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Issue: August, 1989

THE INTIFADA HAS PROVIDED MANY STORIES OF THE IMMENSE COURAGE OF INDIVIDUAL WOMEN. One of the most powerful is that of a stone-throwing incident, where soldiers chased a group of young men and finally caught up with one. They were beating him and pulling him toward the jeep, under arrest, when a young woman with a baby in her arms rushed up, screaming in anger, not at the soldiers but at the young man! "So there you are! I told you not to come into town today! I told you there would be trouble! And what do you expect me to do while you are arrested? How will I eat? How will I feed our baby? I'm tired of your irresponsibility to your family! I will not do it alone! Here, you take the baby and try to feed her!" Whereupon she shoved the baby into the arms of the astonished young father and fled. The soldiers, as shocked as the young man, now had a baby to deal with. Completely confounded, the soldiers shoved the young man into the street, jumped in their jeep and sped away. The man carried the baby for some time, searching for the mother. Finally, she appeared from behind the building where she had been hiding. She went up to the grateful young man, whom she had never seen before, took her baby from his arms, and went home.

INDIVIDUAL STORIES ASIDE, some amazing changes are taking place within Palestinian society. Because the Palestinians are the most highly educated ethnic group within the Arab world (and have the highest percentage of educated women), changes there often portend changes in the others. Some of the most exciting of these have to do with the status of women, but as we learn of them, we Western feminists must guard against assuming that what is right for us is right for all.

The United Nations Conferences on the status of women at Copenhagen and Nairobi clarified some glaring differences between First World and Third World feminists. One major difference was exposed when a coalition of Israeli and American feminists attempted to banish political issues from the debates in order not to deal with the thorny problem of women in Palestine and their lives under Israeli occupation.

FIRST THINGS FIRST?
Third World women from Palestine, South Africa and other colonized and/or occupied lands nonetheless attempted to show First World feminists the futility of demanding equal pay for equal work while women activists (and the men in their society) in the Third World are unable to feed their children, are subjected to jail terms and torture for political activity, are victims of discriminatory labor practices on the part of colonizing and occupying forces and/or are unable to establish any level of economic independence as a people, let alone as a gender.Much of the First World response to Third World pleas for political assistance was the silence of the ignorant or an embarrassing display of what is now understood as "cultural imperialism" - the assumption that one's own Western (women's) values and goals are the only correct ones.

PALESTINIAN WOMEN IN STRUGGLE
[In this column], we recently discussed the role of women in the developing struggle for Palestinian nationalism. Today, with the differences in respective situations of Western and Third World women in mind, let's look at the role of women in the Intifada and at the work of Palestinian feminists to institutionalize the changes in women's roles, wrought by their experience of oppression and exploitation by their society, the conditions of occupation and the struggle for national liberation.

Palestinian feminists are painfully aware of the experience of Algerian women, who, after participating in their own revolution against France, at heavy cost to their own lives, now find themselves living under "new" patriarchal laws even more oppressive than those of the French! Zahira Kamal, Secretary General of the Palestinian Federation of Women's Action Committees and a founder of the modern Palestinian women's movement, has pointed out that there was no Women's Movement, no theoretical political base or history of struggle for women's rights in Algeria; only a nationalist consciousness. Consequently, when the war for national liberation was won, women were relegated to the subjugated position of pre-liberation days. They had not organized to prevent it.

An important part of the struggle for women's liberation in Palestine is being waged through the nationalist struggle for the new state, and has been sharpened by the intense crisis of the Intifada. For Palestinian women, resistance to the oppression of a brutal military occupation is intrinsic with their attempts to free themselves within their own society. Indeed, the political consciousness necessary for the first steps toward institutionalization of the advances in the status of women is being developed through the women's committees, which in turn play a crucial role in the ability of the Palestinians to resist occupation, demand and develop their own state, withstand Israeli brutality, and even to carry on some semblance of "normal" life. Let's look at those committees.

WOMEN'S COMMITTEES
Charitable organizations are hallmarks of bourgeois society, and modern upper and middle class Arab society is no different from those in the West. One of the best known of the women's committees in Palestine, the Society for the Preservation of the Family or In'ash el-Usra, belongs to the Fatah wing of the PLO, and is a member organization of the Association of Women's Committees for Social Work. This committee worked in poor Arab communities the way Western charitable organizations work - it sees what it believes to be a need, does what it can to meet that need, then presents the results to the people. Although they have provided badly needed services during the Intifada and before, the aims and purposes of the Society do not challenge women's position (indeed, it reinforces it through its training, its values, etc.) and it does not threaten the gender status quo. This Society held primacy until the mid-70's, the same time the second wave of feminism was sweeping the Western world.

Zahira Kamal and other more progressive Palestinian women were not satisfied with the manner in which women's needs were being addressed by the charitable organizations (or in the case of rural women, not being addressed at all) and founded the Palestinian Union of Women's Work Committees for a more grass-roots approach. Gradually, with mistakes of their own along the way, they developed a method of going into the small towns and villages, finding out from the women themselves what they needed, and enlisting those women in the effort to meet the needs.

Today there are four groups of women's committees; the bourgeois Fatah-aligned Association of Women's Committees for Social Work, the progressive Women's Work Committee (recently re-named the Palestinian Federation of Women's Action Committees), and two other progressive groups, which sprang from the Work Committee in 1978. The two latest groups, the Working Women's Committee (concerned primarily with issues of women in the workplace, a sort of women's "labor union" if you will) and the Union of Palestinian Women's Committees, along with the Federation, are aligned with the three progressive wings of the PLO. In December 1988, in order to meet the crushing needs of the Intifada, these four groups consolidated into the Higher Women's Committee. This committee coordinates the activities of the four member groups to avoid duplication of scarce human and financial resources and to avoid competition during a time when the people feel a strong need to "speak with one voice." According to Kamal, it has two missions: to address the issue of gender and equality, and to address the issue of national liberation. Kamal says that this consolidation doesn't mean that differences between the groups have been resolved, "only that we have a unified vision of the issues before us."

Today, the committees go into towns and villages when travel is possible, and visit the women house by house, town by town, to hear the them define their own problems and how they might be resolved. After the women have decided what they need - a kindergarten in one town, a literacy program in another, perhaps a health or dental clinic, a small factory for food manufacture or an agricultural project - they form cooperatives where the women make the decisions, raise the money and goods for the program, purchase what needs to be purchased, do the pricing and marketing of goods where appropriate. Throughout, the committees focus on training women for leadership, and all of this is kept secret from Israeli troops, for participation in any of the Popular Committees is outlawed and means prison for those arrested and charged. Or arrested and not charged, as the case may be.

Rita Giacaman, also a co-founder of the Palestinian women's movement and a professor at Beir Zeit University in the West Bank, recently finished research which indicated that the infant mortality for Arab children in the three West Bank villages she studied last year averaged around 90 per 1,000 live births, while infant mortality was 12/1,000 for Jewish Israelis, and 19/1,000 for American babies. A large part of this shocking level of death could be directly attributed to the fact that Israeli authorities had refused the necessary permission to provide piped-in water to two of the villages. The great need for health care education and well-baby care must be met by the women's committees until the implementation of the new State apparatus.

NEIGHBORHOOD COMMITTEES
Most women also participate in their neighborhood committees, which are responsible for various survival activities such as teaching and performing first aid and stockpiling food and medicines for the long curfews. This work is critical to the health and safety of the people, for the curfews can last for several months at a time, during which time no medical care is available and food may or may not be available. (Oddly enough, the sexism of the Israeli soldiers sometimes works to the community's benefit, as it did in Algeria. Because the soldiers cannot seem to perceive Arab women as anything but "housewives," they tend to allow them easier movement than men. Although this is changing, women are still sometimes the only ones who can provide food to hungry families in villages under long curfew, by walking from village to village, sneaking in under cover of darkness at great risk to their lives).

The women in the neighborhood committee first aid teams respond immediately when a demonstration is called. Wounded people try to avoid going to a hospital or clinic because they are often removed from the hospitals for "interrogation" by Israeli soldiers, or are arrested when they return home because their name was on the list of patients at the hospital or clinic.

The Unified Leadership, that combination of external, but primarily internal PLO and Islamic religious groups who coordinate the activities of the Intifada, have incorporated the work of the women's committees into the routine work of the Uprising. They have identified specific jobs for specific groups, such as provision of education (Palestinian schools have been closed sporadically and often since 1967, and permanently for over a year), day care and health care, refusal to pay taxes, boycott of Israeli products, closure of shops, and resignation of the police. One kind of response confronts, the other supplants, the Occupation. Although unequal relations in the division of labor are still strong in Palestinian society (women are still seen to be responsible for cleaning the house, caring for the children, food preparation, etc. regardless what else they do), in the Intifada traditional women's work is given equal importance to that of the men.

The work of the committees has not been done without cost to the women within their own society. In the early days of the popular committees, and occassionally even now, the women are asked by the men to leave a village where they are organizing, because of the domestic disruption which is a standard feature of personal empowerment anywhere. The committee's answer has always been "As long as one women in this village wants us here, we stay." For many women in the committees, the struggle in their own homes is constant, as our Western readers surely remember from their participation in our own early Women's Movement.

LOOKING TO THE FUTURE
These activities, both within the local neighborhood committees and the larger popular committees, are laying the foundation for women's demands for their rights in society when the new State government is implemented. The experience of the women, through their participation in the daily struggle for national freedom, is a natural politicizer, and representatives of the women's groups have all expressed their determination to press forward with their demands for personal freedom, saying that after all they have learned and done, they simply "cannot go back."

The women's committees acknowledge some specific social problems of Palestinian women, and are now addressing them through their committees. Women's groups are calling for:

1. a specific right to education for women and girls, especially in villages where there are not enough schools and boys have priority for the few spaces;

2. broader civil rights, for example the right to keep her job after giving birth. Now, she automatically loses her job when she has a baby. If she has children and gets a divorce, she cannot find a job to support herself, let alone children;

3. divorce laws which give women the right to initiate a divorce, and to retain custody of children as well;

4. visitation rights to children after a divorce;

5. more equitable representation within the PLO. Additionally, the Higher Women's Council is now studying a vision of the Palestinian constitution in order to insure women's inclusion as free persons, to be sure that women's activity on the political level extends to the social level. Under the PLO Charter, their rights are guaranteed.

The women plan to see that these rights are implemented, and they are determined to avoid a repetition of the Algerian experience.

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