Resistance and Love: Paths to Palestinian Liberation
AMAHL BISHARA
One. A fierce Palestinian activist inside Israel explained how Israeli police had arrested her pre-emptively before a demonstration. With special anger, she noted that the police had dragged her father with her to the police station. As she explained:
It is important for me to say that they arrested the young women with their fathers. This also points to the patriarchy of colonialism. We can’t distinguish between patriarchy and colonialism. This shows two things: First, Israel knows that we are a patriarchal society, and it tries to take advantage of this—an eastern, rural [qarawī], patriarchal society. It tries to use this to make us feel shame [ʿār]—that because of me my father was arrested. And the second element of this is that Israeli rule reinforces that patriarchy. If we want to describe a patriarchal system and a colonial system, we will use the same phrases: They both use repression. (Bishara 2022:234)
Two. In Bethlehem in the summer of 2022, a graffito stood out from the scrawls about Fatah and murals of struggle: “Love and resistance, both of them are disdained by the old” (Al-hubb wal-muqāwima, kulāhumā lā yardā ‘anhumā al-kibār).
Three. When my partner and I celebrated our wedding in Bethlehem more than 15 years ago, my new sister-in-law, a feminist leader in the West Bank, quipped, “This is the first wedding between a Christian and a Muslim where there hasn’t been stone throwing!”
These three moments bring Israeli settler colonialism, with its intensely racialized, carceral, and militarized forms, into relation with patriarchy as a global (but not ubiquitous) structure with particular Palestinian and Israeli instantiations. We have long known how Israel takes advantage of patriarchy to enlist collaborators, elicit confessions, and otherwise suppress resistance. The protester’s theory-in-anger demonstrates how this operates today. She asserts the unity of a feminist and anticolonial struggle, echoing a call that resonates through decades of activism (Ihmoud 2022), that “Palestine is a feminist issue” (Palestinian Feminist Collective 2021).
“even when structures do not change quickly, our actions matter. Today’s feminist struggles demonstrate that we can contest patriarchy, colonialism, and authoritarianism through actions, both public and private. We must honor the processuality of change, even as we recognize the urgency of revolution.”
The tactic of arresting women under the protection of a man alleges that Palestinians care more about the “honor” of women—as defined in a patriarchal framework—than they do about all Palestinians’ basic rights. It at once feigns to understand Palestinian culture as it mocks and undermines ordinary notions of parental protection: Palestinians know that parents can rarely protect their children from the dangers of imprisonment. Moreover, the involvement of the father cannot paper over the fact that Israel was arresting activists before they had done anything at all—a tactic that Israel periodically employs in areas under civil law (Hasson 2016). It is one of many Israeli legal tactics like administrative detention—the policy inherited from British colonial law of detaining people for up to six months without charge, most often used in the occupied territories—that violates basic principles of civil and political rights (Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association 2017).
That Israeli police should use tactics like arresting fathers with their daughters against a young, overtly feminist generation of activists so far into the twenty-first century can be disillusioning—like we are fighting last century’s fight. But we must continue to assert: even when structures do not change quickly, our actions matter. Today’s feminist struggles demonstrate that we can contest patriarchy, colonialism, and authoritarianism through actions, both public and private. We must honor the processuality of change, even as we recognize the urgency of revolution.
The graffito in Bethlehem directs critique inward. Who are these elders who reject resistance and love? Perhaps the official leadership goes unnamed out of fear of recrimination. The anti-democratic nature of Mahmoud Abbas’s regime sucks the hope and energy out of new generations in struggle. Abbas is the second president of the Palestinian Authority (PA); an institution established in 1994 that—according to its proponents—was to lead to a Palestinian state, to protection and sovereignty for Palestinians at last. But almost three decades later, the PA only manages civil affairs in islands of cities and towns while boasting a robust policing arm against its own people. On the democracy front, it has been a failure—Abbas was elected to a four-year term in 2005, and no presidential elections have taken place since. Security coordination with Israel criminalizes Palestinian resistance to ongoing Israeli occupation and leaves Palestinians vulnerable to Israeli violence (Tartir 2017). The PA suppresses internal dissent with beatings and imprisonment (Human Rights Watch 2022). It is easy to understand how all of this feels like a generational struggle: In a society where 69% of people are under the age of 29, Abbas is 87 years old (United Nations Fund for Population Activities 2015).
Figure 1. A graffito in Bethlehem in 2022 read, “Love and resistance, both of them are disdained by the old.” (Photo by Amahl Bishara)
Or perhaps the official leadership is not named in the graffito because it is hardly the only disapproving elder. Many Palestinian families have denied hope and a future to couples who fall in love despite social norms—whether because the beloveds are of the same gender (Atshan 2020) or because they are of different religions, as suggested by my sister-in-law’s comment, or different social classes. Sometimes the opposition comes because of subtle intersections of religion and class (Deeb 2020). Our graffiti-theorist asserts that these two denials—of the right to struggle and the right to love—are akin to each other.
It was not always this way. Before and during the first intifada of the late 1980s, love stories and stories of resistance were often entwined with each other. What happened to undermine these currents? The Oslo Accords and the establishment of the PA in the 1990s disrupted liberation politics in favor of a state-building project; it also co-opted Palestinian women’s movements into the world of NGOs mostly dependent on foreign funding.
By the start of the second intifada in 2000, increasing economic inequality within the West Bank, decreased popular participation, and intensifying political despair meant that the trend toward marriages that had crossed conventional boundaries and weddings that had eschewed material expense were often replaced by unions that adhered to hierarchical gender values ushered in by costly weddings (Johnson, Nahleh, and Moors 2009). By the second decade of the century, a neoliberalizing PA economy lured people with new construction and new cars that barely fit on the checkpoint-choked roads, even as economic precarity persisted for many. These trends have shaped perceptions around marriage and respectability, narrowing bounds for what a “good match” looks like.
Stepping Out to Mourn and Mobilize
Grounded values of Palestinian protest can work against patriarchy and toward liberation. In 2019, Israa Ghrayeb was killed by her family members after she posted photographs of her and her fiancé on social media (Alghoul 2019). Her death was one of 23 domestic killings of Palestinian women in 2019 documented in the West Bank and Gaza by Human Rights Watch (Begum 2019) and the Women’s Centre for Legal Aid and Counselling (WCLAC). Activists formed the Tal‘at movement (Tal‘at means “stepping out”) to protest her killing.
The Tal’at movement took on Palestinians’ multiple challenges, with chants that addressed not only violence against women but also Israeli occupation (Mondoweiss 2020). One of the pithiest was:
عودة حرية
ثورة نسوية
[Awda huriyya
Thawra nasawiyya]
Return, freedom
Feminist Revolution
Palestinian principles of liberation are often summarized in a few key words, as with the boycott movement’s call for equality, the right of return, and an end to military occupation. The Tal’at slogan illustrates how women’s liberation literally can rhyme with such core values.
Figure 2. Women gathering stones for a confrontation with Israeli soldiers at a demonstration in solidarity with Palestinian prisoners in Bethlehem, the West Bank, Palestine, on 25 February 2013. (Photo by Mohammad Al-Azza)
The Tal‘at protests took on the fragmentation of Palestinian society imposed upon us by Israeli rule. Protests took place in cities like Haifa, Ramallah, Jerusalem, and Gaza that span Israel’s legal fragmentation of historic Palestine. In these spaces, Palestinians live with different political statuses. As I have argued in my recent book, Crossing a Line (Bishara 2022), this can make shared struggle difficult. It also makes building ordinary intimacies difficult. Israel uses restrictions on intimacy to enforce fragmentation, with its law against family re-unification, a blatantly racist law that makes it extremely difficult for Palestinian citizens of Israel to marry Palestinians from the occupied territories if they want to live in Israel; Israeli visa and residency regulations also strictly limit possibilities for Palestinians from the 1967 occupied territories who wish to marry anyone from abroad and continue to live in the occupied territories; other regulations limit residency in marriages of Jerusalem residents to those from the rest of the occupied territories (Allabadi and Hardan 2016; Daher-Nashif and Hawari 2023; Griffiths and Joronen 2019; HaMoked 2022).
The Tal‘at protests took on Palestinian diversity in other ways, too. They took place not only in Palestinian cities like Jaffa, Haifa, Jerusalem, and Ramallah, but also in smaller towns and villages like Al-Jish and Arraba. They took place in hubs of the diaspora like Beirut and Berlin. The challenges of a Palestinian feminism are distinct across these spaces, as are the challenges of appearing in any kind of a Palestinian collective. For the Tal‘at movement to assert unity across these spaces is remarkable and speaks to the deep integration of Palestinian people 75 years after the initial nakba [catastrophe] of 1948 that caused the splintering of Palestinian society.
Street protest is important because it is like a muscle: when we use it, we allow for its use in the future. This is why Iran’s protest movements hold promise even when they do not immediately lead to sought after outcomes. The street is where we explore and assert new collectivities, grounded in the juncture of argument and affect. Moreover, street protest makes collectivities visible for those in the protest, for those who look on, and for those who might see the protest later in the media.
“The street is where we explore and assert new collectivities, grounded in the juncture of argument and affect. Moreover, street protest makes collectivities visible for those in the protest, for those who look on, and for those who might see the protest later in the media.”
Street protests may be especially important in feminist movements because they help to counter an assumption that the state, or foreign humanitarians, will protect women from men’s violence (Grewal 2023). Dominant rhetoric and institutional systems oriented against “Gender-Based Violence Against Women” (GBVAW) have “become embedded in imperial and repressive state projects whose goals are antithetical to the basic principles of justice and dignity that feminism advances” (Abu-Lughod, Hammami, and Shalhoub-Kevorkian 2023:3). When we “find the man in the state” (Brown 1992), when we challenge the purported benevolence of the state (Osanloo 2023), we can trouble such assumptions. As Tal‘at organizers put it:
the police, as women worldwide know, is not our protector or ally; let alone when they form part of a colonial structure that engages with Palestinians as subjects that are to be surveilled and controlled; be it the Israeli police or the American trained Palestinian Authority police, with a paramount role of policing Palestinians in the interest of our colonizer. (Marshood and Alsanah 2020)
Tal‘at is powerful because it is a grassroots Palestinian response to problems that outsiders name and address in different ways, and because it produces popular, women’s power to challenge violence against women. The Tal’at movement had important antecedents. Women have been participants and leaders in protest against European-style colonial rule since its inception, and they continue to confront Israeli military and PA violence (Feldman 2023; Ihmoud 2022; Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights 2022). They are often at the forefront of advocacy for Palestinian prisoners. People stand out each year for International Women’s Day in demonstrations that would raise eyebrows in my city of Boston, where International Women’s Day is barely on the radar.
The Tal‘at movement transformed other Palestinian political practices, too. In Palestine, funerals can sit at the juncture of mourning and militancy, as they did in the early years of the AIDS crisis in the United States (Crimp 1989). However, it is usually martyrs—those who die in national struggle or who are killed due to Israeli violence—whose funerals become calls to action. Victims of domestic violence are not recognized in this way in their funerals. The Tal‘at protests show that Palestinian nationalist traditions of honoring the fallen can honor those killed in domestic circumstances as well.
Figure 3. Women chanting at the funeral of the martyr Basil Al-Araj in the village of Al-Walaja, the West Bank, Palestine, on March 17, 2017. (Photo by Mohammad Al-Azza)
But the visibility of street protest against the killing of women is only one element of our struggle. Other elements seem to be more private. How do we bring into public consideration the kinds of coercion that come before a violent attack on a woman, the more mundane sanctions on relationships that break with what Arundhati Roy has called “the love laws” (1997)? The Tal‘at movement helped to make protecting women’s lives from domestic violence a public and collective issue. Struggles for queer recognition and rights in Palestine are likewise vital and necessary to protect Palestinian lives. But the challenges we as Palestinians face around love and thriving are, unfortunately, much broader than this. We must be concerned about the forms of love and liberation that are not even pursued because a man has not been able to build a house, or because those who love each other break the boundaries of religion or class. Our “love laws” have become complicit with capitalism and occupation: it is Israeli dispossession and restrictions on land use that make it impossible for so many to build houses at all. Patriarchy and capitalism suffocate futures, for men, women, and everyone else.
Many Palestinians have thought about marriage and childbirth as a support to the national cause on demographic terms (Kanaaneh 2002). The political force of love can never be reduced to marriage. We should find ways to celebrate and affirm the many forms of love that animate Palestinian society: friendship, devotion among extended kin, and the camaraderie formed in creative (think dance troupes!) and political life, to name a few forms of love that have special Palestinian formations.
“Patriarchy and capitalism suffocate futures, for men, women, and everyone else.”
Today, too many people hit roadblocks to building a life with love and joy on their own terms, and this forestalls imagination, passion, and energy, all of which we need to build vital new futures that conceive of new forms of relationality to each other as Palestinians. The Bethlehem graffito holds out hope that when we struggle through love, resistance itself will be stronger. In Palestine as in India, “both public protest and quiet transgressions are ongoing,” challenging repressive political authority (Grewal 2023). May we meet in the streets in protest and create many ways for love to thrive toward liberation.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
AMAHL BISHARA is Associate Professor in the Anthropology Department at Tufts University. She is the author of Crossing a Line: Laws, Violence, & Roadblocks to Palestinian Political Expression (Stanford University Press, 2022), about different conditions of expression for and exchange between Palestinian citizens of Israel and Palestinians in the West Bank, and Back Stories: U.S. News and Palestinian Politics (Stanford University Press, 2013), an ethnography of the production of U.S. news during the second Palestinian intifada. She also writes about popular refugee politics in the West Bank, attending to struggles over and through media, water, space, and protest. Working with youth at the Lajee Center, in Aida Refugee Camp, Bethlehem, she has co-produced two bilingual children’s books, including The Aida Alphabet Book (2014). She is co-director of the documentary Take My Pictures For Me (2016). She is the president of the Middle East Section of the American Anthropological Association.
