Women and Power in the Middle East

Women and the Palestinian Movement: No Going Back?

Women and the Palestinian Movement: No Going Back? Julie Peteet The era described in this chapter is precisely that—an era, one that has now ended. Thus it can now be approached from a more or less historical fashion, with the critical hindsight afforded by the passage of time and reflection. During the period 1968–82, Lebanon was a space in which the Palestinian resistance movement achieved a significant degree of autonomy ; it was a space in which, loosely speaking, a project in social experimentation unfolded. The issue of gender was located at the forefront of this project and the trajectory of the Palestinian women’s movement, and the particular issues and policies it did or did not pursue, must be closely indexed to that of the larger national movement and the specificity of its experience in Lebanon. While this chapter focues on the era of Palestinian autonomy in Lebanon, it tracks the rather dramatic changes that have occurred in the wake of the abrupt end of this period, and their impact on women. The Palestinian women’s movement began in the national ferment of the 1920s. Upper class urban women, usually kinswomen of prominent political personalities, organized charitable associations and women’s organizations to assist in the national endeavor. Their goals and activities were oriented toward achieving national independence and social development. Demands for improvements or reforms in women ’s positions were negligible, largely overshadowed by the pressing immediacy of the national struggle. There was little discussion of changes in women’s predominantly domestic roles or subordinate legal status. Palestinian women were aware of the organic links binding their movement to the national movement and made little attempt to separate their own 136 JULIE PETEET problems and prospects from those of the larger social body. The absence of an independent Palestinian state structure in which to agitate for and materialize women’s demands seemed to inhibit any such movement. The year 1948 marked a major turning point in the history of the women ’s movement. Denied the right to return, the vast number of Palestinians who had fled or been expelled from their homes and villages in the 1948–49 Arab-Israeli war became refugees and an integral component in an emerging diasporic society. Over the course of the next decade and a half, the women’s movement was dispirited and fragmented between those remaining inside Israel and those scattered in the various countries of exile. With the establishment of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in the 1960s, the women’s movement was reformed as the General Union of Palestinian Women (GUPW) and officially made a component part of the larger national body. This major transition, formally linking the women’s movement and the national movement, was accompanied by another: the movement’s attempts to transform itself into a mass-based organization that would represent the bulk of Palestinian women. Whether this class transformation in leadership and mass base was successful is highly debatable. The leadership, though, was clearly no longer composed of women from the elite, sharifian, landed or mercantile families. Women of the new middle class that emerged more forcefully in the wake of 1948 prevailed in the leadership, although a corps of camp women cadres, usually from a peasant background, entered the resistance bureaucracy and middle level leadership positions in the women’s movement over the next decade. During the 1950s in the refugee camps, the Palestinians were dispirited and unable to develop a leadership and organizational format capable of addressing their concerns. This state of affairs changed dramatically after November 1969 following a series of clashes with the Lebanese Army. The government accepted an open, armed Palestinian presence in an agreement known as the Cairo Accords. Thereafter, in an increasingly weak Lebanese state and fragmented polity and society, the Palestinian resistance movement assumed daily control of the refugee camps, providing security as well as a wide variety of health, educational, and social services. From the late 1960s until 1982, the Palestinian national movement in Lebanon recruited women and instituted a variety of social services geared to their needs, such as day care centers, after-school activities, clinics and health education programs, literacy classes, vocational training projects, and home industries. Though still a minority in the political organizations, women WOMEN AND THE PALESTINIAN MOVEMENT 137 joined all spheres of the resistance. Few attained leadership positions, and most were concentrated...