Women and the intifada

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The outbreak of the intifada in December 1987 was marked by the entry into action of new participants in the struggle of the Palestinian people; youth and women. The role of the latter in the struggle has shaken the traditional organization of Palestinian society. The weight of tradition and the rise of the fundamentalist movement, however, have created an increasingly difficult situation for Palestinian women. Below we are reprinting an article from the Oct. 28,1991, issue of International Viewpoint, which reproduced it from El Fanar, the newspaper of a Palestinian feminist group in Haifa, Israel.

Two significant stages can be distinguished in the changes in the status of Palestinian women in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

The first period opened with the outbreak of the intifada in December 1987, and continued throughout the first year of this movement.

The first three months of the intifada were characterized by a wave of spontaneous and massive popular mobilization, affecting social layers which had previously hardly participated in action and political struggle; women, workers, peasants, inhabitants of refugee camps, and so on. This participation was reflected by the self-organization of the masses in the framework of popular committees, charged with the management of everyday life, which expressed the will of these sectors to emancipate themselves, take control of their affairs and establish a new scale of moral values.

Challenge to patriarchy

Women challenged patriarchal traditions and customs which confined them in the role of passive and weak creatures whose essential task was the care of children and the house.

In the context of the intifada, Palestinian women began to participate fully in all areas of political action, breaking down patriarchal traditions, taking part in the non-traditional tasks assumed until then by the men (participation in and taking of responsibility for leadership, guard committees, and so on).

At the end of the first three months, when the popular committees were brought under the control of the different political factions, the mobilization of women continued in spite of everything, but with a certain regression, marked by the return of women to their traditional functions. Their activity in the popular ... Mideast talks from page 1)

reinforcing their bargaining position by occupying more territory and dealing punishing blows to their armed Arab adversaries in Lebanon.

Nevertheless, it is most probable that a deal will be patched together after much kicking and screaming by the Arab delegations. Besides aiming to get as committees and the neighborhood committees was then reduced to teaching and household economy; women took no part in the vigilante committees and in the constitution of what later became known as the Popular Army.

The gains of this first period of the intifada could be summed up thus; the emergence of popular organizational structures at the initiative of the people, which allowed broad participation; the emergence of a new scale of values which favor the participation of women in non-traditional areas, and, consequently, the waning of a number of traditional attitudes; the weakening of the absolute power of the father, the domination of brothers over sisters and the appearance of more democratic relations inside the family; the beginning of a withering fidelity to the family in favor of national fidelity; the dislocation of the social order which existed before the intifada.

The second stage of the radicalization of women in the occupied territories dates from around the end of the first year of the intifada and more precisely the banning of the popular committees in July 1988.

The struggle then shifted from the general popular mobilization to clandestinity, reserved for the cadres and the main political factions; groups specializing in specific forms of struggle (the throwing of stones appeared). This has led to a dangerous social and political phenomenon; the glorification of militarism in all its forms in place of popular mobilization.

The decline in the level of mobilization has obviously engendered an overall regression in the participation of women, marginalizing them and setting back the democratic evolution opened with the beginning of the intifada. One of the aspects of this regression has been the appearance of the "culture of the intifada", characterized by austere behavior-the forbidding of feasts and leisure activities, which have been reduced to watching the television. These norms of conduct obviously affect women—who are subject to control of their behavior and dress.

women backwards and reinforced their social and political isolation. This emergence of the "culture of the veil" is also due to the respect shown by all tendenINE cies of the political leadership to reactionary customs and traditions and to their incapacity to impose a political and social program for the democratic transformation of the social structures, an unavoidable condition for genuine national emancipation.

Field free for fundamentalists This incapacity has helped to leave the field free for the fundamentalist movement—it has a clear political and social program, which has become an alternative because of the inconsistency, indeed the non-existence, of the secular national movement and the mass movement Women being a pillar of the traditional patriarchal order, the fundamentalist movement understood that the consciousness of the latter had evolved because of the struggle.

They were conscious of the energy of women and the menace they represented to the former retrogressive order. They launched a virulent campaign to exclude women from social and political life and relegate them to the household and the home, launching appeals for the control of the conduct of the woman in the family, forbidding them to mix with men, proscribing all permissiveness and calling for the reinforcement of the power of the head of the family (his control over behavior, his right to constraint, coercion and the use of violence).

The fundamentalist movement enlarged its influence through appealing for the wearing of the veil, presenting this as a national duty-the proof of respect for the martyrs.

The wearing of the veil was officially imposed in Gaza in the summer of 1988, by slogans and communiques, as well as by the use of terror, physical aggression perpetrated by groups of children and adolescents against women who refused to do so.

This setback of the second period of the intifada can be illustrated by several phenomena: the decline of popular participation in general in political action, and of women in particular-only a small minority of politicized and organized women have persisted; the number of early marriages is growing and the age of marriage has dropped from 21 years before the intifada to 17 years; the desertion of the primary and secondary schools and universities, for several reasons-amongst others, the closure of these establishments—but also because of the early marriages and the lack of family help; measures of encouragement to motherhood and imposition by terror of the wearing of the veil; reinforcement of the family unit and the role of maternity to the detriment of the political organization of women.

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Finally, what could be called the "cul- ture of the veil" appeared which has set