Abstract
Recovering the long and intricate record of Palestinian’s women’s protests is the first of many invaluable contributions made by Iṣlāḥ Jād’s study, Palestinian Women’s Activism: Nationalism, Secularism, Islamism. In this brilliantly detailed analysis, Jād pushes back against Western juxtapositions of secular and religious, those that so often mischaracterize women’s experiences with Islam. She does so with an extensive study of women in different spheres of the movement and with novel, first-ever documented accounts of women activists in the National Islamic Salvation Party. Iṣlāḥ Jād deconstructs assumptions of a monolithic Palestinian movement culture by depicting the myriad religious, political, and class positions that converge across forcibly fragmented territories. Readers will also take from Jād’s rich historical and ethnographic account an incisive critique of the relationships between international and national nongovernmental organizations and local organizers and their impacts on women. NGO-ization has been disempowering to Palestinian women, Jād argues, and much of the damage done must be understood by disentangling the imposition of the ideals of Western feminism on Palestinian women.
I recently read Palestinian Women’s Activism with my students in an upper-level seminar on Women and Nonviolence. We were delighted to encounter this illuminating account of women’s participation, in great detail, after carefully combing through the general histories of Al-Nakba, all told in a stiflingly male gaze. Jād’s historical corrective is extensive, following women’s activism in Palestine from the 1930s through the post-Oslo period of the 1990s, and then covering women’s engagement in the second Al-Aqsa Intifada of the 2000s by drawing on her own extensive fieldwork. In her meticulous and nuanced account, Jād deftly sorts through the multiple strands of Palestinian women’s movement that converges at the intersection of their oppressions: continuing their national struggle for statehood and sovereignty as Palestinians, while participating in the institution-building work necessary to give form to movement, all the while advocating for women’s rights as equally vital.
To frame her study at the outset, Jād invokes Gramsci’s idea that for dominant groups, hegemony is never complete; rather hegemony becomes a project of constant renewal and recreation. She demonstrates this understanding of hegemony as instructive to fully understanding the history of Palestinian women’s struggle through her retelling of Palestinian women’s struggle for suffrage in a world where, on one hand, Arab revolutionaries differed on the “woman question,” though some saw women’s rights in the public sphere as easily distinguishable from women’s sexual and bodily autonomy among private relationships. On the other hand, she describes how Israeli attempts to fracture the Palestinian Liberation Organization led the Israeli Defense Force to strategically use social conservativism, especially with regard to female sexuality, as a form of movement suppression.
Jād also incisively challenges, however, broad misunderstandings of the relationship between Palestinian secular feminism and the Islamic sphere in two ways. She counters the assumed benefit of Western support to Palestinian women’s activism by showing that, conversely, it has served to strengthen Islamic initiatives to encourage women’s subservience. Second, she skillfully outlines many of the ways the “new Islamism” of Palestinian resistance ideology has been constructed rather recently, is historically particular to late twentieth-century Palestinian struggle and yet, this new political–religious practice also increasingly diffuses and resonates transnationally. She cautions against outsider views that Hamas’ militancy represents a traditionalist approach to Islam and/or a misrecognition of indigenous Palestinian culture. Rather, Jād proposes that Hamas’ conservative approaches, especially early on, are also products of the occupation.
Jād’s is an important perspective addressing several intellectual blind spots. First, she takes on orientalist views of Palestinian movement that fail to understand the significant but distinct contributions of movements in the secularist West Bank and Islamist Gaza. Where others have concluded that the shortcomings of Palestinian resistance can be explained, in part, by internal fragmentation (Pearlman 2011), Jād traces the intricacies of differences in vision, understanding, and organizational form that explain this divergence. Jād also joins an intellectual tradition of de-romanticizing the notion of Islamic women as devoid of autonomy in their resistance, contending that the faith and feminism of Islamic Palestinian women should neither be disregarded nor belittled. Jād supports Ahmed’s (1992) assertion that the Islamist preoccupation with women constitutes a struggle over culture. She notes Taraki’s (2003) view and the work of Hammami (1990) as pertinent, specifically the insights that Islamist women’s embrace of tradition also constitutes a tenacious form of resistance against the moral bankruptcy of the West and that the widespread use of veiling in the first intifada had national significance for respect for those whose lives were lost. She incorporates Moghadam’s (1993) research that has brought class relations to the discussion and Jād adds that the story of Palestinian women’s oppression and their fight against it, among the various ideological constituencies working from within and outside of the resistance, is a multifaceted story that cannot be oversimplified. She asserts that a more nuanced approach to understanding the meaning of Palestinian women’s faith to their feminism is in order, as she herself interviewed Palestinian women who espoused so many different political–ideological understandings and positionalities.
More important, however, for policy makers and those who wish to offer solidarity to women struggling for statehood and against occupation, is the understanding that the feminism imposed by international others has not been helpful to the cause of Palestinian feminism. At the book’s end, Jād concludes that the initiatives of Security Council Resolution and the United Nations Development Goals have not helped Palestinian women in the causes as they understand them. She writes, The one-size-fits-all campaign to save Palestinian women from patriarchy helped create a huge industry in the defense of women’s rights in the Occupied Territories. But this in turn led the women’s movement in the West Bank to lose its vision along with its power, even as the framing discourse was rejected to great effect by the Islamists, first as Western and then as irrelevant to women’s lived realities. (p. 185)