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Ruheen Khatoon

The Question of Palestinian Women in Gaza

‘All my dreams have vanished’: Marah al-Qayed (19-year-old from Gaza)[1]

It has been 5 months since the conflict escalated in Gaza on the 7th of October 2023. More than 34,900 people in the enclave have been killed and over 72,298 injured, according to figures provided by the Health Ministry there. More than 24,620 women were killed, and nearly 1 million women and girls have been displaced from their homes. According to UN women data, 3,000+ women have become widows, and new heads of households, following their male partner’s death. 50,000 women in Gaza are pregnant, with 5,522 expected to deliver in the next month [2].

*This article emphasizes the role of women in the resistance movement and their suffering in the context of the prolonged conflict.

Women living in Gaza have unique and urgent needs and vulnerabilities, as they are disproportionately bearing the burden of the escalation of hostilities in the occupied Palestinian territories, both as casualties and reduced access to health services. Maternal, newborn, and child health services are being severely disrupted by the bombardments, damaged or non-functioning health facilities, massive displacement, collapsing water and electricity supplies, and restricted access to food and medicines. There's a good chance that the 5522 women who are expected to give birth will have pregnancy-related complications and require extra medical attention. These women are deprived of the emergency obstetric care they need to deliver their babies safely.[3] There have been cases of childbirth without anesthesia due to the collapse of more than 70% of the healthcare infrastructure. Some women are forced to give birth in homes, shelters, streets filled with debris, or overcrowded medical facilities where there is an increasing risk of infection and other health problems and poor sanitation. Given the lack of access to quality care, an increase in maternal deaths is anticipated. In addition to having a direct impact on sexual and reproductive health, the psychological toll of hostilities also increases the risk of stress-induced miscarriages, stillbirths, and premature births. Al-Jazeera [4] reports that because sanitary pads and tampons are hard to come by, water is scarce, and living conditions are overly crowded, women have been forced to resort to menstruation-delaying pills.

The Case of Sexual Violence

In 2014, following a lecture in Israel, Catherine Mackinnon was asked about rape as a war crime and in the context of genocide. She concluded from her response that from the testimonies she has- the Israeli army does not rape. The impression is that rape and other forms of sexual violence are not part of Israel’s arsenal of violence. (Weisht) (Nashef, 2022)

Against this tendency, scholars have noted that as a mechanism of security, speech is not always possible and revealed how silence might work as a survival mechanism. Scholars researching Israeli state sexual violence against Palestinians have likewise turned their gaze to less visible spaces, such as prisons, courtrooms, and investigation rooms, and to perpetrators who are not necessarily soldiers, examined the sexual torture of Palestinian men, discussed women’s fear of rape by Israeli soldiers, analyzed the representation of rape in Palestinian literature and illustrated how Palestinian women’s narratives are locked within colonial loops of displacement.

Hania Nashef in her writing “Suppressed Nakba Memories in Palestinian Female Narratives” tried to analyze the suppressed accounts of women present in literature and other oral forms. She claims that Israeli officials have long denied that rape was used as an instrument of war against Palestinians. Most of the files relating to the expulsion of Palestinians during the Nakba in 1948 and its aftermath remain sealed in Israeli archives and have been reclassified as top secret. Palestinian oral narratives have long been considered a poor alternative to historical research based on archives or written texts. In addition, some of the narrative in many instances was driven by an ideology that favored the male voice, resulting in the silencing of Palestinian female voices. Hence, Palestinian stories were either the official narrative or stories told by their menfolk. Oral histories or testimonies by women were often missing, not only in the collective narrative but also in stories told through first-hand experiences of the Palestinian Nakba in 1948. She analyzed two fictionalized historical novels, The Blue Between Sky and Water by Susan Abulhawa which is a story of the survival of a peasant family from the village of Beit Daras, and The Woman from Tantoura by Radwa Ashour tells the story of the aftermath of the 1948 massacre of Tantoura.

Role of women in the resistance movement

From 1987 to 1992, the Palestinian Intifada was characterized as a movement for national self-determination of Palestinians. The Palestinian women and women’s committees aided the Intifada(uprising), while their institutional platform was impacted by the combination of forces such as class, political, and gender issues that permeated among the occupied territories known as the West Bank and Gaza Strip, in 1987. The intifada broke out in December of that year, which has been explained as both a spontaneous outbreak as well as within the context of twenty years of political struggle between Israel and Palestinians. This twenty-year background is in effect the 1967 war between Syria, Egypt, and Jordan against Israel. As a result, Israel won the war that consequently led to the usurpation of lands from the Palestinian people of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Under occupation, Israel adopted measures that included not only land expropriation, but “exploitation of water resources, restrictions on agriculture and industrial development, and like-have dispossessed of their lands and livelihood and forced into wage labor in the Israeli economy.” (Souad Dajani)

Many Western researchers on Palestinian women present a vulnerable image which they claim to have come from the cultural norms. As a critique to which, Jean Genet[4] argued:

“it is inconceivable that the Palestinian revolution should not be accompanied by the liberation of Palestinian women. I am not talking of bourgeois women…I am talking of ordinary women, who are, even in her present situation, an extremely dynamic and revolutionary element.”

We must begin by recognizing that the silence and distortion that surround Palestinian women are not true reflections of their passivity but are signs of exclusion from history that they share with women generally and also with peasants as a class. The problem of Palestinian women is not primarily of oppression by their society, but of colonialism and to put the two problems on an equal footing makes a false start. Colonialists and missionaries have always claimed land, perhaps even believing that they were liberating the natives from cruel and degrading family practices, only to put less visible forms of oppression in their place.

To understand Palestinian women’s situation and responses, we must first identify the basic conditions that shape the Palestinian struggle:

  1. An opponent of more than ordinary ambitions and resources

  2. An imbalance of forces such that there is little likelihood of even minimal national objectives being reached in the near future.

  3. Lack of territory from which, they can launch the struggle or develop autonomously

  4. Dispersion which facilitates repression and makes the reproduction of the community (Mogannum, 1937)

  5. The repeated crushing and scattering of the national movement, preventing the accumulation of organizational experience, self-knowledge, and records

  6. A vulnerability to economic exploitation arising directly out of political disenfranchisement.

All these conditions interact to produce an exceptionally harsh, intractable struggle, fragmented in time and space, punctuated by spasms of genocidal violence. In periods when the leadership is affected – as in 1948- it falls upon family units to transmit the Palestinian idea. 

Conclusion

Women and children have been facing the brunt of the war. Women have been subject to “double colonization” in this case, wherein patriarchy existed within society as well as inflicted through colonial oppression. The physical, psychological and sexual impact on women is at times undermined by the forefront media and academic writing. There is a crucial need to analyze the role of women in this resistance movement and direct and indirect violence towards them.

References

Dajani, S. R. (1990). The Intifada . Centre for Hebraic Studies, University of Jordan.

Enloe, C. (1990). Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making sense of International Politics . Berkeley: University of California Press.

Mogannum, M. (1937). The Arab women and Palestiniam problem . London: Joseph.

Nashef, H. A. (2022). Suppressed Nakba memories in Palestinian female narratives. Interventions, 24:4, 567-585.

Tickner, J. A. (n.d.). You just don't understand: troubled engagements between Feminist and IR theorists. Inrenational Studies Quarterly , 41, 11-32.

Weisht, J. D. (n.d.). Sexual Torture of Palestinian men by Israeli authorities. Reproductive Health Matters, 23(46), 71-84.

Young, G. (n.d.). Feminist International Relations: A contradiction in Terms? or Why women and Gender are essential to understanding the world 'we' live in",. International Affairs, Vol 80, 75-87.

Dajani, Souad R. The Intifada (Amman: Centre for Hebraic studies, University of Jordan, 1990) pp.15 

[4] Linah Alsafin and Ruwaida Amer, 31 October 2023, No Privacy, No water: Gaza Women use period- delaying pills amid Israel War, Al-Jazeera.

[5] J. Genet, ‘The Palestinians’, Journal of Palestinian Studies (Beirut) 3 (1) Autumn 1973

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