Dr. Edmond Melhem: Palestinian Women – Part I

As a result of Jewish settlements in Palestine during the British rule and the issuing of the U.N. Partition Plan in 1947, which called for the partition of Palestine into two separate states – one Jewish and one Palestinian – the hostilities broke out between the Palestinians and the Jews. This led to the Jewish occupation of 79 percent of the land of Palestine and, consequently, to the declaration in 1948 of the establishment of the State of Israel. One immediate result of the Palestinian-Jewish war was the mass deportation by direct military assault of many thousands of Palestinians from their cities and villages (726,000 people); about 480 villages were destroyed. Fleeing Palestinians were dispersed into refugee camps in the remaining areas of Palestine in the West Bank (6,257 km) and the Gaza Strip (378 km) and in neighbouring Arab countries such as Jordan, Syria and Lebanon. The Palestinians, accordingly, suffered by being politically exterminated and expelled from their land and by living in exile as refugees while their land and properties were confiscated by the newly-established Israeli government without respect to their rights or desire to return to their homes.
In 1967, another war broke out between Israel and the neighbouring Arab countries. This war ended with the loss of more Palestinian territories (West Bank, Gaza Strip and Sinai Peninsula) and Syria’s Golan Heights. An additional 405,000 Palestinians fled their homes and lost their livelihood for a second time in their lives.
As a result of the 1948 catastrophe (Nakba) and the subsequent catastrophes, Palestinian women found themselves out of their space and time, in the heart of exile, and being “victims of a disfiguring oppression on various levels” and subject with the whole Palestinian people to systematic destruction. Palestinians, as one author describes their lot, “lost their environment, properties, and balance; they were cut in all directions with nothing to pull them together apart from the horrors of the catastrophe.” Since the 1948 great catastrophe, Palestinian women were forced to take their place in the front lines and to join in the national struggle for liberation. They were also forced to develop personal, gendered and national strategies to overcome their tragedy and to advance their social, economic, and cultural status. In the wake of the 1948 exodus of refugees, Palestinian women engaged themselves in welfare activities providing social services for the needy and the poor. This nurturing role in women’s activism continued into the early periods of 1967 Israeli occupation. In the early 1970s, Palestinian women became actively involved in the resistance movement and engaged in grassroots committees, diverse social relief work and activities across class and gender issues in order to improve the situation for women and increase their mobilisation in the resistance movement. As asserted by Valentine M. Moghadam, “in the 1970s Palestinian women’s political activity and participation in resistance groups expanded, whether in Lebanon, the West Bank, Gaza, universities, or refugee camps.” Changes in the roles of women were initiated by a national crisis and the destruction of a system of agricultural production, and then materialized and legitimized by the Palestinian national resistance. As asserted by Julie Peteet:
During the 1950s, for example, it was not uncommon for young camp women to work as maids for wealthy urban families. By the early 1970s, the Resistance was providing women with opportunities for vocational training and employment, a move favourably received by the camp population as a step in the process of social development. Parents are often heard to justify a daughter’s employment by commenting, ‘She’s working for the cause,’ or, if she is enrolled in a vocational training programme, ‘She’ll be able to take care of her children.’