Palestinian Women

Fighting Two Battles

SUSAN MUADDI DARRAJ
On March 8, 2003, which is recognized as International Womens Day,
several Palestinian womens organizations released a public statement,
in which they declared: Looking towards the eighth of March, we,
Palestinian women, stand defiantly over the graves of our innocent mar-
tyrs and children, challenging the violations of human rights practiced
against our people daily. Later the statement goes on to say: [W]e raise
our voices loudly, as one people, demanding from international society
to provide international protection for our people, living, dying and
existing under occupation. We demand a halt to all forms of war crimes
and violations of our human rights which we face daily. We call upon our
civil society partners to build a feminist agenda as an integral part of
their programs for the sake of a just society in which all are equal with-
out discrimination or abuse.
1
The statement is a fitting illustration of the dual battle that
Palestinian women wage against the obstacles of occupation and the
challenges of patriarchy. Any womens movement that has had to con-
tend with patriarchal as well as imperialist forces has had to wage a sim-
ilar battle, fought on two fronts. This paper will outline the history of the
Palestinian womens movement, highlight the issues that differentiate it
from other global womens movements, and discuss the future of
Palestinian womens rights.
History
In the United States, the first wave of the feminist movement arose
decades after independence from Britain had been sought and gained.
The ground-breaking summit on womens rights was held in 1848 in
Seneca Falls, New York, and women finally achieved suffrage in 1920
with the passing of the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. In the
2 5
Susan Muaddi Darraj is a freelance writer and the managing editor of The Baltimore
Review(www.BaltimoreReview.org). She is the editor of Scheherazades Legacy: Arab and
Arab-American Women on Writing, which is forthcoming from Praeger/Greenwood
Publishers. She lives in Baltimore, where she teaches writing and literature courses.
Darraj8.qxd 4/9/2004 12:51 PM Page 25
West Bank and Gaza, however, feminism and nationalism have always
had a concurrent and parallel history.
The history of colonial occupation and dominance in the Palestinian
territories has always marked its physical, political, and cultural land-
scapes. While the 500-year reign of the Ottomans in Palestine had pro-
duced a flowering of literature, music, and culture in general, corruption
and brutality had marked the last years of Ottoman rule. During this
time, Palestinians endured mass oppression: rates of literacy among men
and women remained quite low, and most Palestinians lived an agrarian
life, tilling the soil on their farms to sustain their living. It is not unusu-
al to hear stories of Palestinian men who were kidnapped by Ottoman
armies to fight in battles. (Indeed, I have heard from my own family that
my paternal grandfather was so kidnapped, and after the wars end, he
walked and hitchhiked his way from Syria back to his village in the West
Bank.)
After the First World War, when Palestine came under the control of
the British Empire, life did not significantly improve. However,
Palestinians became more urbanized as cities like Ramallah and Nablus
began to crystallize into mass centers of trade and commerce.
Newspapers such as Filastin, Mirat al-Sharq, and the Palestine Bulletin
circulated, keeping Palestinians from Haifa on the coast to Jenin in the
north to Jericho (a-Riha) near the Dead Sea connected and informed.
2
Almost immediately, however, pockets of Jews began arriving in
Palestine from Western Europe, establishing small colonies and towns.
In 1896, Theodor Herzl had written his famous book, Der Judenstaat, or
The Jewish State, arguing that a national homeland for the Jewish peo-
ple was essential to their survival. As a result, the Zionist movement
spread quickly through Europe, its fire no doubt fanned by the fact that
Jews had long been the victims of anti-Semitic practices that made life
unbearable for many. The Jews who left Europe to settle in Palestine
were initially befriended by the native Palestinians; this is not surprising,
since communities of Sephardic Jews (also known as Arab Jews,
because they speak Arabic and are identified ethnically as Arabs) had
always existed in Palestine. Furthermore, the medical and agricultural
skills and knowledge that these Jewish immigrants brought with them
from Europe often proved useful and intriguing to the community in
general.
Problems arose, however, when the influx of Jews from Europe
increased exponentially. In 1914, 6 percent of the population had been
Jewish and the rest Arab; by 1939, as a result of the increasing horror of
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the Holocaust in Europe, the Jewish population had risen to 30 percent.
3
Furthermore, by this time, the purpose of the increasing numbers of
immigrating Jews had become clear to most Palestinians, even to vil-
lagers and those living in rural areas: despite confusing British claims to
the contrary, Palestine was to become the new Jewish homeland. The
threat was understood immediately, and Palestinians began mobilizing
to resist it.
Until this time, most rural Palestinian women had shared the same lot
as the men: living a rudimentary, simple lifestyle, they shared farming
duties with their families and husbands, while also caring for their chil-
dren and managing a household. Politically passive and uninvolved, this
group of women had more immediate concerns: preserving their liveli-
hoods and that of their families under crippling poverty. Middle- and
upper-class women, however, had already begun to organize, also in par-
allel stride with men of their socioeconomic class. In 1903, a Palestinian
womens organization was founded in Acre, on the current Israeli
coastone of the first known womens organizations in the Palestinian
territories.
4
In her book, The Nation and Its New Women: The Palestinian
Womens Movement, 19201948, Ellen Fleischmann notes that during
the years of crisis, when Palestinians were resisting both British colo-
nialism and a surge in Zionism whose intent was a Jewish nation on
Palestinian land, Palestinian women were doing something.
5
Fleischmann offers a comprehensive and riveting study of the earliest
years of the Palestinian womens movement. It is a movement that really
began in the early 1900s, as a way for women to conduct charitable work
as an early welfare system; gradually, as Palestinian hopes for an inde-
pendent nation crystallized in the 1910s and were then threatened by the
Zionist movement, the womens movement became more and more
political and feminist, in the Western sense of the word.
In the 1900s, Palestinian women of the upper and middle classes had
more access to education, something that was seen as an asset and there-
fore encouraged by Palestinian men of the same classes. As a result, these
women wanted to make use of their education, and they began organiz-
ing charitable and social works organizations: these included schools for
girls, homes for orphans, service organizations caring for the ill and
infirm, literary and sports clubs, as well as a labor union for women. As
Fleischmann notes, however, Although womens new activism may have
been clothed in the garb of charity and reform, it also constituted tacit
political protest and social critique. By stepping in to fill perceived gaps
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(in services, for example), women were also implicitly criticizing those
responsible for not fulfilling the function. Indeed, ultimately the criti-
cism was not necessarily implicit and muted but openly directed against
the government for its neglect of the population. This criticism also
foreshadows one of the main pillars of the Palestinian womens move-
ment: it is a movement whose cause from the beginning was the
improvement of society in general. This is a community-oriented femi-
nism whose goal is the general betterment of life for all Palestinians,
especially women, as opposed to Western feminism, which seems main-
ly to improve the individual lives of women. From the beginning, how-
ever, this nuance in the Palestinian womens movement has made it
suspect in the eyes of Western feminism, which has questioned its con-
formity to true feminism.
6
At the same time as Palestinian women were mobilizing, Arab women
all over the Middle East were doing the same. This was the era of the rise
of the general Arab womens movement, spearheaded by women like
Huda Sharawi, an Egyptian feminist. As the colonial era in the Middle
East was beginning to draw to a close in the early 1900s, Arab women
sought to re-energize their countries by throwing themselves into active
political life. Palestinian women were no different (although their cause
would take a much different turn), and Palestinian women generally had
the support of the men in their lives, who also believed that women
needed to take a more active role in the life of the new, hoped-for
Palestinian nation.
Some of the most active and productive organizations included the
Red Crescent Society in Jerusalem, the Womens Solidarity Association,
the Palestine Womens Council, and others. As the threat of Zionism
became more palpable, and as the British seemed less and less inclined
to uphold their promise of a Palestinian state, the womens organizations
paralleled those of the men and became increasingly political. In 1929, the
womens movement was officially established during the Palestine Arab
Womens Congress, although it had been building up and entrenching
itself for many years before this declaration. At this same meeting, the
Arab Womens Association was founded and became the most prominent
feminist organization in Palestine. At the same time there was a shift in
the activities of Palestinian women, who moved from performing solely
charitable, volunteer work to organizing mass demonstrations and pub-
lic protests against British rule. At a speech in April 1933, during a visit
by British General Allenby, Tarab Abd al-Hadi, an organizer in the AWA,
declared: The Arab ladies ask Lord Allenby to remember and tell this to
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his government. . .The mothers, daughters, sisters of the Arab victims are
gathered here to make the world witness the betrayal of the British. We
want all the Arabs to remember that the British are the cause of our suf-
fering and they should learn from the lesson.
7
During 1938 and 1939, in the years following the Arab revolt (a time
during which Arabs in Palestine held strikes against the British and orga-
nized with the aim of minimizing Jewish immigration into Palestine and
preventing the sale or acquisition of Arab land to Jews), the Arab
Womens Association split into two factions: the Arab Womens
Association (AWA) and the Arab Womens Union (AWU). During the
revolt, Palestinian women had been forced to question their cause: They
were fighting for liberation from British colonialism and Zionist expan-
sionism, but would they do it by marching in the streets or by writing
letters to newspapers and government officials? They had, thus far,
employed both tactics prodigiously, but the intensity of the crisis esca-
lated during the revolt, which demanded dramatic action on the part of
the womens movement. There appeared to be some women who
thought that the political work was temporary, and that their mission
over the longer-run should revert to social work. This is one cause of the
split of the AWA into the two organizations: the AWA remained mostly
an organization dedicated to social work, while the AWU became the
more political, feminist organization.
The next phase of the womens movement can be described in terms
of the fate that befell most Palestinians in 1948. When the United
Nations voted to partition Palestine in 1947 into seven entities, three for
the Jews, three for the Arabs, and one separate independent entity for
Jerusalem, the Jews accepted the plan while the Palestinians flatly reject-
ed it. The reasons were various, but the primary factor in the refusal was
the fact that the Jewish population was significantly less numerous than
the Palestinian, but the greater share of the land, especially the rich, cov-
eted, and developed coastal areas, had been allotted to the Jews.
8
There
was a general sense of dissatisfaction among the Palestinians, as well as
a feeling that the British, by having submitted the problem of the Jewish-
Palestinian conflict to the UN, had betrayed their promises to the Arabs
for an independent Palestinian state. Other Arab countries felt the same,
and an attack on the new state of Israel was launched almost as soon as
its establishment was declared.
Women expressed their disapproval in many ways, most expressly by
holding demonstrations and by writing letters to the British and UN offi-
cials. During this time, Jewish militia gangs had begun to terrorize resi-
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dents in Palestinian villages; the most famous incident occurred on April
9, 1948, about one month before Israel was established. On that day, the
Irgun and Stern Gangs, led by Menahem Begin and Yitzhaq Shamir (both
of whom later were elected prime minister of Israel) massacred 245
Palestinians in the village of Deir Yassin, near Jerusalem. The massacre
shocked the Palestinian populace, and word spread rapidly to other
Palestinian cities and towns that the Zionists were going to violently
oust them from their land. The news prompted many people to flee,
while others held their ground and fought. Women, especially peasant
and lower-class women, fought alongside their husbands, fathers, and
brothersthey prepared ammunition and supplies, helped develop
escape routes, and participated in other ways.
When the Israeli state was established in May 1948, the majority of
the Palestinian populace was thrust into a diaspora. Many fled because
of continued attacks on villages by Jewish gangs, while some others
became displaced during the war. The end result was that a massive
refugee crisis developed, and the Palestinians became the largest ethnic
group in the world with a majority of its population forced to live in
exile. (This is ironic, as many scholars have noted, especially because the
Palestinians became the victims of victims, that is, they suffered at the
hands of a community that had itself been no stranger to suffering and
displacement. It is difficult to find another historical example of a com-
munity that endured terror and genocide, but then terrorized another
community after its recovery.) The infrastructure of the Palestinians
media, health, education, and governmentwas shattered. The
womens movement suffered the same fate.
While the formal womens movement struggled to regroup in the face
of war, poverty, displacement, and other trials, Palestinian women
struggled on an individual basis to maintain their families and earn a liv-
ing, whether they had been displaced to refugee camps, to other coun-
tries or within their same communities under a new government. After
1967, Palestinians living within the original borders of Palestine also
faced living under a new occupation government.
The next historical intersection that saw a substantive re-emergence
of the womens movement was during the intifada of 1987. During this
uprising, which lasted until 1992, women demonstrated their strength.
As Rita Giacaman says, The social change resulting from the intifada
has created new roles for women. The womens organizations and the
committees taught women the skills needed to be politicians and strate-
gists, and the intifada taught them how to be political leaders. The
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important movement of women into leadership roles in the male arena
was necessitated by the mass imprisonment of male political leaders,
9
The result was that when the Oslo Accords were signed in September of
1993, Palestinian women had already drafted and approved a Document
of Principles on Womens Legal Status, recognizing that they had to
assert their rights to be incorporated at the onset of the future
Palestinian state. The goals, as stated in this document, of Palestinian
women are to: (1) preserve a cohesive Palestinian society; (2) enhance
Palestinian culture and uniqueness; (3) reinforce the national and
social struggle of Palestinian women; (4) achieve equality; (5) achieve
political rights; (6) achieve civil rights; and (7) achieve economic,
social, and cultural rights. The concluding paragraphs demonstrate
how closely the womens movement is tied to the national movement:
The efforts of Palestinian women as well as all democratic forces in
Palestinian society must unite to remove all obstacles hindering the
equality of women with men. We must work hand in hand towards a
democratic society which fulfills a comprehensive national indepen-
dence, social justice, and equality.
10
In September 2000, a second intifada broke out in the West Bank and
the Gaza Strip. Women have taken on many roles: they operate as a wel-
fare system, caring for the wounded and the sick, as well as those
orphaned or who have lost their chief financial providers in the violence;
and they maintain the educational system as teachers.
In a more complicated role, many women have also participated in the
violence. The rise of suicide bombings as a means of retaliation against
the Israelis has claimed the lives of several female bombers and their vic-
tims; as of this writing, the most recent episode occurred on October 4,
2003, when Hanadi Tayseer Jaradat blew herself up in a restaurant fre-
quented by both Arabs and Israelis in Haifa, Israel. In the aftermath of
the explosion, which killed at least 19 people, it was immediately report-
ed that Jaradat had, earlier that summer, witnessed the Israeli execution
of her brother and her cousin, killed in the entrance to their home in
Jenin, where Jaradat also lived. A lawyer in training, Jaradat had been, by
most reports, a hard-working and intelligent young woman, depressed
by the violent deaths which had befallen her relatives. This story is not
unusualthe handful of other female suicide bombers had also report-
edly witnessed crimes by the Israeli military against their families or
close friends.
The circumstances that apparently motivated Jaradat to become a sui-
cide bomber are manifold; they can be labeled mitigating conditions, but
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it is still impossible to justify the bombingsuicide or otherwiseof
civilians. An attack against a military target can be seen as a war tactic,
but an attack against civilians in a civilian environment is different.
While there is no Palestinian army, a force that can confront the Israeli
military, attacks by the Palestinians are enacted on an individual basis.
Unfortunately, suicide bombings come to be interpreted by the media as
a collective, generally-approved response by the Palestinian forces, rather
than the desperate action taken by an individual against an occupying
army and the population that is seen as supporting it.
It seems inevitable that these young women would become caught up
in the cycle of oppression and violence that pervades the Israeli-
Palestinian conflict. The only thing that will stop Palestinian attacks
against Israeli civilians is another, substantial way to express their rage
and anger. Women are just as susceptible to this feeling of frustration
and fury as men. Since the network of Palestinian womens organizations
and feminist networks seems to be surviving the blow to the Palestinian
infrastructure, it is hoped that other alternatives will be available to
young women who feel the need to act against the occupation.
Issues
The Palestinian feminist movement today faces many issues and
obstacles. The trials of colonialism and occupation, compounded by the
difficulties of living in a deeply patriarchal society, make feminist
endeavors twice as difficult but immeasurably more important.
Furthermore, nationalist concerns have the potential to eclipse feminist
ones. Some of the issues confronting the modern feminist movement
include:
1. Fundamentalism: Anyone who has been absent from the West Bank
and Gaza for some years usually expresses surprise to learn that more
and more women have adopted the traditional Islamic dress, from an
elegantly draped hijab to a full, black cloak with long sleeves and face
covering, a complete concealment of the body. The reasons behind this
trend differ among individual women (for some, it is an expression of
their faith; for others, it has been forced upon them by their families; for
still others, the hijab is a mark of a new kind of feminism known as
Islamic feminism (more below). One factor, however, is the rise of
Islamic fundamentalism in the West Bank and Gaza. As the Palestinian-
Israeli conflict has become more intense and violent in the last several
years, and especially after the seeming collapse of the Oslo Peace
Accords, Islamic fundamentalism has gained a popular appreciation
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P A L E S T I N I A N W O M E N 3 3
among Palestinians, as it has in other Arab nations.
According to Philippa Strum, Many modern Palestinian women
interpret the pressure to wear modest clothing as part of an illegitimate
attempt by fundamentalists to reject modernity and womens redefini-
tion of their roles.
11
Dress, however, is only one way in which funda-
mentalism is working against womens individual independence.
Fundamentalist notions of womens roles are ultraconservative, as is
common among all fundamentalist movements, chipping away at
womens progress in education, social equality, health care rights, and
other areas.
2. Honor killings: While honor killings take place frequently in Jordan
(approximately 25 per year), they are also a problem in the West Bank
and Gaza as well. Men who feel that their family honor is all they have
left in the wake of displacement, occupation, and poverty (also by the
fact that Palestinian women in Israeli jails have reported suffering sexu-
al abuse) often force the females in their families to abide by strict behav-
ioral codes. This often throws suspicion upon women who attempt to
take part in womens organized activities.
3. Occupation: The occupation is, as most Palestinians view it, the root
cause of many problems their society faces, including poverty, illiteracy,
human rights, and employment. Some of these issues impact women
most severely. For example, in a time when many men cannot find
employment, women have an even more difficult time since most
employers are more willing to hire a man who may have a family to feed.
Also, domestic violence rates increase, since the frustration and rage
many men feel is often vented in the form of violence against a spouse or
female family member.
Furthermore, the occupation causes another major obstacle for
women: sexual assault. Many women have served time in Israeli jails for
participating in protests, demonstrations, rock-throwing, and other
activities; many of them, it is commonly known, have been assaulted by
Israeli soldiers while in jail as a form of retribution, punishment, humil-
iation, and even as a means of eliciting information. According to Nadia
Shalhoub Kevorkian, the methods used by the Israeli military are calcu-
lated and cunning, exploiting social and cultural norms:
Stories were told of girls who were drugged and photographed naked in
order to blackmail them for information on the political activities of fam-
ily members, relatives or neighbours. The form of the harassment varies
widely, but the pattern of the behaviour and its effect represent a serious
violation of the females personal integrity: she feels as if she is no longer
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a human being, that her value is not in her social function and contribu-
tion, and that she is transformed into a sexual object. This transformation
affects her self-evaluation and confidence and even has negative repur-
cussions on her school performance.
12
Awareness of the emotional effects of sexual harassment and assault on
women who have been imprisoned is growing and will hopefully result
in significant actions to help young women emotionally handle these
crises. However, fear of such assault prevents many Palestinian women
from fully participating in social and political activities. One young
woman reported to Kevorkian: I am terrified of leaving the house, even
to go shopping or visit a friend, for fear of being taken away by the Israeli
army. They might take indecent pictures of me, by force, or by drugging
me as they have done to some of my friends.
13
4. Distance/communication obstruction: The occupation, and the
continual building and expansion of Israeli settlements (illegal under
UN law) on Palestinian land, has left the West Bank and Gaza in a state
of continuous obstruction. Checkpoints are set up at major intersections;
a series of roads connect the settlements and only Israelis are permitted
to use them; and Palestinians are often obstructed from traveling to work
and school. Most Palestinians also live in exile in other countries, and
they are not permitted to return. Coordinating and maintaining a strong,
unified, and connected feminist movement is quite difficult.
5. The Algeria factor: Palestinian women are generally divided into
two camps: those who believe that the struggle for Palestinian womens
rights needs to be delayed, at least until autonomy and national inde-
pendence are achieved, and those who believe the two movements
should be parallel. There is a lesson, the latter group would argue, to be
learned from Algerian women, who participated actively in the struggle
for independence from French colonial rule. They planned to assert the
need for womens rights at the conclusion of the national crisis; once
independence was achieved, however, womens rights never received the
intended attention and time. Instead, womens rights became trampled
underneath a new form of patriarchal Islamic fundamentalism that
swept through the nation. Leila Danesh says: Women in the Algerian
nation today remain victims in a sustained campaign of violence by both
the state and the Islamists.
14
Many Palestinian women worry about this
Algeria factor and strive to ensure that the same fate does not befall
them, especially after the significant roles they have played in the life of
the Palestinian independence movement.
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P A L E S T I N I A N W O M E N 3 5
The Future
The recent crises in the Middle East, especially the escalation in
Islamic fundamentalist fervor as well as even more aggressive Israeli
occupation policies, have led to a marked change in Palestinian femi-
nism. There is, for example, a new brand of feminism which can be
called Islamic feminism. In her excellent book, Palestinian Women:
Patriarchy and Resistance in the West Bank, Cheryl Rubenberg
describes this movement, in which Palestinian Muslim women find a
precedent for a strong Muslim woman in the Quran and teachings of
Muhammad, and reject current conservative attitudes about women as
false notions concocted by men attempting to manipulate history and
the teachings of Islam.
While there has also been a steady interest in maintaining the
womens committees and organizations that helped to establish the fem-
inist movement in the first place, a more academic interest has also
developed. In 1993, Birzeit University, one of the premier Palestinian uni-
versities, established a womens studies program, with a mission to train
women to organize and to research the needs of Palestinian women.
According to Roula el-Raifi, The program, which is unique for the Arab
world, includes a research initiative, Palestinian Women in Society,
whose initial goal was to fill the existing void with respect to research
on womens conditions by evaluating existing material from a gender
perspective and identifying further research and policy implications.
15
A major challenge of the Palestinian feminist movement will be con-
necting and maintaining relations between Palestinian women of all
class levels; this is the same problem that has plagued the movement
since its inception, when the feminist movement was seen primarily as
a vehicle of upper-middle and upper-class women, without real efforts
being made to reach out to peasant women. In modern times, the femi-
nist movement should seek, despite the difficulties of occupation, to
simultaneously embrace the views and voices of upper-class and edu-
cated women, working-class women, Bedouin women, refugee women,
and Palestinian women living in exile.
Given its long history, the Palestinian feminist movement is deeply
entrenched in Palestinian society, though it can often seem invisible
because of the overarching concerns about the Israeli occupation. A
swift, just resolution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, leading to an
independent, viable Palestinian state, is essential to the ability of the
feminist movement to continue making meaningful progress in the lives
of both Palestinian women and Palestinian society.
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Notes
1. Press Release on the Occasion of International Womens Day, 8th of March, e-mail
correspondence, March 6, 2002, from alzahraa44@hotmail.com. Signed by: Al-Zahraa:
An Arab Womens Feminist Organization (Sakhneen); PNGO: the Network of
Palestinian NGOs in the Occupied Palestinian Territories; HRA: the Arab Human Rights
Association (Nazareth); The Womens Studies Center, Birzeit University (Birzeit, OPT);
Assiwar, the Arab Feminist Movement to support Victims of Sexual Abuse (Haifa);
Baladna: The Association of Arab Youth (Haifa); Kayan: A Feminist Organization (Haifa);
Al-Wafa wal Amal: A Womens Charity Organization (al-Baqa al-Gharbiyya); The
Association of Women in Laqiya (Bir al-Sabaa); A Step Forward (Rahat); The Womens
Democratic Movement (Nazareth).
2. Ellen Fleischman, The Nation and Its New Women: The Palestinian Womens
Movement, 19201948 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003) 311.
3. http://www.palestine-net.com/history/bhist.html
4. Palestinian Academic Society for the Study of International Affairs (PASSIA),
Palestinian History, http://www.passia.org/palestine_facts/pdf/pdf2003/sections2/
Timeline.pdf. PASSIA is based in Jerusalem, and it considered a major think tank on the
Israeli-Palestinian struggle. I visited PASSIAs offices in 1998, and I was impressed by the
scope and range of information it collects and the research it conducts on this issue.
5. Fleischman, The Nation, 3.
6. Fleischman, The Nation, 9697.
7. Fleischman, The Nation, 95, 121.
8. For a map, see http://www.passia.org/ palestine_facts/MAPS/newpdf/Partition-
Armistice.pdf.
9. Rita Giacaman, The Womens Movement on the West Bank, in Arab Women:
Between Defiance and Restraint, Suha Sabbagh, ed., (New York: Olive Branch Press,
1996) 130.
10. General Union of Palestinian Women, Jerusalem, Palestine, Draft Document of
Principles of Womens Rights, third draft, in Arab Women: Between Defiance and
Restraint, Suha Sabbagh, ed., (New York: Olive Branch Press, 1996) 258, 261.
11. Philippa Strum, The Women are Marching: The Second Sex and the Palestinian
Revolution (New York: Lawrence Hill Books, 1992) 73.
12. Nadira Shalhoub Kervorkian, Fear of Sexual Harassment: Palestinian Adolescent Girls
in the Intifada, in Palestinian Women: Identity and Experience, Ebba Augustin, ed.,
(London: Zed Books, 1993) 175.
13. Kevorkian, Fear, 176.
14. Leila Danesh, Algerian women in politics. Middle East Times, http://metimes
.com/issue31/ reg/3algwomen.htm.
15. Roula El-Raifi, Laying the Foundations of a Democratic Palestine: The Womens
Studies Program at Birzeit University, http://www.idrc.ca/books/reports/1997/11
-01e.html.

The only thing worse than being occupied is being an occupier.

L. Paul Bremer III, Chief Administrator of Occupied Iraq
(quoted in New York Times, April 4, 2004)
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