feminist trouble/s and palestine
ILANA FELDMAN
“Palestine is a feminist issue.” This statement frames a pledge that the United States-based Palestinian Feminist Collective circulated in 2021 asking allies to affirm that they will stand with Palestinians against “Israel’s masculinist and militarized siege of Palestinian land and life” (Palestinian Feminist Collective, 2021). The pledge identifies obviously gendered attacks—such as those that target women’s bodies—as well as the panoply of violent efforts to deny and eliminate Palestinian presence and politics as matters of feminist concern.
My own entry into the question of Palestine was a feminist one. As a college student in the U.S. when the first intifada [uprising] against the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip began in 1987, I grappled with figuring out how my various commitments aligned. I was a feminist and thought of myself as progressive. I was also raised in a Zionist environment, as were most Jews in the U.S. at that time (and still today). Feminism helped me find my way to my political values. It taught me that the apparent natural order of things may be anything but. It taught me that how we feel, what we want, and to what we are attached is produced in power and through ideology. It taught me that another world is possible, other ways of being are available, and that these possibilities are joyous. And, thus, feminism helped me to see Palestine, something that my background might not have primed me to do. The increasing legibility of Palestine in the U.S. context more generally, as a result of the intifada, also contributed to my openness to the encounter. So, for me, Palestine is a feminist issue biographically as well as politically.
“Feminism helped me find my way to my political values. It taught me that the apparent natural order of things may be anything but. It taught me that how we feel, what we want, and to what we are attached is produced in power and through ideology. It taught me that another world is possible, other ways of being are available, and that these possibilities are joyous. And, thus, feminism helped me to see Palestine, something that my background might not have primed me to do.”
My personal and political interest in Palestine ultimately put me on a path to sustained intellectual and scholarly engagement. The experience of writing an undergraduate honors thesis on the Palestinian women’s movement opened the possibility of an academic career, a trajectory that had not previously occurred to me. Palestine has been the focus of my research throughout my career. Even as my work shifted away from a primary focus on gender—I have written books about bureaucracy and governance in Gaza during the British Mandate and Egyptian Administration, about policing in Gaza under Egyptian rule, and about humanitarianism and refugee politics over the many decades since the nakba [catastrophe] of 1948—it has been guided by feminist perspectives.
To recognize that Palestine is a feminist issue is not to say that the relationship is easy or untroubled. In fact, there has been a lot of trouble. As has been the case in many other circumstances, Palestinian feminists have been repeatedly told that now is not the time or place for their concerns. Nationalist parties have sometimes indicated to women that they should be patient, that the proper time to raise their “specific” issues would be after the liberation of Palestine, not in the midst of the struggle. International, and more specifically Western, feminist groups have told Palestinian women that they were being “divisive” in raising the matter of Palestine and of Israeli colonization in the context of international feminist gatherings. Despite these national and international efforts to silence their voices and marginalize their claims, Palestinian feminists have been steadfast in their insistence both that Palestine is a feminist issue and that feminism is a Palestinian matter.
“To recognize that Palestine is a feminist issue is not to say that the relationship is easy or untroubled. In fact, there has been a lot of trouble. As has been the case in many other circumstances, Palestinian feminists have been repeatedly told that now is not the time or place for their concerns.”
Nationalism and Feminism
In Palestine, feminism has always been nationalist. Women participated in resistance to British colonialism and Zionist settlement from the outset, organizing in the 1920s and 30s in groups such as the Palestine Arab Women’s Congress and the Arab Women’s Association (Sayigh 1988; Mogannam [1937] 1978). The trajectory of women’s organizing from charitable societies (through which wealthy women provided services to the poor) to women’s committees (in which politically affiliated women sought to engage others in political action and feminist organizing) shows this deep connection. Charitable societies and other early women’s groups were more nationalist than feminist. Their class structure meant that they did not provide a means to organize large numbers of women and their focus was primarily on supporting the national struggle, rather than addressing questions about the gendered dynamics of Palestinian society. Nonetheless, in order to support the national struggle, the women in these organizations necessarily participated in shifting those dynamics.
The emergence of the women’s committees in the late 1970s further shows the entanglement of feminism and nationalism, as the leaders of these groups began with the intention of bringing poor and rural women into the national struggle. As they tried to recruit in villages and refugee camps, they discovered crucial matters that needed to be addressed to make such involvement possible—literacy and childcare key among them. That is, for large numbers of women to be actively nationalist, feminist organizing was necessary. Although the first women’s committee was established without an explicit factional affiliation, women’s organizing soon split along factional lines, with each Palestinian faction having its associated women’s committee, a structural reflection of how feminism has always been nationalist in Palestine. The first intifada against the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza brought large numbers of women into political life, initially at least.
The first years of the intifada were marked by the disruption of many social hierarchies and norms—of age, gender, and class. Women participated in large numbers in demonstrations, they were vital to neighborhood committees which provided education, healthcare, and other services in the face of Israeli repression, and they were leaders in efforts to develop alternative economic structures (Usher 1993). This revolutionary social upheaval was not as enduring as many initially hoped. Israeli repression and backlash from segments of Palestinian society both contributed to the diminution of these activities. No matter how deeply connected feminism and nationalism are for Palestinians, there are challenges built into that connection.
Women’s participation in the national struggle is clearly vital for its success. But nationalist discourse often assigns to women particular roles and symbolic locations that may not match their feminist aims. As in many other anti-colonial national struggles, women have often been valorized in nationalist discourse for their position as “mothers of martyrs” and “factories of men.” And women have often taken considerable pride in their ability to use their position as mothers to support political efforts. Perhaps the most well-known of such practices is the way that women claim unrelated young men as their sons in the face of Israeli military attacks—seeking to offer the protection of kin to anyone facing occupation violence (Abdo 1991). At the same time, stereotyped understandings of gender formations in Palestinian society have shaped how the Israeli occupation targets women. Occupation forces often use sexual violence or the threat of public exposure to seek compliance and even collaboration from women (Ihmoud 2022). And Palestinian feminists have pointed out that Palestinian entities, such as the Palestinian Authority, have sometimes been complicit in this discourse, and even these practices (Elia 2021). Feminist analysis, that is, does not only contribute to Palestinian struggles for liberation, but it also provides a necessary internal critique of political and social structures in Palestinian life.
“Again and again, feminists who raise the question of Palestine as a fundamental part of their feminist praxis are told they are behaving inappropriately and are being divisive.”
International Feminism and the Palestine Question
Just as nationalism offers a complicated home for feminist concerns, so too has international feminism provided a sometimes-limiting platform for “third world” and colonized feminist perspectives. In the Palestinian case, Palestinian women confront both the general problem of imperial feminism and the specific problem—to use a term that has been developed in the US context, but which is globally resonant—of feminists who are “progressive except for Palestine.” [1]
Chandra Mohanty’s 1988 diagnosis of how much of Western feminist writing (and this also applies to Western feminist practice) works to “discursively colonize the material and historical heterogeneities of the lives of women in the third world” remains relevant today (1988:62). Where writers may be distant from the women whose lives they describe in problematically universalizing terms, international activists directly confront, even as they may not see, the inadequacies of these accounts. The gatherings connected to the United Nations (U.N.) Decade for Women, which began in 1975 with a meeting in Mexico City and concluded with a Nairobi meeting in 1985, were settings for such confrontations. And the Palestine problem was front and center.
Nada Elia describes how, at the U.N. Nairobi conference in 1985, American feminist icon Betty Friedan told Egyptian feminist icon Nawal El Saadawi that she should not bring up Palestine because “this is a women’s conference, not a political conference” (Elia 2017). Although Saadawi did not heed this admonition and insisted that it was impossible to separate feminist politics from national and anti-colonial politics, similar demands have been made at numerous international gatherings and within Western political spaces. Efforts to include Zionism in the conversation about racism at the 2001 U.N. World Conference against Racism in Durban were met with charges of antisemitism (Naber 2016). In the U.S., some organizers of the Women’s March—created in 2017 in the aftermath of Donald Trump’s election to protest, among other things, his decidedly anti-feminist policies and perspectives—were attacked for their critique of Israel (Kanji 2019). Again and again, feminists who raise the question of Palestine as a fundamental part of their feminist praxis are told they are behaving inappropriately and are being divisive. Despite the persistence of these objections, Palestinian women and their allies have also persisted in their efforts. Palestinian feminists know that struggles for social justice are not separate struggles and can only succeed by remaining entangled.
“Intersectionality does not, though, only help us understand the myriad structures of oppression that reinforce one another; it can describe pathways towards liberation. Intersectional analysis helps us see that a feminist future requires a fundamental re-imagining of global socio-political formations and power.”
The analytic framework of intersectionality—as theorized by Kimberlé Crenshaw and with deep roots in Black feminist praxis (1991)—seeks not only to recognize the multiple forms of oppression that Black women in the US experience, but also to understand how forms of oppression shape each other. When Palestinian women, along with other colonized people, have insisted that understanding their oppression requires recognizing the impact of Israeli settlement and occupation on their lives, they point to this intersectional condition. Intersectionality does not, though, only help us understand the myriad structures of oppression that reinforce one another; it can describe pathways towards liberation. Intersectional analysis helps us see that a feminist future requires a fundamental re-imagining of global socio-political formations and power. Just as the slogan “Woman, Life, Freedom” frames a struggle for all in Iran, rooted in Kurdish struggles that articulate similar logics of state domination, daily violence, and patriarchal control, so too the recognition that “Palestine is a feminist issue” mobilizes an intersectional struggle that resonates globally. These movements confirm the importance of struggles against settler-colonialism, occupation, and dispossession for feminist practice.
ENDNOTES
1. For more on “Feminist Except for Palestine,” see Shalhoub-Kevorkian, Wahab, and Abed-Rabo Al-Issa (2022).
REFERENCES
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ILANA FELDMAN is Professor of Anthropology, History, and International Affairs at George Washington University. Her research focuses on the Palestinian experience, both inside and outside of historic Palestine, examining practices of government, humanitarianism, policing, displacement, and citizenship. She is the author of Governing Gaza: Bureaucracy, Authority, and the Work of Rule, 1917-67, Police Encounters: Security and Surveillance in Gaza under Egyptian Rule, Life Lived in Relief: Humanitarian Predicaments and Palestinian Refugee Politics; and co-editor (with Miriam Ticktin) of In the Name of Humanity: The Government of Threat and Care.
