Women's Political Activism in Palestine

Peacebuilding, Resistance, and Survival

Sophie Richter-Devroe

• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780252050558
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

During the last twenty years, Palestinian women have practiced creative and often informal everyday forms of political activism. Sophie Richter-Devroe reflects on their struggles to bring about social and political change.

Richter-Devroe's ethnographic approach draws from revealing in-depth interviews and participant observation in Palestine. The result: a forceful critique of mainstream conflict resolution methods and the failed woman-to-woman peacebuilding projects so lauded around the world. The liberal faith in dialogue as core of "the political" and the assumption that women's "nurturing" nature makes them superior peacemakers, collapse in the face of past and ongoing Israeli state violences.

Instead, women confront Israeli settler colonialism directly and indirectly in their popular and everyday acts of resistance. Richter-Devroe's analysis zooms in on the intricate dynamics of daily life in Palestine, tracing the emergent politics that women articulate and practice there. In shedding light on contemporary gendered "politics from below" in the region, the book invites a rethinking of the workings, shapes, and boundaries of the political.

CHAPTER 1

Women’s Peacebuilding

UNSCR 1325 and the Post-Oslo Peace Supermarket

There is no funder who tells us what we need or don’t need, what is allowed and what is not. But they propose certain “interest issues,” and then NGOs decide that this year they should work on that. This makes an organization unprofessional; it makes it look like a supermarket. (Samira int. 2007)

Samira is a young activist who works in an NGO that aims at strengthening Palestinian women’s political and social activism. When I interviewed her in 2007, she explained to me how—like most Palestinian female activists—she has to negotiate through the often conflicting agendas that local and international actors put forward on Palestine. Her critical outlook on foreign funders’, but also local NGOs’ lack of consistency in their programming, and their quick shifting to new “fashionable” topics, is not exceptional. Most Palestinians criticize the post-Oslo peacebuilding industry for fragmenting Palestinian civil society and contributing to its “NGO-ization.” After the Oslo Accords, Palestinian civil society and grassroots politics became increasingly professionalized and depoliticized. NGO professionals started targeting specific interest groups (e.g., women, refugees, youths) in short-term output-oriented peace and development projects, rather than mobilizing them for more mass-based voluntary forms of protest and resistance activism as was common during, for example, the First Intifada.1 As such, the post-Oslo NGO-ization contributed to the disintegration and weakening of Palestinian civil society, including its once very active and strong social movements and networks.

The NGO-ization of Palestinian civil society produced what has aptly been described as a “globalized elite” (Hanafi and Tabar 2005)—an elite that encompasses mainly urban-based and professionalized supporters of the “peace” process and its negotiation agenda. The “globalized elite” is globalized not just because its members participate in global events, but also because it implements, responds to, and interacts with global agendas, such as Boutros-Ghali’s Agenda for Peace (United Nations Secretary General 1992), the Beijing Platform (United Nations 1995), or more recently, the UNSCR 1325 (United Nations Security Council 2000) on Women, Peace and Security. UNSCR 1325, which was unanimously passed on 31 October 2000 by the United Nations Security Council, calls for women’s increased participation in conflict prevention and resolution initiatives, as well as their protection and empowerment during conflict.2

Since Oslo, and even more so since the adoption of UNSCR 1325, one of the major foreign funding “interest issues,” as Samira puts it aptly, has been women’s peacebuilding. The resolution and its wider WPS agenda have been added to the programming of many, if not most, local and international organizations active in the field of peacebuilding, conflict resolution, or women’s rights in Palestine.3 Acting as a basket for projects related to conflict resolution (ḥal aṣ-ṣirac), joint Palestinian-Israeli dialogue projects (barāmij al-ḥiwār), nonviolence (lā cunf), but also gender empowerment and mainstreaming, it fits comfortably within the liberal peace orthodoxy. Women’s peacebuilding, grounded in the WPS agenda and the UNSCR 1325, thus has become one of the main products displayed on the shelves of the post-Oslo peace supermarket.

Local awareness of and support for 1325, however, is minimal. Many Palestinians, men and women, consider 1325 (and the mainstream WPS agenda to which it belongs) not only irresponsive to their real needs under occupation, but also a patronizing colonial attempt of “white men [and women] saving brown women from brown men” (Spivak 1988, 297). This stance is not exceptional: interventions by the international community that press links between women’s empowerment and conflict resolution are often viewed skeptically by local populations, particularly in contexts of foreign occupation and (neo-)colonialism.4 While locally dismissed, liberal peace projects based on UNSCR 1325 receive strong international material and ideational support. The resolution has played an important role in attracting international funding as well as feminist solidarity for Palestine. As such it has functioned to normalize certain forms of female political agency (e.g., joint peacebuilding), while delegitimizing others (e.g., women’s popular and everyday resistance).

Joint dialogical peace initiatives, including women-to-women projects based on UNSCR1325, can be anchored conceptually in the Habermasian notion of ideal speech. Habermas argues that it is through ideal speech that private individuals, when they come together in the public sphere, form consensus in rational deliberation on matters of public interest. While Habermas maintains that an ideal speech situation can lead to mutual understanding, he considers other—less idealized and functionalized—forms of language “parasitic” (cited in Gardiner 2004, 35), and thus not useful for politics. According to Habermas the public sphere (and politics more broadly) relies and indeed should rely on discourse ethics and dialogue: people use dialogue and discursive dialectic exchange to justify, verify, and establish validity claims and norms. Habermas’s analysis has both an empirical dimension (in his claim that the ideal speech situation and public sphere was in existence, but then declined), and a normative one (in his demand that such is the way that politics should be done). It has been argued that Habermas’s theory can “tackle empirical questions in world politics” (Risse 2000, 2), and, in the context of Palestine, scholars have used his theory to better understand dialogue-based peacebuilding, claiming that dialogue groups between Palestinians and Israelis have been successful in establishing an ideal speech situation (Pfeil 2015).

Countering such claims, the analysis provided in this chapter of the actual experiences of Palestinian women in dialogical conflict resolution groups shows that the Habermasian dialogical model cannot and does not work in Palestine. Dialogue here did not lead to the establishment of consensus and shared validity claims, but rather functioned as a disciplining mechanism that helped to solidify the “peace (agenda) of the powerful,” that is, the empty, shallow, and dull peace, as Ghassan had described it in 2008, that the colonizer aims to establish.

After providing a brief historical overview of the developments in women’s peacebuilding in Palestine, I discuss the problems inherent in the mainstream liberal WPS agenda. The chapter relies predominantly on interviews conducted with women leaders who work, or worked, on UNSCR 1325 in Palestine. Even though Palestinians have largely lost trust in official politics since 2000, some political actors continue to struggle from within the hegemonic paradigm: the post-Oslo peace and the WPS agenda. In this chapter I aim to shed light on the narratives, practices, struggles—but also critiques—of those in the Palestinian women’s movement who have tried to fight from within and as part of the “globalized elite.” I focus on those women activists who use the liberal WPS agenda, have joined Palestinian-Israeli peace initiatives, and have attempted to work with UNSCR 1325 in order make it applicable and relevant to the Palestinian context. Many of the women whose voices feature in this chapter are longtime activists; they have played and continue to play leading roles in women’s peace projects.

From Mass-Based Activism to the Liberal WPS Agenda

Joint political initiatives between Palestinian and Israeli women existed since 1948 and were propelled in particular by the Democratic Women’s Movement (TANDI), which was founded in 1948 by Arab and Jewish female members of the Communist Party. TANDI worked for women’s and workers’ rights, organized peaceful marches and protest actions, and advanced a joint solidarity agenda for peace calling for a democratic binational state (Sharoni 1995, 134). What united Palestinian and Israeli women in these early activities was their joint political standpoint against colonialism and discrimination, and for coexistence, not their shared gender identity as women.5

A joint political agenda—that of resistance against the Israeli occupation—was also what brought together Palestinian and Israeli women in the years before and during the First Intifada, when joint activities peaked. Israeli human rights lawyers, such as Leah Tsemel and Felicia Langer, defended Palestinian political prisoners, investigated and brought to light the fact that they were tortured in Israeli prisons, and staged joint protest actions (see, e.g., Langer 1975; Ashrawi 1995, 32, 51). Suad, a prominent leftist women’s leader with ample experience in women’s and peace activism, also during the First Intifada, remembered from her time in the women’s prison in Ramla that

there were many Israeli women’s organizations in the beginning of the ’80s who visited [us] when we held strikes inside the Israeli prison from ’82–’84. We were on strike to gain our rights as female political prisoners and the [Israeli] women’s human rights organizations really supported our strike. A group of women used to come and stand in front of the prison in Ramla protesting against the treatment of Palestinian political prisoners. … They used to always visit us, bring us books, and such things. They wanted to support and show solidarity with Palestinian women. This was, I think, the beginning of [joint solidarity] work: those female lawyers who defended the cases of Palestinian political prisoners. And this, of course, started to pave the way for thinking that we might work together as women. (Suad int. 2008)

Before the start of the First Intifada, however, only few tentative steps were taken by the Palestinian women’s movement to establish links with Israeli women. This changed during the First Intifada, as Suad explained:

Before the First Intifada there was no vision to approach or pay attention to Israeli society, maybe in some programs of some [Palestinian] political parties, but no specific steps were taken from the women’s movement. But when the slogan “two states for two people” (dawlataīn li-l-shacbaīn) was raised and maybe a peace process was to start, [it was clear that] peace can only come from both sides. Of course, there was also the big role that women played in the First Intifada and the development of women’s political leadership that opened a space to develop relations between Palestinian and Israeli women, especially if these were aimed at ending the occupation of the 1967 land. … So when it became clear that we [the Palestinians] really believe in peace and in the establishment of two states, a Palestinian state next to an Israeli, a change of thinking was initiated in Israeli society and among the Israeli women. (Suad int. 2008)

The slogan “two states for two people” was officially promoted after the 1988 Palestinian National Council session in Algiers, when the PLO leadership confirmed its commitment to UN Resolution 242, the 1967 borders and the principle of land for peace. This crucial shift in the PLO ideology encouraged the Israeli peace movement, and particularly Israeli women’s peace groups, to widen participation in joint peace initiatives. Several Israeli women’s peace groups were founded after the start of the First Intifada, among them the Women’s Organization for Political Prisoners (WOFPP), a group of women defending Palestinian female political prisoners, and Women in Black, a group of anti-war activists who stage nonviolent silent vigils in various locations in Israel and Palestine and are also often joined by Palestinian women.6 Joint initiatives between Israeli and Palestinian women groups could take various forms, such as dialogue groups, local and international conferences, and solidarity protests (Sharoni 1995, 134–35). Suad recounts her involvement in joint women’s groups at the time:

The [joint women’s] meetings included, for example, invitations to Palestinian women leaders to come and hold awareness-raising campaigns in Israel. In these session we [the Palestinian women leaders] would explain to them [Israelis] what the concerns of Palestinians are, or that the Intifada is in fact all popular [shacbī] mass work, like strikes, demonstrations, sit-ins, and that all this aims at ending the Israeli occupation of the 1967 lands and establishing a Palestinian state next to the Israeli. So there started to be more joint work, in the form of solidarity with political prisoners, the human chain in Jerusalem, or when we called for Jerusalem to become two capitals for two states.7 (Suad int. 2008)

The first contacts between Palestinian and Israeli women were mainly through demonstrations or street actions. Such political solidarity activities, whether women only or mixed, were generally received favorably by the Palestinian public.

But those who met with Israelis also had to face the criticism of normalization (taṭbīc), that is, of normalizing the status quo of occupation by meeting with the other side. Hanan Ashrawi reflects in her autobiography on the major difficulties she faced in 1988 when participating in the first official and public joint Palestinian-Israeli encounter—a TV debate. For her, the main problem was “to persuade the various factions that such an event could be carried out without conceding the ‘normalization’ of relations between occupier and occupied” (Ashrawi 1995, 48). The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) refused to participate or lend official support to public Palestinian-Israel dialogue, while the Communist Party was its strongest supporter. Fatah and the Popular Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PDFLP) remained ambiguous in their stance toward dialogue (ibid.).8

The women’s committees, although mostly reflecting the position taken by their political parties, tended to adopt a more pragmatic stance toward joint initiatives. Suad, for example, explained that

even some of the [women’s] committees that did not support the call for two states for two people did not oppose the [joint] meetings. They [only] opposed that you would enter the stage of negotiations or the normalization (taṭbīc) process. They were afraid of normalization. But the message that we sent out to the Israelis was … that all the women in the world have to unite in their efforts. In this we were of course influenced by the international conferences that had been taking place for women, whether in Beijing or Nairobi. We were saying that we women—all of us who are struggling in conflict areas—we should come together, talk about this, and discuss our cases. But, of course, those who participated most [in joint activities] were those who supported the call for “two states for two people.” (Suad int. 2008)

Several women’s peace conferences, often bringing together international, Israeli, and (in much smaller numbers) Palestinian women, have been organized since the First Intifada (see, e.g., Pope 1993; Daniele 2014; Sharoni 1995). In 1989 Simone Süsskind organized “Give Peace a Chance: Women Speak Out,” a major international women’s peace conference in Brussels attended by over 150 women from around the Mediterranean. Palestinian women participated as committee representatives or as independent experts. The conferences dealt with the linkages between women’s emancipatory struggles, nationalism, and national liberation and called for an end to the occupation and the establishment of two states through the path of dialogue and negotiations.9

But already then there were also many Palestinian women activists who refused to participate in the growing business of joint women’s peace initiatives. The PFLP-affiliated Union of Palestinian Women’s Committees (UPWC), for example, boycotted the Brussels conference. In an interview conducted in 1991 by Simona Sharoni, the late Maha Nassar, the union’s director, expressed her skepticism toward joint women’s dialogue groups, asking the pertinent question: “what kind of bridges you want to build, between whom and leading to what?” (Nassar quoted in Sharoni 1995, 142).

After the signing of the 1993 Oslo Accords, joint Palestinian-Israeli civil society peace projects received increased financial support from international donors and were institutionalized through the 1995 People-to-People Program.10 By bringing together constituencies from both sides of the conflict and establishing dialogue and cooperation between them, the People-to-People Program aimed at enhancing mutual relations, building stability, trust, and cooperation and moving toward full reconciliation. Norway and its Institute for Applied Social Science, Fafo, were the official administrators of the People-to-People Program, but other local, bilateral, and multilateral organizations, such as USAID, CIDA, EU, SIDA, and Belgium Aid, quickly joined the post-Oslo peace market.11 With its focus on civil-society actors as peacebuilders, the People-to-People Program relied mainly on NGOs for implementation: on the Palestinian side, the projects were administered by the Palestinian Center for Peace in Ramallah under Hassan Abu-Libdeh (Naser-Najjab 2004, 90n73; Endresen and Gilen 2000, 30). It is estimated that, between September 1993 and September 2000, somewhere between $20 and $25 million were allocated to civil-society organizations for joint Palestinian-Israeli peacebuilding (Baskin and Al-Qaq 2002, 544), and by mid-2000, 136 projects had been funded through the People-to-People Program alone (Endresen and Gilen 2000, 31).

Apart from the People-to-People Program, most other joint Palestinian-Israeli conflict resolution projects were (and continue to be) carried out by foreign-funded NGOs. Sometimes Israeli-Palestinian or Palestinian NGOs are involved, but most joint projects tend to be headed by Israeli NGOs that collaborate for their joint projects with NGOs from the other side. NGO involvement in peacebuilding has been widely discussed. Those supporting the liberal peace agenda, and following in particular Boutros-Ghali’s Agenda for Peace (United Nations Secretary General 1992), find that non-state actors play a cri...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Note on Transliteration and List of Arabic Terms
• Abbreviations
• Introduction: From Revolutionary Activism to Informal Politics
• 1 Women’s Peacebuilding: UNSCR 1325 and the Post-Oslo Peace Supermarket
• 2 Women’s Popular Resistance: Embodied Protest and Political Claim Making
• 3 Women’s Everyday Resistance and the Infrapolitics of Ṣumūd: “Yes, we came here to enjoy!”
• Conclusion: Reclaiming Humanity and the Politics of Women’s Everyday Life in Occupied Palestine
• Appendix: Groups, Networks, and Organizations
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index