Palestinian Women is the first book to examine and document the experiences and the historical narrative of ordinary Palestinian women who witnessed the events of 1948 and became involuntary citizens of the State of Israel. Told in their own words, the women's experiences serve as a window for examining the complex intersections of gender, nationalism and citizenship in a situation of ongoing violent political conflict. Known in Palestinian discourse as the 'Nakbeh', or the 'Catastrophe', these events of 60 years ago still have a powerful resonance in contemporary Palestinian-Jewish relations in the State of Israel and in the act of narrating these stories, the author argues that the realm of memory is a site of commemoration and resistance.
In this volume, Brownson sheds new light on Palestinian Muslim women’s agency in shari‘a courts from the British Mandate period to the present. Her extensive archival research on wife-initiated maintenance claims, divorce, and child custody cases deepens our understanding of women’s position in the courts, demonstrating that Muslim women were and are active participants in their legal affairs. Using court registers and interviews, Brownson uncovers a variety of ways women have manipulated the system to their benefit despite its patriarchal bias. She also finds that few reforms were implemented during the Mandate period. The British were uninterested in improving colonized women’s legal status and sought to avoid further antagonizing Palestinians. At the same time, Palestinians wished to uphold the one indigenous institution they still controlled while both British rule and Zionism threatened their nationalist aspirations. Although Palestinian women have had few alternatives to using this male privileged system to redress grievances with their husbands and in-laws, they continue to resist its injustices every day. Brownson finds that women’s understanding of family law fundamentals has enabled some to deftly navigate the system; however, a unified, reformed law reflecting society's current needs is required so women can have full access to their rights.
Though they are almost completely absent from the historical record, Palestinian women were extensively involved in the unfolding national struggle in their country during the British mandate period. This history studies the development of the Palestine women's movement between 1920 and 1948.
In this rich, evocative study, Rhoda Ann Kanaaneh examines the changing notions of sexuality, family, and reproduction among Palestinians living in Israel. Distinguishing itself amid the media maelstrom that has homogenized Palestinians as "terrorists," this important new work offers a complex, nuanced, and humanized depiction of a group rendered invisible despite its substantial size, now accounting for nearly twenty percent of Israel's population. Groundbreaking and thought-provoking, Birthing the Nation contextualizes the politics of reproduction within contemporary issues affecting Palestinians, and places these issues against the backdrop of a dominant Israeli society.
This book explores Palestinian women's views of popular resistance in the West Bank and examines factors shaping the nature and extent of their involvement. Despite the signing of the Oslo peace accords in 1993 and 1995, the Occupied Palestinian Territories in the contemporary period have experienced tightened Israeli occupational control and worsening political, humanitarian, security, and economic conditions. Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted with women in the West Bank, this book looks at how Palestinian women in the post-Oslo period perceive, negotiate, and enact resistance. It demonstrates that, far from being 'apathetic', as some observers have charged, Palestinian women remain deeply committed to the goals of national liberation and wish to contribute to an effective popular resistance movement. Yet many Palestinian women feel alienated from prevailing forms of collective popular resistance in the OPT due to the low levels of legitimacy they accord them. This alienation has been made stark by the gendered and intersecting impacts of expanding settler-colonialism, tightening spatial control, a professionalised and depoliticised civil society, reinforced patriarchal constraints, Israeli and Palestinian Authority (PA) repression and violence, and a deteriorating economy - all of which have raised the barriers Palestinian women face to active participation. Undertaking a gendered analysis of conflict and resistance, this volume highlights significant changes over the course of a long-running resistance movement. Readers interested in gender and women's studies, the Arab-Israel conflict and Middle East politics will find the study beneficial.
Abdullah, Amal Kharisha Barghouthi, Rita Giacaman, May Mistakmel Nassar, Amal Wahdan / Sahar Khalifeh ; translation by Nagla El-Bassiouni -- Intifada year four: notes on the women's movement / Rita Giacaman and Penny Johnson -- Palestinian women's activism after Oslo / Amal Kawar -- The declaration of principles on Palestinian women's rights: an analysis / Suha Sabbagh.
Women throughout the world have always played their part in struggles against colonialism, imperialism and other forms of oppression. However, there are hardly any academic books on Arab political prisoners, fewer still on the Palestinians who have been detained in their thousands for their political activism and resistance. Nahla Abdo's Captive Revolution seeks to break the silence on Palestinian women political detainees, providing a vital contribution to research on women, revolutions, national liberation and anti-colonial resistance. Based on the stories of the women themselves, Abdo draws on a wealth of oral history and primary research in order to analyse Palestinian women's anti-colonial struggle, their agency and their treatment as political detainees. Making crucial comparisons with the experiences of women political detainees in other conflicts, and emphasising the vital role Palestinian political culture and memorialisation of the 'Nakba' have had on their resilience and resistance, Captive Revolution is a rich and revealing addition to our knowledge of this little-studied phenomenon.
As the crisis in Israel does not show any signs of abating this remarkable collection, edited by an Israeli and a Palestinian scholar and with contributions by Palestinian and Israeli women, offers a vivid and harrowing picture of the conflict and of its impact on daily life, especially as it affects women's experiences that differ significantly from those of men. The (auto)biographical narratives in this volume focus on some of the most disturbing effects of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: a sense of dislocation that goes well beyond the geographical meaning of the word; it involves social, cultural, national and gender dislocation, including alienation from one's own home, family, community, and society. The accounts become even more poignant if seen against the backdrop of the roots of the conflict, the real or imaginary construct of a state to save and shelter particularly European Jews from the horrors of Nazism in parallel to the other side of the coin: Israel as a settler-colonial state responsible for the displacement of the Palestinian nation. Nahla Abdo is Professor of Sociology at Carleton University, Ottawa. She has published extensively on women and the state in the Middle East with special focus on Palestinian women. She contributed to the establishment of the Women's Studies Institute at Birzeit University and has found the Gender Research Unit at the Women's Empowerment Project/Gaza Community Mental Health Program in Gaza. Ronit Lentin was born in Haifa prior to the establishment of the State of Israel and has lived in Ireland since 1969. She is a well known writer of fiction and non-fiction books and is course co-ordinator of the MPhil in Ethnic Studies at the Department of Sociology, Trinity College Dublin. She has published extensively on the genedered link between Israel and the Shoah, feminist research methodologies, Israeli and Palestinian women's peace activism, gender and racism in Ireland.
A collaboration between an Israeli psychologist and a Palestinian school teacher. This highly original book recounts the surprisingly candid stories of three Palestinian mothers and their daughters. Beautifully told and sensitively edited, these linked narratives bear witness to their experiences of Israeli occupation, their memories of the wars of 1948 and 1967, and the profound changes that have occurred in their political and personal lives. "The complexity of the women's lives and stories and the ways in which they portray themselves in the book make this work of value to anthropologists, as well as to scholars in women's studies, oral history, Middle East studies, and sociology." -Journal of Palestine Studies
