Palestinian Women through a Century of Organizing
Jennifer Mogannam
I
n examining various stages of one hundred years of Palestinian women’s and feminist organizing, it becomes apparent that Palestinian feminism is not a new phenomenon. Though the most recognized formations that have adopted feminist language in collective mobilizing have emerged in the twenty-first centur y, a
Palestinian anticolonial feminist politics has been brewing since modern, Western
forms of colonialism were imposed on the lands and peoples of Palestine. While the
development of such a feminism has changed shape and been undermined by shifting colonial and imperialist policies meant to repress the Palestinian liberation
struggle, Palestinian feminist political praxis has been mobilized throughout. Each
phase of mobilizing has shaped a practice of feminism grounded in how women
have inserted themselves into the anticolonial struggle against both British and
Zionist colonial forces, and through this practice a feminist politics of liberation
and care has emerged. While the term feminism remains contentious in Palestinian
spaces, Palestinian feminist praxis has been built through every moment of intifada
in the Palestinian liberation struggle. Intifada is an Arabic term that translates to
“uprising” and is largely specific to moments of Palestinian insurgency. As I think
through different historical moments of Palestinian intifada, I note the various roles
women have played and how those mobilizations create a nonlinear yet necessary
trajectory of Palestinian anticolonial feminism. I argue that this trajectory, while not
widely accepted due to multidirectional challenges to the concept and language of
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© 2024 by MARHO: The Radical Historians’ Organization, Inc.
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Palestinian Feminist Formations
On September 26, 2019, talʾat emerged across Palestine, through calls for mobilization in response to the intercommunal, gendered murder of the Palestinian
woman Israa Gharib.1 Palestinian feminists situate this murder within a global
rise in femicide that results from patriarchal hierarchies that deem women’s bodies
property and connect family honor to control over women’s bodies.2 The Zionist
state further perpetuates the familial anxieties around honor and poses a threat to
women’s physical safety through infiltration practices for the purposes of blackmail.3 As my comrade and colleague Shadia4 narrated to me, the idea of talʾat
began to form earlier in 2019 and, following some smaller, localized protests,
talʾat (“We’re going out,” in the feminine)5 was used as a slogan to call for nationwide protest in response to growing cases of gendered violence in Palestine. The
original intent of this mobilization was a singular day of aligned protest; however,
through the immense force, power, and energy of this moment, organizers realized
the necessity of continuing to organize this feminist front in a fascinating display of
the power of both spontaneity and organization.6 Talʾat mobilized not just women
but Palestinians of all genders,7 and the profound impact rippled across Palestine,
the region, and the Palestinian shatat (translated most often as “diaspora” but more
literally meaning “dispersal” to connote the transnational community of Palestinians outside their homelands). It also evoked a power that women came to assume
in organizing spaces that are typically overpowered by male leadership.
The emergence of talʾat challenged the social and political culture that perpetuates gender-based violence in Palestinian infrastructures while also calling
into question the lack of effective prevention, intervention, and accountability processes for engaging such gendered questions. In turn, this moment reflects a twofold
challenge to the patriarchal order. First, it contests Zionist colonial, ideological
underpinnings of violence based on gender that have insurmountable effects on Palestinians and serves as a tool for emasculating Palestinian men. There are many
instances in which Zionist colonialism genders its colonized subjects. Some examples include the use of sexual violence as a torture practice on Palestinian political
prisoners and unequal access to health care that has resulted in mothers birthing
their babies at checkpoints because they are not allowed to pass—often resulting
in birth complications, including death of the mother, the baby, or both. Second,
this moment challenges Palestinian society and political culture to take seriously
the egregious consequences of gender inequity and particularly femicide as structurally enabled through Palestinian governing bodies and social status quos. Within
Palestinian social and legal structures, there are no clearly defined repercussions for
instances of femicide or other forms of gender-based violence, yet solicitations like
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feminism, is in fact compatible with, and even necessary for, the struggle to actualize
Palestinian liberation and freedom.
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Historicizing Palestinian Feminism
In tracing historical iterations of Palestinian feminism, we must examine women’s
organizing spaces, which housed this work almost exclusively until the early 2000s.
The queer organizing spaces that emerged in Palestine articulated their organizational trajectories as overtly feminist. Palestinian women’s organizing dates back
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catcalling in the streets have been monitored by morality police, thus furthering the
cultural view that protecting women is an issue of honor and violence against them
is a family matter. These pressures are further exacerbated by the technologies of
Zionism that prohibit a life of dignity for Palestinians, often prohibiting Palestinian
men from their aim of providing economic stability to their families, threatening
their sense of masculinity and thus producing an expression of masculinity in the
family through regulations of honor, gender, and violence.
This moment of uprising in 2019 left many Palestinians across the shatat
wondering why there had been such a void in contemporary Palestinian feminist
mobilizing. As talʾat’s efforts continued to resonate, some organizers in the United
States, including me, remained in contact with the organizers in Palestine whom we
had encountered in other Palestinian organizing spaces. This relationship was crucial for thinking through the shared need for an explicitly feminist platform in the
diaspora. After almost a year of foundational work and process, the Palestinian Feminist Collective (PFC) publicly launched on March 15, 2021, pledging that “Palestine is a feminist issue.”8
This pledge immediately gained public traction; signatories stepped forward in the hundreds to thousands and are still trickling in nearly three years
later. As Palestinian and Arab women and feminists committed to liberation in its
multilayered forms, we came together around an idea and a void that we felt. The
pledge came out just before the emergence of the unity intifada in 2021, which signified a renewed resurgence of Palestinian resistance to defend land and lives across
Palestine’s entire geography, from Jerusalem to Gaza and from Nablus to Haifa, as
well as retaliatory escalations of violence by the Zionist regime. In this moment the
PFC decided to write “A Love Letter to Our People in Palestine.”9 This public letter
was in part a response to a letter we learned of from talʾat to the women of Jerusalem
defending their homes from demolition and lands from confiscation. These initiatives and this moment of heightened resistance led to the mobilization of a letter
from gender studies departments in support of the PFC.10 This unexpected and welcome initiative was released alongside an influx of university departments issuing
public statements in support of Palestine. At this moment it became clear, at least
in my view, just how critical the need was for a Palestinian feminist formation, both
for the Palestinian community and for US-based radical feminist allies, and how
deeply felt the PFC message was as it aimed to fill that void.
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over a century and therefore is far from a new phenomenon. To take the question of
Palestinian feminism seriously, we must honor this continuity and the different formations that house this trajectory. Highlighted in the PFC’s Feminist Futures 2023
calendar project is this century-long legacy Palestinian women and feminists have
created. The work of this project is featured in the physical calendar, in corresponding social media posts, and through programmatic events accompanying the physical calendar.11 The first iterations of Palestinian and Arab feminisms predated the
British Mandate, as we see with women’s resistance against the construction of a
settlement in Afula as early as 1893 and through to the establishment of women’s
societies including, most notably, the Arab Women’s Association in Jerusalem and
localized Arab and Palestinian women’s unions across Palestine in the early 1920s.12
In the early years of resistance under both British and Zionist rule, to the foundations of the Palestinian student movements and emergence of the parties, to the
establishment of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and the anticolonial
national liberation movement, women have persisted in their organizing; they have
inserted themselves in spaces not relegated to them and paved the way for the participation of more women, signifying an anticolonial, feminist practice of visibilizing
and strengthening demands and participation from a broader social base. During
the British Mandate, Palestinian women were committed to Palestine as an autonomous and contiguous land-based formation and were unequivocally consistent in
their criticisms of colonial migration, militarism, and rule, both British and Zionist,
as a foundational part of their principles in organizing.13 This legacy of Palestinian
and Arab women’s organizing persisted in multiple forms across the past century.
During the peak of the liberation movement, known as the thawra, or revolution, from the 1960s to the 1980s, Palestinian women largely mobilized through
the General Union of Palestinian Women (GUPW) as well as the various political
parties and PLO unions. At this time, the Palestinian liberation movement was consolidated under the PLO, one united infrastructure that housed political parties,
popular resistance unions, guerrilla organizations, and executive infrastructures
that moved forward a united project and strategy of liberation. In this period, in particular, the aims of women’s movements were in line with those of the national liberation struggle, and women inserted themselves within male-dominated spaces to
pave the way for more broad-based women’s participation in revolutionary activities. These activities centered the creation of a Palestinian national infrastructure
in exile to contest the Zionist state’s violence and its colonial existence altogether
through political party organizing, popular refugee mobilization, and cross-border
armed resistance. The national movement at the time, including many revolutionary women active in the movement’s organizations, subscribed to the framework that
Palestine must be liberated before women can be liberated. While you can read this
work through a feminist lens both as a sort of feminist nationalism and as shortsighted
in feminist imagination for its relegation of women’s issues to a postliberation
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chronology, the language of feminism was not used as such in either regard. However, women were central to conceiving of a feminist cultural practice from within
the movement, putting forth a politics of care and sustaining the revolutionary current through their gendered labor.
Women were central to the organized resistance against colonial, military,
and state rule inside Palestine as far back as the 1936 Great Revolt (and preceding
it), which lasted three years. In all waves of Palestinian resistance, especially in what
has been communally labeled the first intifada in the late 1980s, coordinated popular resistance from within Palestine strongly contested Zionist state violence and
militarism. Both the 1936–39 Great Revolt and the first intifada are important
moments, in a century of ongoing anticolonial intifadas, for the organized formations that emerged in these two moments as grassroots defenders of Palestinian
life, land, and dignity. During the late 1980s Palestinian Islamic movements emerged
and women found their way into organizing in these spaces as well, resisting in direct
confrontation with Zionist state militarism. Following the early 1990s peace processes, which ultimately resulted in the Oslo Accords14 and the formation of the Palestinian Authority (PA), a process of both political collapse and an influx of money
from foreign nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), particularly from the West,
shifted the landscape of women’s organizing. This occurred not only in Palestine
under the PA but also across the region where Palestinians were displaced, especially in the refugee camps.
This transition reflects the move from a radical nationalist women’s organizing modality, whereby women’s labor fueled revolution and intergenerational survivance, to a more politically restrictive phase, whereby the collapse in the organizing institutions, coupled with liberal funding with strings attached, created a
“women’s empowerment” boom across the newly established NGO sector.15 Many
women who were leading the GUPW and the women’s movements found themselves moving into NGO positions with narrowly defined women’s empowerment
foci.16 As Islah Jad explains, NGOization enables a new, growing form of dependency on the West and is a tool to expand Western hegemony. She argues that a process of decentralizing and fragmenting sociopolitical issues from one another ensues
and mobilizes state-building frameworks, localizing women’s struggles and decoupling them from the broader liberation struggle.17 The frameworks brought forth by
the funding networks of United Nations and international development organizations revert women’s empowerment “back [to] the old dichotomies of West versus
East” and inscribe the Westernized notion of women as the model of empowerment
to follow.18 This NGOization move, in combination with the conditions set through
the Oslo Accords for Palestinian political elites and wealthy exilees to return to the
PA territories, produced a new elite class in Palestine that ushered in a new wave of
economic instability through the facade of growing capitalism under occupation.
The influx of NGO and PA funding forged a deeper wealth gap as well as reliance
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Palestinian Feminism Today
While women have continuously been part of Palestinian political life, whether in
the PLO, the PA, the secular parties that make up the PLO, or the Islamic parties
that emerged in the 1980s, the first Palestinian queer organizations—Aswat and
Al-Qaws—emerged in the 2000s, at a time when women’s organizing through NGOs
was in full force.19 However, these organizations did not immediately become public, and their work was met with heavy social and political backlash that continues today. While queer organizing situates its work within the conditions of settler
colonialism and through feminist visions, it, like feminism, is still not fully integrated into the larger social and political landscape in Palestine or the shatat.
Talʾat and the PFC also face backlash in Palestinian community spaces.
Feminism is a challenging concept for Palestinian communities, because the most
common iteration of feminism is Western, imperialist feminism. Therefore, using the
language of feminism connotes for some an alignment with imperialist aims. This
association is as much linked to the anti-imperialist politics of the Palestinian thawra
as it is to the current phase of NGOization and strings-attached funding streams for
women’s (and other) organizing. As has been reflected in countless comments on the
social media platforms of the PFC as well as talʾat and other formations, there are
multidirectional challenges to the concept of feminism as a vehicle for anticolonial
resistance.
However, the Palestinian feminism that both talʾat and the PFC offer stands
in stark contrast to imperialist and white feminisms, though in our communities the
concept of feminism is often seen as imperialist and Western. In fact, if one engaged
in the concepts and politics the PFC is putting forth, one would find that the commitment to Palestinian resistance in all forms, to anticolonial struggle, and to decolonization is central to its feminism. In turn, PFC’s feminism is compatible with, and
arguably offers necessary frameworks for, the struggle for Palestinian liberation
and freedom. What talʾat and the PFC offer organizationally, as far as liberation is
concerned, is to conjoin political and social struggles and aims as inextricably tied
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on these types of employment opportunities, creating a dependence on colonial and
imperialist funding circuits and governing structures to ensure economic stability
and survival. Following the counterrevolutionary engagement of the peace process,
in which we see the national bourgeoisie become figureheads for a governing body
that maintains the colonial regime instead of offering an alternative, and the fracturing of a unified liberation project, a void was deeply felt in terms of Palestinian
mobilizing, which, I argue, is still felt today. Of course, this dissolution of organized
liberation struggles impacted women as it impacted all of Palestinian society. It created a vacuum of revolutionary infrastructure, leadership, and vision, all of which
have continued to devolve incrementally into further fragmentation from the 1990s
to today.
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177
Jennifer Mogannam is an assistant professor of critical race and ethnic studies at the University of
California, Santa Cruz. She is a former UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow and a founding member of the Palestinian Feminist Collective.
Notes
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung—Palestine, “Discussion about the New Palestinian Feminist
Initiative”; Hawari, “Israa Gharib’s Murder Has Nothing to Do with Honour”; Marshood
and Alsanah, “Talʾat.”
Abueish, “Israa Ghareeb.”
Ben David and Ben David, “‘I’d Rather Die in the West Bank’”; Mahmoud, “Film about
Israel Collaborators”; O’Connor, “Gay Palestinians Are Being Blackmailed”; Council on
American-Islamic Relations, “Israeli Guards Rape Palestinian Women”; Rapoport, “The
Disturbing Story from Within”; Mohsen, “Decolonization of Palestine.”
Shadia is used as a pseudonym for someone still actively engaged in the community that
talʾat created and is part of the leadership community of talʾat.
Since Arabic is a gendered language, the gendering of the term is an important part of its
significance.
Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth.
Giovannetti, “Palestinians Demand Legal Protection.”
Palestinian Feminist Collective, “Pledge That Palestine Is a Feminist Issue.”
Palestinian Feminist Collective, “Love Letter.”
Gender Studies Departments in Solidarity with Palestinian Feminist Collective, “Gender
Studies Departments in Solidarity.”
Palestinian Feminist Collective, “Calendar.”
Palestinian Feminist Collective, “Calendar.”
Mogannam, Arab Woman and the Palestine Problem.
The Oslo Accords were a Western-facilitated attempt at diplomatic resolution between
Palestinians and the Zionist state. However, the agreements disregard the refugee
question and the question of Jerusalem and have upheld colonial military rule through
elaborate mobility-control infrastructures like checkpoints, sniper towers, and the
annexation wall and through the rapid expansion of settlements, which continue to
confiscate lands and bantustanize West Bank Palestinian territories. See Palestine Remix,
“The Price of Oslo.”
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and coconstitutive in the fight for liberation. This is exemplified through talʾat’s popularized slogan “no free homeland without free women.”20 These two collectives
account for very real material conditions being felt by women and queer Palestinians as multiply and intersectionally oppressed through the duality of being a subject of both colonialism and patriarchy and the entanglement of the two. The feminism put forth by the PFC and talʾat are not new among intergenerational
Palestinian conversations. However, they articulate a Palestinian feminism of
twenty-first-century relevance, building on over a century of Palestinian women’s
mobilizations and accounting for the material conditions and social struggles central to the Palestinian gendered experience as we mobilize toward actualizing
decolonized liberation through sustained Palestinian feminist intifada.
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AlQaws. “AlQaws for Sexual and Gender Diversity in Palestinian Society.” http://alqaws.org
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16. Hindi, “Narratives of National Struggle.”
17. Jad, “‘NGOization’ of the Arab Women’s Movements.”
18. Jad, “‘NGOization’ of the Arab Women’s Movements,” 46.
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Initiative.”
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