Militarization and Violence against Women in Conflict Zones in the Middle East: A Palestinian Case Study (review)

In November 2009, Adalah, the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, filed a lawsuit on behalf of Dr. Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian against the Israel Airports Authority charging that she was subjected to humiliating and degrading treatment by security agents when traveling to Tunis for an academic conference; Shalhoub-Kevorkian had been singled out and made to endure a demeaning inspection and was barred from transporting her laptop computer, forcing her to cancel the trip. For a Palestinian citizen of Israel (or for any Arab), humiliating and degrading treatment at Ben Gurion International Airport is hardly an exceptional event. The airport is one of countless sites in Israel/Palestine where humiliations and abuses are routinized, ritualized, and rationalized as necessary for the security of Israel. What is exceptional—or at least atypical—about this incident is the willingness and capacity of the victim to sue the institution whose staff violated her legal rights to “dignity” and “equality.” Quixotic perhaps, but the case is one strategy for illuminating the endemic and systemic violations of Palestinians’ rights.

Shalhoub-Kevorkian is an internationally renowned expert in humiliation, degradation, and abuses of many varieties. She is also a keen observer of the strategies that Palestinian women employ to survive, understand, and dignify their existence in contexts where complex and interlocking forms of repression and violence are daily and life-long experiences. Her work as a scholar, clinician, and women’s rights activist is showcased in Militarization and Violence against Women in Conflict Zones. Indeed in a rich field of studies about Palestinian women and gendered dimensions of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Shalhoub-Kevorkian’s book offers a distinctive blend of cutting edge social theory and deep and varied personal experiences drawn from counseling, aiding, and advocating for Palestinian women.

The empirical data and narratives presented in the book are based on intervention projects spanning more than fifteen years under the auspices of several non-governmental organizations. These include her work as founder and head of a hotline for domestically abused women; various projects with the Jerusalem Center for Women, providing therapy for mothers of martyrs and female relatives of political prisoners as well as addressing the effects of house demolitions and displacement; research conducted through the Women’s Studies Center on the traumas of political violence and the effects of economic hardships and militarization on gender and education; and analysis of clinical cases in Nablus through the Families Defense Society.

Palestinians women’s and girls’ lives—and Shalhoub-Kevorkian’s analytical insights—are shaped by dynamics of political violence between Israelis and Palestinians in the occupied territories, and socio-political dynamics within Palestinian society, which include contestations over national authority, norms of morality and narratives of “authenticity.” Gender itself, and the rights and bodies of women are, literally, sites of these complex and interlocking struggles. Shalhoub-Kevorkian’s objectives are twofold: She chronicles and explains experiences of victimization, resistance, and agency from the perspectives of “frontliners,” her term for those women who “always incur the first wave of violence as well as the final one” (4). She also provides a grounded revisioning of Gayatri Spivak’s now famous question of whether or not the subaltern can speak; by illuminating specific ways in which political despair and hegemonic silencing have influenced Palestinian women’s resistance, she gives voice to that which foreign and domestic military and patriarchal political and social powers would muffle and deny. For example, losing a home to demolition, in addition to the generally acknowledged consequences of displacement that this form of collective punishment exacts from families, eradicates intimate and gendered space, thus transforming and taxing the relations that make and sustain a family, with distinctive consequences for women. Shalhoub-Kevorkian has spent years listening to individuals recount their experiences and responses to such traumas. In the best feminist scholarly tradition, she...