Feminist Solidarity with Palestine

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Apr 1, 2019 Palestine
Image by Jos Van Wetten via Wikimedia Image by Jos Van Wetten via Wikimedia

Feminist Solidarity with Palestine

By : Afaf Jabiri

In this article, I show how feminist narratives on the significance of the Palestinian/Israeli feminist dialogue displaces the question of Palestine, shifting the focus from the settler-colonial nature of Israel to one of “conflict resolution” and “peace-building,” as if conflict takes place between two equal powers. It is not the dialogue itself that I question; it is the false and disabling symmetry designated to both sides. Rejecting this narrative means resisting the notion that such dialogue and conflict resolution initiatives attempt to construct: a notion of a shift or transition not conceptualized within the context of a struggle against colonialism. Although I do not doubt some feminists’ good intentions, my aim here is to bring the perspectives of Palestinian refugee feminists into the narrative as well as to pose questions, not about the dialogue itself, but about the conditions and terms under which this dialogue is proposed, and indeed, imposed.

I will begin by providing examples drawn from a number of events I have attended and conversations I have had with feminists at international conferences. Thereafter I will try to unpack some of the arguments made and questions posed during these conversations.

In July 2015, I was invited—in my capacity as a member of the Jordanian Women’s Union (JWU)—to take part in a meeting of a legal working group on violence against women (VAW) in Washington DC. On the meeting’s opening day, I learned that a representative of Israel was also in attendance. As the Jordanian women’s movement has been very active in the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions Campaign (BDS) and has opposed participating in conferences that include official representatives of Israel for decades, I protested Israel’s representation at the meeting and objected to not being informed in advance. I informed the organizers and left the meeting.

In 2012 and 2017, I took part in Jordan’s NGO delegation to the Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) Committee’s review of Jordan’s Periodic report. Knowing there was, and still is, an Israeli member of the CEDAW Committee, the delegation informed the organizers of our position against normalized relations with Israel and asked for that member not to engage us in any discussion of Jordanian women’s rights. The delegation also complained about the irony of an Israeli representative sitting on a committee that questions states on their implementation of women’s rights, whilst Israel commits all types of targeted atrocities against women in Palestine.

In 2008, I and another Palestinian activist participated in a conference in the Netherlands on women’s rights in the Middle East. The Palestinian activist presented a film on so-called honor crimes in the West Bank, and the audience’s reaction and questions mainly focused on the patriarchal nature of Palestinian society. In my speech, however, I argued against the deceptive equivalence given to patriarchy and occupation in the discussion of the film, which infuriated some participants.

At each of these events, I had many discussions with other feminists, both academics and activists. Such discussions would often include statements and questions such as: “I think feminists need to distance themselves from male politics and nationalist accounts of narrow identities, the Palestinian/Israeli conflict is so complex and vexing”; “We need to overcome our differences to work together in achieving gender equality and end VAW”; “There are many challenges ahead of us, as women, we need to engage in dialogue with each other and believe in co-existence.”

I will try now to problematize and unpack some of the questions posed during these conversations by exploring a few counterpoints, as follows: 

Firstly, organizing meetings that include both Israelis and Palestinians—or Jordanians or any other Arab nationalities (as many feminists in the region take a similar stand on the issue of normalization)—means that either the organizers do not understand the politics of the region and the context of women’s activism, or are trying to impose the politics of normalization on Arab feminists. Needless to say, both explanations are extremely problematic. Over the summer, I asked several activists about their views on this dialogue, and why they are against it. Nadia Shamroukh, for example, who has experienced isolation at international conferences due to her position against normalization, told me that “This is the only means of resistance left to us. What else can we do as Palestinian refugee women?” So, the act of not speaking, in and of itself, is a form of resistance. 
The issue is not about differences, it is fundamentally about power politics: for my family, my mother’s—and indeed my own—continuous suffering is very personal. If feminists consider that the 'personal is political,' why should it not be true for Palestinian feminists?

Secondly, to emphasize differences rather than the relation between the colonizer and the colonized certainly conveys a skewed message of the struggle. In the Washington meeting, the representative of the settler-colonial state of Israel and I might not have had any differences in understanding domestic violence, but we are undoubtedly positioned differently in the power structure. I am a Palestinian refugee, born and raised in a camp; the daughter of a Palestinian mother who abandoned her dream of becoming a teacher when she was forced to leave her home in 1949; the daughter of a mother who spent years moving from one camp to another, who faced violence and exploitation as a result of her uprooting and the killing of her father and two brothers in 1948 by the Zionist militia. On the other hand, the representative is herself a settler, who voluntarily left England and decided to move to Israel. While I am a refugee, she holds dual Israeli and British citizenship. While she and other settlers live in Palestinian cities, villages, and towns, my mother—along with millions of Palestinians—still lives in a refugee camp in Jordan. She is treated as a second-class citizen and deprived of all rights, not only as a woman, but also as a human being. Therefore, the issue is not about differences, it is fundamentally about power politics: for my family, my mother’s—and indeed my own—continuous suffering is very personal. If feminists consider that the “personal is political,” why should it not be true for Palestinian feminists? 

Thirdly, speaking of women’s solidarity—regardless of the speaker’s position in the power structure—is rather an attempt to essentialize women and their rights, to universalize and depoliticize women’s struggles for equality. So, the question here is: is being a woman and/or a feminist enough basis for dialogue? It surely cannot be.

The comment related to challenges shows that colonialism is not considered a challenge and, hence, its impact on VAW is not adequately recognized, if recognized at all. To speak of challenges, one needs to accept, as Said described, “the politics of blame, blame of culture and religion or state” policies, which are seen as related to culture but not political. If one accepts these conditions, they will be welcomed, celebrated and may be rewarded; but, if they instead speak of colonialism and imperialism, they will only become isolated at the international level, but they may also face outright accusations of being anti-peace and anti-dialogue.

Fourthly, the equivalence given to patriarchy and occupation—taking into account Kandiyoti’s conceptualization of patriarchy as a non-monolithic way of looking at male domination[1]—forces us to confront the following question: would we have the same type of patriarchy if Palestinians still lived in their homes rather than in a colonial context as second-class citizens in Palestine, in the big prisons of Gaza and what they call West Bank, and in the camps in Jordan, Lebanon, and elsewhere? I will use some examples from my mother’s life in her village, Iraq al-Manshieh, prior to 1948 to explain my point. Through my mother and grandmother’s retelling of their memories, I did not see women as oppressed. My grandmother was not only a housewife, she also managed the family store, and my mother was in year three at school. Women living in villages were not illiterate, and both my grandparents shared the responsibility of working in the field. My mother used to wear a shasheh (head scarf), which is a very transparent piece of cloth, and my uncles used to wear the same type of cloth as koffyeh—both men and women covered their heads. My mother had never heard of a woman being killed for the sake of honor during that time, and I trust what my grandmother once said to me in this regard: “It all started after the Deir Yasein massacre and the mass rape of women.” Patriarchy certainly existed before 1948, but its nature, scope, and constraints have certainly varied drastically within a context of settler colonialism. 

Fifthly, on the issue of Palestinian identity and feminism being about anti-nationalism, for Palestinians being a Palestinian is a necessity, not a choice. With regards to nationalism in the context of Palestine, Judith Butler stated: “It makes sense to be opposed to Zionist forms of nationalism, but do we want to oppose the nationalism of those who have yet to see a state, of the Palestinians who are still seeking to gather a nation, to establish a nation-state for the first time and without firm international support? To this most urgent question I want to suggest that we try to think for a moment not only about whether all nationalisms are the same (they surely are not), but what we might mean by nation.”[2]

My identity as a Palestinian refugee is a form of being, it is not the narrow sense of nationalism but a form of being as well as belonging to a just cause. If I untied my Palestinian identity from my life experience, I would be left only with the refugee experience, configured solely on the daily misery of life in the camp, without any connection to the past. Without this past, I cannot explain the type of existence I have in the present nor define my hopes for future. The identity of Palestine is, hence, what allows us as refugees to make sense of our life conditions; it turns misery into hope, it transforms despair into aspirations and, most importantly, maintains the struggle for justice, not only in Palestine but also in all other problems in the world, as it provides a lens by which to see the world’s problems as interconnected. The living identity here is not nationalist, or to preserve certain aspects of culture, but justice, being a Palestinian in this sense is to maintain a world movement against imperialism and colonialism and is, hence, freed from any cultural claims since it has been linked to the indivisibility of justice.

Sixthly, on the question of dialogue with leftist Israelis, who are not only very few but also quite unsure how to define what is leftist in the context of settler colonialism, there is an important question that must be answered: what does dialogue with me, as a refugee, mean to them? If it is about my right of return, then they must work against the state from outside its framework, because this framework excludes and denies my existence. It is a moral and human obligation to create a movement that recognizes both my symbolic and actual right of return, even if I reject the dialogue. Seeking justice should not be conditioned on my presence in the first place.

Furthermore, Cynthia Cockburn and others have shown that this approach to co-existence—i.e., not tackling major issues related to the colonialist and Zionist nature of the state and the right of return—is not working.[3] Perhaps there is no better example to show how this approach has failed Palestinians than what Sama Awidah, the director of the Jerusalem Centre for Women’s Studies—one of the first Palestinian women’s organizations to engage in dialogue—posted on Facebook about one of tayy’aish protests in Jerusalem: 

This protest is part of an organized process of normalization, as if we are telling the world not to worry about us, we agree and live happily side by side, and we call upon you to support our coexistence regardless of the recognition of us as humans and regardless of the recognition of the right of return.

What we need is enlightened and mobilized feminist solidarity, not just any feminist solidarity. Israel could not be committing the kind of atrocities it commits were it not for the absolute support of Western powers and American and European citizens’ passive acceptance of this support, be it in the form of military assistance or financial aid. This type of support needs to be exposed in our work and activism. 

What we need to understand is that imperialism has a threefold impact: it impacts gender issues in the context of Palestine; has a connection with other crises in the region; and impacts women’s national activism, international networking, and solidarity. One the one hand, understanding this will take activists’ experiences and everyday activities to show how the settler-colonial state of Israel has not only oppressed the Palestinian people but also empowered masculine institutions and institutionalized cultural aspects that limit the ways in which activists can address gender issues and combat VAW. On the other hand, the lack of understanding highlights the extent to which the dearth of political solidarity with and actions against the killing and detention of Palestinian women—as compared to solidarity around issues related to culture, such as so-called “honor crimes”—have undermined the position of feminists and women activists not only in Palestine, but across the Arab region.

Finally, what we need is a solidarity that engages in answering the questions posed here and beyond: questions such as that outlined by Mohanty in relation to the United States’ and Israel’s myth of democracy (2011:76): “How might we comprehend these imperial democracies and organize resistance across borders, resistance that demystifes and challenges the violent, authoritarian governmentalities mobilized by these militarized landscapes?”[4] . Subsequently, women in Palestine, women in the region, and women living within all area of throughout the world need a solidarity that addresses militarism as “a common context for struggle”(Ibid); a solidarity that exposes and challenges the violent, authoritarian nature of states and globalised militarised systems; and, most importantly, a solidarity that recognises the collaboration between the two in maintaining corruption, fuelling conflicts, and undermining peace initiatives, justice, and democracy.

___________________________________ 

Notes 

[1] Deniz Kandiyoti, “Bargaining with Patriarchy,” Gender and Society 2, no. 3 (1988): 274-290.

[2] Judith Butler, “‘What Shall We Do Without Exile?’: Said and Darwish Address the Future,” Journal of Comparative Poetics 32 (2012): 30-54.

[3] Cynthia Cockburn, The Space Between Us: Negotiating Gender and National Identities in Conflict (London: Zed Books, 1998).

[4] Chandra Talpande Mohanty, “Imperial Democracies, Militarised Zones, Feminist Engagements,” Economic and Political Weekly 46, no. 13 (2011): 76-84.

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Nov 6, 2013 Lebanon
Sara Mourad By :
Sara Mourad

In the Shadow of Malala: The West’s Unsaved Others

Malala Yousafzai has made a number of headlines in the past few weeks: Nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize, addressing the UN on the occasion of “Malala Day” dedicated to youth education, meeting with the Obamas in the Oval Office, chatting with Queen Elizabeth at Buckingham Palace, speaking at the World Bank’s “International Day of the Girl,” and receiving the honorary Canadian citizenship. In case you missed it, even The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart declared his wish to adopt her.

Many have written about Malala’s fame. Journalist Assed Baig argued that Western journalists and politicians have used Malala to appease their white man’s burden, to hide their sins in Afghanistan and Iraq, and to divert attention from the Western-caused suffering of many in the region. In a recent piece on Al-Jazeera, Murtaza Hussain compared Malala to nine-year-old Pakistani girl Nabila Rehman who came to Washington D.C. to testify before Congress about the drone attack that killed her grandmother last year. Only five out of 430 representatives came to hear Nabila’s story. For Hussain, Malala Politicians and pundits used Malala as the human face of the American-led War on Terror, on behalf of whom “the United States and its allies can say they have been unleashing such incredible bloodshed.” Nabila, on the other hand, had become, “simply another one of the millions of nameless, faceless people who have had their lives destroyed over the past decade of American wars.”

By shedding light on the suffering, past and present, of people in the Middle East, such critical interventions expose Western political propaganda’s use of Malala. But who are Malala’s others? For she has many. And they are not just those in the Middle East, but in the heart of the West itself. Certainly, Malala’s near-canonization diverts attention from the chaos and injustice of the War on Terror in the region. But what about those black, brown, and white poor bodies, in the West, that remain in Malala’s shadow?

Malala rose to international fame following a failed assassination attempt by the Taliban on 9 October, 2012. Taliban gunmen shot her in the head and neck as she was returning home on a school bus in the Swat district of Pakistan. The attack received worldwide media coverage and prompted condemnations from President Obama, US Secretary of State Hilary Clinton, and British Foreign Secretary William Hague. Days after the attack, Malala was flown to the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Birmingham for surgery and rehabilitation. Former First Lady Laura Bush wrote a Washington Post op-ed comparing Malala to Holocaust diarist Anne Frank. Angelina Jolie donated 200,000 dollars to the Malala Fund. The young girl received the Simone De Beauvoir Award (previously given to Ayaan Hirsi Ali). Foreign Policy voted her among the top one hundred global thinkers in 2012. Time magazine listed Malala among the one hundred most influential people in the world in 2013. She had also made it to the magazine’s shortlist of Person of the Year in 2012. At sixteen, Malala has already published her first autobiography, I am Malala, and has her portrait commissioned for the National Gallery in London.

As the French magazine Le Point put it, Malala had become “an enterprise,” one that is run by the world’s largest independently owned public relations firm, Edelman. The multimillion dollar firm had allegedly dispatched five employees to assist Malala and her family, pro bono, in managing the media interest in her campaign. McKinsey, the renowned American global management consulting firm, is also involved in the campaign, handling the Malala Fund for the education of girls.

Of course, Malala is a modern-day heroine, and a great model to many. She was shot by the Taliban for speaking up against their ban on girls’ education, most famously in a 2009 series of blog posts commissioned by BBC’s Urdu service website. But Malala’s message of girls’ right to education cannot but be eclipsed by her larger-than-life persona that Western states, international organizations, public figures, and public relations firms have manufactured. This essay is not about Malala, the person, as much as it is about her international circulation as an icon. It is not about Malala’s deeds, unquestionably noble, but about Western politicians and media figures’ fascination with this young girl.

The history behind Western media narratives about Muslim women’s plight is by now all too familiar. As Lila Abu Lughod has shown, in the context of the post 9/11 War on Terror, Western political projects, including the United States War on Afghanistan, justify themselves by purporting to liberate and save women. Decades earlier, Frantz Fanon wrote about France’s project to colonize Algeria by unveiling/civilizing its women. Laura Bush’s unwavering commitment to brown women attests to the tenacity of the narrative. In fact, the former First Lady explicitly framed her Washington Post op-ed, “A Girl’s Courage Challenges Us to Act,” as a follow-up to her first presidential radio address. During that address in November 2001, Laura Bush justified the invasion of Afghanistan in the name of the liberation of its women, claiming that “the fight against terrorism is also a fight for the rights and dignity of women.” Bush ends her most recent op-ed with the following words: “Today, for Malala and the many girls like her, we need not and cannot wait. We must improve their world.” Plus ça change…Eleven years after the invasion of Afghanistan, Bush is still bent on saving Muslim women. Eleven years after asking her initial question, “Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving?” Abu Lughod is still trying to explain why, in fact, they do not.

Activists, artists, and intellectuals have repeatedly challenged everyone from Bush to the bare breasted women of FEMEN in their imperative to liberate Muslim women by speaking on their behalf. One recent example is thisbeautifully-executed Muslim superhero cartoon. Third world feminists have powerfully formulated these critiques for decades. But there is something peculiar about Malala that cannot be explained only by exposing the fetish of saving the brown woman. The critique must move further into the underbelly of this affective excess, to recuperate those other brown women that the “we” of Laura Bush does not want to save Otherwise, the analysis remains politically incomplete and critically lopsided, further reproducing the fixation on brown women “over there.” There is something about this sixteen-year-old amassing award after award and prize after prize that says much more about the West than it does about Malala, Pakistani girls, or the right to universal education.

This painful story “over here” is particularly poignant given the collapse of public education in the United States. The US president commends Malala on her “inspiring and passionate work on behalf of girls education in Pakistan" just as twelve-year-old Laporshia Massey died because the government did not find it necessary to pay a full-time nurse at her under-funded Philadelphia school. To be sure, no one will award Laporshia a Nobel Peace Prize. She is not Pakistani, not a Middle Eastern Muslim girl shot in the head by the Taliban. No one will send Laporshia a helicopter to fly her to a hospital. She is just a poor black girl from Philly. She suffocates quietly in her classroom. She is told “there’s no nurse, just be calm.” She is ordered to wait even as Laura Bush implores, “we need not and cannot wait. We must improve their world.” The world that must be saved is far away over there; ours is doing just fine. In his meeting with Malala, president Obama signed a proclamation to mark Friday as the “International Day of the Girl.” The proclamation reads: "on every continent, there are girls who will go on to change the world in ways we can only imagine, if only we allow them the freedom to dream." Young girls from American public high schools are pleading with their government to build schools, not prisons. They are dreaming out loud, but who is listening?

Muslim girls’ right to education must also be brought into relief in France, which bans Muslim girls donning the headscarf—the one Malala wears—from attending public schools. Many believed that the 2004 law, which instituted a ban on “conspicuous signs” of religious affiliations in French state schools, was specifically targeting Muslim girls wearing headscarves, and through them, the country’s Muslim minority. The secular republic ostensibly banned the headscarf to safeguard France’s laïcité. But many intellectuals and public figures couched the ban in a rhetoric of gender equality whereby the secular law saves women from the tyranny of their religious communities. Lest we forget, the headscarf controversy itself dates back to 1989, as Joan Scott shows in The Politics of the Veil, when three French Muslim girls (of Moroccan origin) who refused to remove their headscarves were expelled from their Middle School in the Parisian suburb of Creil. Canada will not grant them honorary citizenship, but the King of Morocco himself will intervene to convince them to remove their headscarf when entering a classroom. But, as Scott shows, in a clear demonstration of their personal conviction, they continued to wear the hijab in the school’s hallways and courtyards. Their struggle did not go down in history as a story of Muslim girls’ fight for equal education. Nor did that of fifteen-year-old Cennet Doganay (of Turkish origin) who shaved her head to be able to attend class. Following the ban in 2004, Doganay tried to substitute a beret and a bandana for her headscarf, “but they still refused to let her into class." The BBC, who reported her story, did not ask her to blog about her experience.

There is something about Malala, and it is not the “white savior complex,” or not only that. It is the erasures that are enacted by her global circulation as an iconic brown, Muslim girl. Malala screens from view the Laporshias and Cennets in our midst. There is something about her hypervisible presence that further enacts a symbolic violence against the poor, black, and brown bodies, in our midst in Europe and the United States. These bodies are constantly erased from public, undeserving as they are of collective “white” middle-class attention and care. These bodies are ordered to enact their own self-erasure: by being quite, not blogging about injustice; by hiding their difference, not flaunting their scarves; by accommodating dominant social values, not subverting them. Would a million prizes for Malala wash away the hefty price of an American or European education?

Yes, Philadelphia may not be the Swat Valley, but one has to wonder, given the history of mass school shootings in the United States that have taken the lives of American children and teenagers. The Pakistani government, following Malala’s shooting, ratified the Right to Education Bill; the United States has yet to pass a law on gun control. Yes, the girls of Creil were not shot in the head. But the comparison is not meant to suggest similarity. The juxtaposition of these differently-situated young brown female bodies is necessary if we are to grasp the connections between the injustices they face. Mapping these connections does not equalize experiences; it reveals how education is a common discursive thread, differently-deployed, across these stories. It forces us to contemplate the terms of “girls’ right to education,” of which Malala has become the poster child. It impels us to specify the subject of these rights, and to identify those whose exclusion is masked in the process.

Exclusion is universal; it is historical and contextual. In Jim Crow America, black girls were not allowed in public (white) schools. In Taliban-dominated Swat Valley, girls are not allowed in public (boy) schools. In republican France, veiled girls are not allowed in public (secular) schools. In many places around the world, from Philadelphia to Santiago, poor girls (and boys) are not allowed public schools altogether. Schools are places where the exclusionary logics of racism, republican secularism, Islamism, and neoliberalism, as different as they may be, become manifest. Schools are the locus where such exclusions are enacted, learnt and normalized. Schools are where children become versed in the grammar of national culture. They are where “others” are taught that they are unwelcome into the fold of the nation, society, and community.

Exclusion is not a Taliban-created exception. It is all around us. And there is something about Malala, as a poster child for girls’ right to education that is meant to make us think otherwise. There is something about an internationally-endorsed, officially-supported, generously-funded, Nobel-prize nominated, and branded campaign for education, starring a brown Muslim girl, that sharply contrasts with recent student protests in Quebec, Chile,France, the United States, Spain, and the United Kingdom (among other places). There is something deeply wrong when gender is deployed as the sole source of inequality that must be addressed (albeit in far-away places). There is something deeply wrong when transnational state feminism displaces class inequalities, deeply felt in the languishing state of public education, onto the body of a Taliban-shot sixteen-year-old girl. Such a displacement undermines Malala’s just cause against religiously-inflected social injustice by making it exceptional, by severing its links to global demands for equal and free education. If feminism is not to be co-opted by a neoliberal discourse, as Nancy Fraser recently argued, we must be aware of the fetishization of gender inequality that makes moot all other inequalities.

Western governments have used the figure of the victimized brown woman in the past to justify overseas action, intervention, expansion. Here, they are also using it to whitewash and legitimate the withdrawal of the state from the public domain. As if this child’s small body, stretched and overblown by awards and honors, is supposed to hide the ever-shrinking state; as if Malala’s inflated body will cast a large enough shadow over the growing pool of bodies the state has abandoned.