Palestinian Women and Politics in Israel

3. Reshaping the Narrative: The Voices of Palestinian Women

3 Reshaping the Narrative: The Voices of Palestinian Women I lost my father first. Then Nasser died.1 Nasser’s death was a different loss. I was thirteen, and Arab politics in Israel was mostly reactive to Israeli and regional politics. When I was going to school in Acre, I remember the Jewish kids taunting us, yelling, “Nasser died, Nasser died.” We shouted back: “Ben-Gurion died, Ben-Gurion died.”2 Afnan Ighbariyya, A female activist from the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) This chapter identifies three stages that shaped and influenced these women’s involvement in politics. The first stage, “the formative years of a political Palestinian woman,” covers the sociological characteristics of the interviewed women including socioeconomic status, familial, political, and social background, as well as the role of higher education. The second stage, “the making of a Palestinian political woman,” during which the challenge of pursuing a political career matured and sharpened the women’s awareness of gender bias and expanded their political experiences. Most of the women faced challenges to their political careers from families and society, from within the parties and from the media—all of which built their characters and increased their understanding of their complicated position. The third stage, “negotiating reality—the search for strategies,” describes how political women have to maneuver around the political realities of gender bias, societal preconceptions of women’s roles, and political wrangling. Some women negotiated around social expectations and defied cultural norms. Other women relinquished their goals to achieve representative positions in their parties, or opted to pursue their agendas through informal activism. The interviews reinforce this work’s central thesis, which holds that the challenges the women faced were shaped by a complex reality and are not reducible to single explanations, such as patriarchy or “Arab culture.”3 Reshaping the Narrative: The Voices of Palestinian Women 109 Stage 1: The Formative Years of a Political Palestinian Woman Female Stereotyping and Family Dynamics Many scholars consider socialization a primary factor in the scarcity of women in politics. They consider families and schools to be the social agents that play the greatest role in shaping and reinforcing gender concepts (Wharton 2005). Socialization is “the way children are introduced to the values and attitudes of their society and how they learn what will be expected of them in their adult roles” (Almond and Powell 1988: 34–35). From early childhood, Wharton argues, most girls are taught that their primary mission in life is to marry, have children, and be housewives. If there is a need for them to work outside the home, women are discouraged from pursuing any occupation that is likely to conflict with their domestic role. Wharton argues that gendered social expectations are passed from generation to generation by socialization. Sexual identities and divisions of social function are reinforced by religion, the legal system, and the family structure (Wharton 2005: 127–28). In Arab societies, the influence and interconnectedness of tradition, customs, patriarchy, religion, and religious interpretations are vital factors that contribute to excluding women from different levels of political participation . These factors impede and often deny women the possibility of positioning themselves in quintessential “masculine” arenas. Such restriction manifests itself in the type of public support female candidates receive and in the way they are presented on the candidates’ lists within the Arab political parties. Of course, the inferior status of women is not unique to Arab culture (Ahmad 1992). Scholars seem to agree that the traditional Arab family is among the most important institutions in the Arab world, and thus plays a factor in repressing women’s social status there. What is peculiar to the Arab world, however, is not the form assumed by the patriarchal system, but rather the perpetuation of this system as an ideal model (Mernissi 1987) For Palestinian women activists in Israel, challenges did not come late in their lives. Even in homes that strongly supported women’s education, women experienced discrimination based on their gender. This is similar to Palestinian women’s experience before 1948 and in the Occupied Territories . Fadwa Tocan, the prominent Palestinian poet, recalls her experience in which her father and her paternal aunt encouraged her education Chapter 3 110 while insisting on her wearing the hijab and restricting her behavior (Fleisch­­­ mann 2003: 61). As for Palestinian women in Israel, a common refrain among the interviewees was that their families often told them, “You are...