bishara, Hochberg argues: “As a visible display of military force, checkpoints sharply divide Israelis from Palestinians, occupiers from the occupied, according to ‘those who give permission and those who need to ask for it’”²³ (577). Since the 1967 war, checkpoints have marked not only the landscape between Israel, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip but also countless sites within the occupied territories.²⁴

Like Mornings in Jenin, the perilous corporeality of Palestinian women’s reproductive bodies is also eloquently depicted in Raymonda Tawil’s memoir My Home, My Prison through the perverse sexualization and torture of Palestinian women during the “elaborate ceremony” of checkpoint strip searches (150). Tawil tells the officer on duty to put a gynecologist on the bridge between Jordan and Israel for body-cavity searches. When she asserts, “Those women aren’t allowed to poke into such sensitive and intimate places,” the officer laughs at her dehumanization and humiliates her further as he “sneeringly offers to be … her gynecologist” (151). Barbara Harlow, in her work on strip-searching of political detainees of the Irish Republican Army in Northern Ireland, has underlined the racist implications of such sexual assaults on Irish women’s bodies. They are based on “the arbitrarily upheld and discriminatorily practiced distinctions between ‘civilian’ and ‘barbarian’” defined by the “pale” of English civilization (100). In My Home, My Prison this distinction forces Palestinian citizens of Israel like Tawil to renounce her Israeli citizenship when she needs to pass through the Mandelbaum Gate to live in Jordan. The Mandelbaum Gate was a checkpoint that from 1949 to 1967 partitioned the Israel- and Jordan-controlled parts of Jerusalem, passing which Tawil would never be able to return to her parents in Israel. In a poetic rendering Tawil describes the pangs of separation between Palestinian mothers and daughters during the intensely feminine experience of the birth of her first child. She wistfully narrates how “the fresh morning breeze [that] came over the hills from the west of the city—the Israeli side” almost becomes a go-between her and her mother as Tawil, “with tears in … [her] eyes,” looks “at the magnificent Jerusalem landscape, gazing toward the Mandelbaum Gate” (65). This is also a checkpoint that Palestinian daughters cannot cross to be with dying parents in Israel. Tawil mourns: “I thought of Father and Mother, I thought of their lonely deaths while I—only a few kilometers away—had not been permitted to cross the armistice line to comfort them in their last moments” (112). On the bridges of Jordan Palestinian mothers who apply for permits to re-enter their homeland wait helplessly in long queues in the blazing sun as their newborn babies die in their arms and Jewish newcomers welcome them with “a pleasant stay in our country” (149). Checkpoint experiences of Palestinian women are thus reminders that securitized regimes of terror can never march forward in the guise of protecting women’s rights.

Checkpoints have also become important for Palestinian discourses against Israeli terrorism in the face of Israeli propaganda about its queer rights regime. Such oppositional discourses examine the violent encounter of the Palestinian man with what I call the “homoadversarial” gaze of the Israeli soldier. The Palestinian filmmaker Sharif Waked’s seven-minute film, Chic Point: Fashion for Israeli Checkpoints, is a critical intervention into homoerotic Israeli cinema, like Eytan Fox’s The Bubble, that offers romantic possibilities for Palestinian queers at Israeli checkpoints. Refusing to be co-opted by the homoerotic gaze of Israeli soldiers at checkpoints, unlike Ashraf in The Bubble, the models in the first part of Chic Point invite instead the homoadversarial Israeli gaze as they walk the ramp, defiantly showcasing Palestinian men’s checkpoint fashion wear. These designs, with their splits, zippers, and nets, leave large parts of the Palestinian body exposed and hence easily accessible to checkpoint strip searches. The second part of the film moves away from the glamour and aesthetics of staged male nudity as bold self-expression to the black and white footage of the forced nudity of real Palestinian men in varying degrees of humiliating and terrorizing checkpoint surveillance. Some of them have their shirts lifted while others are naked before Israeli guns. As the blindfolded, despondent, and helpless Palestinian men hang their heads down and Israeli soldiers leer at them with smirking faces, the absurdity of romanticizing the checkpoint is laid bare while the prudence of checkpoint fashion wear becomes evident. The project of national security thus “loses its credibility” and becomes one of sexual perversion underlined in the “pathetic dissymmetry” between “the naked, unarmed … allegedly dangerous suspect or terrorist” and “large groups of uniformed soldiers armed with guns and massive tanks” (Hochberg, “Check Me Out” 579). The film disrupts the heteronormative suppositions underlying the practice and discourse of security and surveillance, as Hochberg argues (584), but I contend that it also severs the homoerotic Israeli gaze with the homoadversarial refusal of Palestinian men to meet it. Such a reading allows for the subversive possibilities of queer desire without asserting that such an “alternative reality” can “transcend the colonial context in which it is embedded” (Amireh 642).

Curfews also play a vital role in confining and immobilizing Palestinian lives in Israel’s national security regime of terror. Tawil describes the 1966 curfews imposed by Jordan on the West Bank in response to the Palestinian protest marches against Israel’s raid of the village of Samoah. The curfews go on for weeks and are lifted only for an hour or two so that West Bankers can buy their necessities. Families dependent on daily wages eventually starve, and Tawil’s house runs out of water since they cannot replenish the tanks during the curfew. A 14-year old girl who ventures out onto the veranda of her house is almost shot. During a similar curfew imposed by Israel, Tawil coaxes her husband to use his curfew pass to drive a dying man to the hospital. Sam Bahour argues: “The policy, euphemistically known as ‘curfew,’ is every bit as destructive to the fabric of society as the tanks rumbling through our streets. By forcing at gunpoint, tank, and barrel two million Palestinians to remain in their homes, the Israeli military is, in effect, criminalizing an entire population” (29). The author points out that in addition to roadblocks and checkpoints that accompany curfews, Israeli Caterpillar bulldozers dig up dirt mounds to block Palestinian access to entry and exit points in villages.

Tawil’s memoir ends with her house arrest between 1976 and 1977 for her activism and journalism on behalf of Palestinians. Her detention is based on the British Defense Regulations Act of 1945 used by Britain to suppress the Jewish population during the Mandate and that Israel in turn uses to subjugate Palestinians. Her telephone line is disconnected and eventually she is permitted no visitors so as to keep the press away. In an evocative passage foregrounding the absurdity of a woman smelling flowers as an act of terrorism, Tawil says: “The flowers are in bloom, and the garden is very lovely. But it seems that if I go out there, I endanger the security of the state of Israel” (249). She challenges the masculine world of Israeli defense that has depleted the Palestinians of all resources. She lashes out at this world embodied by Major Maurice of the military government of Ramallah on the West Bank where she was under house arrest: “By what right does this man forbid me to see the sun? Does the sun, too, belong to the Israelis alone?” (249). Finally, Peretz Kidron’s postscript to My Home, My Prison offers us an insight into Tawil’s detention and solitary confinement for six weeks in 1978 when she was beaten, blindfolded during interrogation which some-times lasts for 15 hours, kept in an unlit cell, and threatened. She could have no visits from family and no lawyer during the first three weeks.

Hence land, homes, camps, checkpoints, curfews, and arrests offer sites of provocative analysis of the Israeli spacio-cidal project as Palestinians are terrorized into becoming refugees in their own lands. Palestinian women and queers experience militarized racial violence from the Israeli national security state along with other Palestinians as a people, and at the same time encounter such militarism in distinctively gendered ways. Nonetheless, the racial order that the ethno-nationalist Israeli democracy anomalously upholds by organizing social structures and everyday life, targeted to produce differential treatment of human bodies, does not go uncontested.²⁵

QUEER COUNTERPUBLICS AND TRANSNATIONAL FEMINIST PRAXIS

Queer counterpublics and transnational feminist praxis confront the Israeli discourse and practice of state-sanctioned terrorism in the guise of security building. Here queer counterpublics do not engage with sexual identities. Instead, the term defines oppositional discourse and practice (praxis) that uncover and resist dominant constructions of terror and security catering to lives the state considers precarious and grievable. Even so, queer does not stand in for a transcendental signifier of liberation either—“an exclusively transgressive one” of liberal humanist agency (Puar 22). Rather, queer counterpublics offer the precarious possibilities of impossible speech acts—naming and performing what terror and security mean to them whose lives are not considered precarious and grievable. It also challenges the neat packaging of the destructive and the creative into airtight compartments. Earlier I pointed out how Spivak jumbles the categories of war and peace. In a similar vein it could be argued that the borders between the contradictory impulses of life (creation) and death (destruction) are blurred in the context of what Israel names as “Palestinian terrorism.” Extra state action such as plane hijackings and suicide bombings can be read as queer counterpublics—impossible speech acts that queer understandings of life and death, the creative and the destructive. As powerful political acts embedded in flamboyant spectacles of resistance, they create spaces for Palestinian visibility that revitalize strangled and muted lives denied personhood. Such exhibitions crack open possibilities of hearing Palestinian voices and hence examining the history of the Palestinian collective that has led to such desperate acts of speaking. When such acts are at the behest of Palestinian women, queer counterpublics disrupt the heteronormative assumptions about terrorism. According to such assumptions, the monster-terrorist-fag is male because the women of the hetero-patriarchal elsewhere are veiled and confined by the monsters to the heterosexual family in the roles of daughters, wives, sisters, and mothers. They are not agents of political change. In sharp contrast, these acts by women create queer counterpublics of terror, broadcasting across geographical borders Palestinian desperation in the face of Israeli violence.

Queer counterpublics of terror, associated with death/destruction, also replicate the dynamics of a transnational feminist praxis of diasporic cultural resistance through queer feminist art and activism associated with life/creativity. Both attempt to disseminate the message of Palestinian disenfranchisement and invigorate the Palestinian bare life. Forged in the historical context of the occupation, Palestinian films and visual/performance art and literature have become inseparable from activism. Such expressions of Palestinian suffering and revival are evident in blogging and other uses of social media, public reading of poetry, street plays and marches, sit-in demonstrations, music, installation art, posters, graffiti, and films. These women- and queer-centered art forms and activism work through cross-border alliances with Israelis and other transnational networks, etching distinctively gendered paths of political participation as women in queer counterpublics of terror do.

My People Shall Live narrates how Amina Dhahbour made world headlines in 1969 after hijacking the Israeli semi-military El-Al plane at Zurich. Soon after, Leila Khaled was selected “on a mission against US imperialism” to hijack the American airline TWA 840 (124). In what can be read as the queering of the heteronormative assumptions and practices of society, Khaled, during the arduous military training at Jordan, sees how women fighters reorient their relationship with “parents, boy friends, or husbands” (118). Thereafter, as a member of the Che Guevara Commando Unit of the PFLP, Khaled hijacks TWA 840 and en route sees her hometown of Haifa again after the nakba of 1948. As a statement against US imperialist support of Zionism, the emptied American plane is exploded after landing in Syria. Upon her release from house arrest there, Khaled undergoes three excruciating plastic surgeries. This is to render her now famous face unrecognizable for another operation in 1970—the hijacking of the Israeli flight El-Al 219. But the mission is foiled when her fellow revolutionary, Patrick, is killed in the fray, and she is overpowered and imprisoned in Britain.

Frances Hasso has argued that Palestinian women suicide bombers such as Wafa Idris, Dareen Abu Aisheh, Ayat Akhras, and Andaleeb Takatkeh challenge the links between women’s bodies and “menstruation, childbirth, heteronormativity, maternal sacrifice,” and rape (81). Similarly, Khaled’s facial reconstruction for another hijacking mission offers a sort of queer counterpublics that disrupt the associations of cosmetic surgery with enhancement of feminine beauty. “[D]isobeying normative conventions of ‘appropriate’ bodily practices and the sanctity of the able body,” such bodily reconstruction can also be read as a “chaotic challenge” to “identity as the evolved form of western modernity” (Terrorist Assemblages 220), embedded in “normative conventions of gender, sexuality, and race” (221). The hijacker-as-woman queers/trans-forms her identity beyond recognition for a queer logic of feminine labor and production. Indeed, her monstrosity is heightened by her gender-bending performance. Here one might ask: If extra-state “terrorism is rhetorical” and a performance against the violence of occupation, circulating as news through mass media which become “tools of persuasion and propaganda” (Naaman 938), what kind of queer counterpublics emerge through the figure of the stateless Palestinian woman in such missions? I argue that when the occupied bodies of Palestinian women dare to queer themselves through their destructive potentiality, dissident against the Israeli colonial project, they severely weaken Israel’s claim to gender liberation, often supported by Euro-American feminists. The “Third World woman,” constructed as a passive victim of patriarchy “under Western eyes” through the subversive act of hijacking, resists global structural inequalities to once again reinforce transnational feminism’s critique of the many ways in which feminism and imperialism work in tandem.²⁶

In “Thinking about Terrorism and Just War” Talal Asad, like Gayatri Spivak, has argued about “a space of violence shared by ‘war’ and ‘peace’, by ‘ruthless terrorism’ and ‘just war’” (5). Asad highlights how strong states can evade accountability for their own atrocities: “It is the state’s overwhelming preoccupation with making ‘our way of life’ safe that renders ‘illiberal’ measures (including threats of mass destruction) into acceptable means of fulfilling ‘liberal’ commitments” (8). Khaled’s queer counterpublics of terror challenge such constructs underlying the liberal democracy of Israel, when the oppressor can “apply his ethical and legal doctrines” against those whom he disenfranchises “because he has the power as well as the means of communications to justify his inhumanity” (127). She highlights that there are two competing trajectories of terror, and the terror of Palestinian resistance is merely a response to Israeli state-sanctioned terrorism. She queers the trope of terrorism: “He is in no position … to accuse me of air piracy and hijacking when he has hijacked my home and hijacked me and my people out of our land” (126).

Susan Abulhawa’s Mornings in Jenin graphically depicts how unequally matched Palestinians are in the face of Israeli terror, defined by US-backed military-industrial might. The novel captures the gruesomeness of Israel’s June 1982 attack on Lebanon to “dislodge the PLO [Palestinian Liberation Organization]—a six-thousand-member resistance” (218) with a “ninety-thousand strong invasion force” (216). Operation Peace in the Galilee deprives the people of Beirut of water, electricity, and medical care for two months. By August it left Lebanon with “no infrastructure for food or water” and “17,500 civilians killed, 40,000 wounded, 4,000,000 homeless, and 100,000 without shelter” (219). Amal’s doctor husband, Majid, who stays back to treat the injured, is killed, Red Cross-marked hospitals are aerially bombarded, and babies in hospitals burst into flames from “phosphorous Israeli shells.” The PLO evacuates Lebanon in a cease-fire deal brokered by the Reagan administration that guranteed “the safety of the women and children left defenseless in the refugee camps” (219). However, in September Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon defies the cease fire as his army slaughters women and children in the Sabra and Shantila refugee camps. Amal recounts the grisly Associated Press photograph of her brother Yousef’s wife, Fatima—her blue dress torn open, her stomach slit wide, killing her unborn child, as the head of her curly-haired dead daughter, Falasteen, emerges from behind her. Fatima’s friends—the women who were with her during Falasteen’s birth, who kissed Amal and gossiped about her when she fell in love with Majid, and who sang and danced and cried at her wedding—are all raped and killed. A little boy is castrated, “his trousers torn open, and a settlement of flies throbbing over his torn intestines” (226). And then a man drives a truckload of explosives into the US embassy in Lebanon, killing 63 people and injuring many more. The cycle of violence continues, but can armed resistance of a stateless refugee population compare with the state-sanctioned terrorism of Israel, with the ammunitions of modern warfare at its disposal and the support of the United States behind it?

After the US embassy incident the Palestinian diaspora in America are coded as terrorists, including Amal, who finds herself in the US on a scholarship for Palestinian refugees. Under suspicion that it is her brother Yousef who bombed the US embassy, the FBI interrogates her for 10 hours at a stretch. She is handcuffed when she punches Milton Dobbs, the ex-husband of Angela Haddad who was her host family in America. Dobbs calls Palestinians “fucking terrorists” as he watches the television coverage of the US embassy bombing (238). Like Khaled, Amal queers the phenomenon of terrorism by asking how one comes to be defined as a terrorist. Who were these terrorists? They were like her brother, who was “denied, imprisoned, tortured, humiliated, and exiled for the wish to possess himself and claim the heritage bequeathed to him by history” (239). As she reads accounts of Palestinian dispossession, “Amal moved through time in the United States, each day like the one before, all of it forced and unreal” (254). Even in death America betrays Amal. When she dies in an Israeli attack on a visit to Jenin, along with 53 others, and hundreds go missing, neither the UN nor US representatives visit the site. Yet the official UN report “concluded that no massacre had taken place. The conclusion was echoed in U.S. headlines: ‘NO MASSACRE IN JENIN.’ ‘ONLY MILITANTS KILLED IN JENIN, SAYS ISRAEL’” (317). The irony here is even more palpable since, in death as in life, Amal is defined as a terrorist by the United States which completely disregards its own role in the Israeli politics of terror.

However, given the iconic status that the Palestinian has reached as a terrorist, through the power of Euro-American discourses which have simultaneously ignored Israeli state terror, it is imperative to focus on other modes of Palestinian resistance to Israeli terrorism. Only then can we fully address the guiding questions that have shaped much of this argument: How do we recognize terror? Whose definitions are at work when we grapple with terror? Thus it becomes vital to reflect on how hijacking planes and bombing the US embassy discussed earlier come together with Palestinian aesthetics and activism in “a series of dispersed but mutually implicated and messy networks” that confront the terror of Israeli occupation (Terrorist Assemblages 211). Poets, performers, artists, and activists from the occupied territories, Israel, and the diaspora have used weapons of culture to resist occupation and the concomitant destruction of Palestinian cultural life.²⁷

Palestinian-American performance poet Suheir Hammad’s work is an act of transnational feminist solidarity with women in zones of state-sanctioned militarized terrorism. Hammad’s poem “Break Clustered” articulates images of suffering left behind in the wake of “humanity contracted” with malignance as “One woman loses fifteen, maybe twenty members of her family,” another loses six, yet another “loses her head,” others search the rubble and feed on trash. Like performance poetry, performative visual arts by Palestinian and diasporic women artists has become crucial in a transnational feminist solidarity politics contesting Israel’s claim to gender and sexual exceptionalism in the Middle East. The Palestinian-British artist Mona Hatoum’s Them and Us … and Other Divisions and Variation on Discord and Divisions are two related performances on otherizing. In these pieces Hatoum, in a boiler suit and black hood, symbolizes the otherized as she crawls among impeccably dressed professionals in London.²⁸ In Under Siege Hatoum, in a grueling seven-hour performance in London in 1982, represented Palestinian women’s unrelenting struggle for survival as she “placed her own naked body literally and figuratively ‘under siege’ within a plastic cell” (Ankori 127). Covered with clay, she was blasted with a collage of news reports, statements in English, French, and Arabic, as well as revolutionary songs as she repeatedly tried to stand up in the small cell and slipped and fell.²⁹ Hatoum’s The Negotiating Table commemorates the 1982 Israeli massacres of Palestinian refugees in the Sabra and Shatila camps in Lebanon as well as the 1948 Deir Yassin massacre in which Jewish terrorist groups disemboweled pregnant Palestinian women. In this performance the diasporic artist, covered with entrails, bandages, and blood, is inside a body bag as peace negotiations of political leaders are played on a tape. Through this self-estrangement and exposure, this transnational feminist scripts the history of her “foreign body … the exilic daughter of exiles, somebody … who is forever displaced” (135).

While Hammad and Hatoum have, through their performances, illuminated what it means to be a Palestinian woman, artists like Rana Bishara have used the feminine art form of sewing to underscore what Palestine means. Sewing symbolizes both women’s creativity and suturing the past. In Home Bishara sews together dead cacti fibres around a weathered window frame from her childhood home.³⁰ The articulation of personal and collective violation and vulnerability in Bishara’s work is evident: “The skeletal shreds of cacti … were gathered by the artist from the hedges that used to define the territorial boundaries of [her hometown] Tarshiha” before the occupation (Ankori 212). In this way Bishara, who works from the occupied territories, uses everyday material from there to commemorate the past.

On the other hand, graffiti turns material, such as apartheid walls that set Israel-imposed territorial limits that now define Palestinian lives, into powerful cultural ammunition. Malika Malini underlines that, in the absence of the Internet or Facebook in the 80s graffiti was a means to announce strikes or meetings, and spread political propaganda. In fact, “[d]uring the First Intifada [1987–1993] it was used as a tool of fighting the Israeli occupation and writers acted under the risk of being arrested by Israeli troops.” Malini elaborates on Swedish photojournalist Mia Grondahl’s book Gaza Graffiti: Messages of Love and Politics, which captures the murals and graffiti on the dissident walls of Gaza during the Second Intifada (2000–2006). Approximately 1500 ..., painted by 25 artists, is a 30-meter-long mural protesting the war in Gaza. Exhibitions of Grondahl’s images of Gaza’s wall art have also toured the occupied territories and beyond, defining a transnational space of solidarity politics where art and activism come together.

Political posters are another significant contribution to the repertoire of cultural resistance. In 1996 Dana Bartelt curated a poster exhibition called Both Sides of Peace at the Contemporary Art Museum of North Carolina in an effort to provide a graphic transnational commentary on the occupation. The following year the posters were published as a book with accompanying literary pieces. The poster “Pain” by the Israeli artist David Tartakover depicts a little girl who lost her eye because of an Israeli rubber bullet. “Pain,” which in Hebrew also means “as a father,” is a plea to Israeli soldiers, who might also be fathers, not to serve in the occupied territories (80). “Pain” is paired with “The Window”—a poster by Palestinian artist Mohamad El Fara. It portrays another little girl who was shot in the eye and blinded when she went to the window to watch a clash between Palestinian demonstrators and Israeli soldiers. The two posters are embedded in Ghassan Kanafani’s “Letter from Gaza” in which another Palestinian girl, Nadia, loses her leg when Gaza is bombed. Dan Walsh’s “The Palestine Poster Project Archives,” at present possibly the largest digital endeavor on Palestine in the world, has numerous posters of women, including some powerful ones by Fatah. One asks: “To whom does Palestine belong?” “Golda Meir/born in USSR/raised in US” or “Ayesha Audi/born in Palestine/raised in Palestine.” Another foregrounds a Palestinian woman looking on as an Israeli officer rummages through her suitcase. The caption reads: “Raid my house,/Zionist enemy of man,/But I shall not depart.” The power of such Palestinian cultural resistance is attested to by the fact that vandalizing Palestinian cultural institutions is an official strategy of the occupation. The vandalism in 2002 at the Sakakini Cultural Center, the Qassaba Theater, and the Cinematheque in Ramallah are well known. Such attacks attempt to stifle oppositional voices that contest Israel’s version of the occupation.

Elaborating on film as a weapon of culture, Joseph Massad argues that Palestinian filmmakers have instrumentalized their films to “infiltrate … [the] bastion of Zionist power”—power in the international arena, derived from “misrepresentations of the Palestinian people and … [the Israeli] colonial project” in film and the news media (Massad 42). By curating Palestinian films in the international circuit, women filmmakers have played a significant role in forging transnational feminist alliances that voice the injustices of the occupation. In 2003 in New York, Palestinian-American filmmaker Annemarie Jacir curated 34 films in the Palestinian film festival The Dreams of a Nation, sponsored by Hamid Dabashi. Among them were powerful productions by women, such as Nada El-Yassir’s Four Songs for Palestine, Mona Hatoum’s Measures of Distance and Mai Masri’s and Jean Khalil Chamoun’s Wild Flowers: Women of South Lebanon. In organizing the festival Jacir had to surmount the hurdle of coordinating with people in the occupied territories who would have to navigate checkpoints and military curfews to physically mail the videotapes. Jacir also relates the active resistance that the organizers faced in New York: “Our computers were hacked, our e-mails spammed, our voicemails flooded with racist, obscene, and threatening messages” (28).

Israeli feminist filmmakers have also been powerful dissidenting voices against the occupation. Anat Even’s and Ada Ushpiz’s documentary Asurot (Detained) is a powerful transnational feminist solidarity statement with Palestinian women. It is about a house in the West Bank city of Hebron, partitioned in 1997, whose rear end is in H1, the area of Hebron controlled by the Palestinian Authority, while the front falls within H2—the Israeli-occupied territory of Hebron. This is the home of three Palestinian widows and their 11 children—a home whose terrace is the watch tower for border security soldiers, a home which is not in the occupied territory but is the occupied territory, where armed soldiers, women, and children cohabit. For these women, their home is the prison since they live their lives under constant state surveillance. Tamar Mayer has argued that the occupation has created new spaces of gendered encounters in the everyday lives of previously secluded women, “[a]s the Palestinian home has opened up, involuntarily, to the Israeli army and to its searches and violence” (67). Women are forced to talk to strange men “and are often alone with men who search their houses and who sometimes use this opportunity to molest, abuse, and even attempt to rape them” (67).

Street theater has also served as a powerful activist weapon against the occupation. In 2007 on the 40th anniversary of Israel’s victory in the Arab-Israeli War of 1967, the activist umbrella organization Kibush 40 Coalition called for a protest march against Israeli national pride in Tel Aviv. The parade was called “Saluting the National Erection—Giant Penis Parade.” The flyer of the event posted on the website of anarkismo.net announced the occasion: “To celebrate the ongoing screwing of the Palestinians by the occupation army and Israel’s governments;/And in worship of the generals who have shown us over and over that theirs is the biggest;/We shall hold a march to salute and worship the national erection of the Zionist state.” This was graphically enacted in the march by a “giant penis” in code pink that symbolized the phallic madness of Zionist occupation. Before it was cut open and packed into a car trunk, women rode the ejaculating penis as they shouted slogans: “Sixty years of chauvinism, sexism, militarism/We are going to squirt against Zionism.” This videotaped theater is now a potent activist tool in presentations by groups such as the Israeli direct-action collective Anarchists Against the Wall (AATW).³¹

In 2002 Israel started building an Apartheid Wall 26 feet high—twice as tall as the Berlin Wall.³² Envisioned as 810 miles long, the Wall is to be completed with concrete and electric fences, army patrols, checkpoints, sensors, and cameras, and as it continues to be built it has become iconic of Israel’s continuing repression of the Palestinian people. It appropriates Arab territory in the West Bank beyond the Green Line that marked it from Israel after the 1967 Arab-Israeli war. The International Court of Justice has declared the construction of the Wall as violating international law. Response to this heightened Israeli expansionism has taken a multi-pronged approach. Suicide resistance has continued alongside new modes of confronting Israel, such as an escalating transnational movement for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) against Israeli Occupation and Apartheid (“Palestinian Civil Society Call for BDS”). This has emerged out of a call issued in 2005 by the major Palestinian civil society organizations and popular committees.

In January 2011 activist Abrasha Blum of AATW, established in solidarity with Palestinians in 2003, toured Northern California, including UC Berkeley and Stanford University. He presented on the significance of international support for Israel-Palestine solidarity groups like AATW.³³ As Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu refuses to freeze Jewish settlement in the West Bank, and peace talks in the Middle East reach an impasse, cross-border clashes between Israeli forces and Gaza militants continue to increase and Israel, in a horrendous display of military might over a dispossessed population, retaliates with air strikes on Gaza (Al Arabiya). In the midst of this turmoil, activists on both sides of the Apartheid Wall join hands to design what Blum calls a “coexisting reality.” Here Israeli fence-busters, in solidarity with Palestinians, come together with pliers to pry open the barbed-wire fence in the checkpoint section of the Wall and to videotape it for public dissemination of the truth about Palestine. Blum says: “We were educated in a hate system which taught us that no one on the other side can be a friend.” In this system an arrested Israeli goes to the civil court, while an arrested Palestinian goes to a military court. It is this system that Anarchists Against the Wall target in their unarmed struggle. Blum appealed to the American people at Berkeley not to support the US policy of giving $2.5 billion to Israel every year in exchange for Israel’s promise to buy US products. The dollars go into buying teargas canisters that Israel uses from within 100 feet against unarmed demonstrators against the occupation. For Blum, the ties that support the occupation need to be broken, like Security Studies at the University of Arizona. AATW demonstrates every Friday in Israel against the occupation as its activists continue to be imprisoned. Comparing the Israeli apartheid to the South African apartheid, Blum argues that in the former, there were clear race laws to be fought against whereas “Israel’s racism is hidden.” Blum concludes: “We need to understand that we have not been victims for many years.” He adds: “Israel has succeeded in creating the most dangerous place for Jews—the biggest ghetto in Israel—in the Holy Land.”

2 Zionist Settler Colonialism in Palestine/Israel

INTRODUCTION

HISTORY OF DISPOSSESSION AND TERROR

RECOGNIZING TERROR: WHOSE DEFINITIONS ARE AT WORK?

SPACIO-CIDE, MILITARIZATION, WOMEN AND QUEER REFUGEES

QUEER COUNTERPUBLICS AND TRANSNATIONAL FEMINIST PRAXIS

CONCLUSION

NOTES

REFERENCES