Her own activism began during the first Palestinian Intifada (Arabic for "shaking off") or "uprising" and she insists that the goals and methods are the same in the present set of demonstrations. The First Intifada began in 1987 and was characterized by a highly coordinated, unarmed mass-mobilization against the Israeli occupation. Widespread acts of civil disobedience included strikes, boycotts, the creation of "underground" schools, grassroots projects to develop economic independence from Israel, and mass demonstrations. Women were that uprising's backbone.
"The masters of the field are the protestors," Abdelalim says of both then and now. "In the First Intifada, women and men used to stand shoulder to shoulder beside each other, struggling together."
Abu Mosa, who is typical of many women in Gaza in not having been politically active in more than 25 years, tells us that the Return March brings back her memories of that earlier period. Even the smell of tear gas makes her nostalgic. "I feel this March is the First Intifada."
Hamad was also a young activist during the First Intifada. Now 51, she remembers how women were "the vanguard" of that uprising. "There was a unified women's council in 1989 and this council had the responsibility of the streets," she recalls. Women led demonstrations and sit-ins, distributed leaflets, created neighborhood committees and participated in a unified women's council. They even worked together in remarkable unity, whatever political faction they belonged to.
Women's Activism After the First Intifada
The First Intifada ended with the signing of the Oslo Accords, a peace agreement negotiated in secret between the government of Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). Made up only of Palestinians in exile, the PLO negotiation team was all male.
The Oslo Accords led to the creation of the Palestinian Authority and the return of the exiled PLO leaders to the West Bank and Gaza. Many of the grassroots activists who had led the uprising were promptly marginalized in the formation of new leadership structures -- and women were excluded altogether.
According to Samira Abdelalim, the trajectory of the struggle, and particularly the role of women, then shifted radically. There was now an armed, institutional Authority governing a traditional, patriarchal society. "The male societies refused to include women in the decision-making units, and denied women's [engagement] in policies and plans," she explains. So, rather than confronting the Israeli occupation, Palestinian women began agitating for social, political, legal, and economic rights within Palestinian society. Abdelalim and other women activists organized around the task of creating laws to protect women from honor killings -- that is, the murder of a female family member when she is perceived to have brought shame upon the family -- and to prevent gender-based male violence.
The Oslo process was supposed to culminate in agreements on a set of thorny "permanent status" issues between Israel and the Palestinians. These issues included Jerusalem, water rights, border delineation, settlements, and refugees. However, trust in the process continued to erode over the years and the "final" status negotiations held in the summer of 2000 collapsed, setting the stage for the Second Intifada, which erupted on September 29th of that year.
Though that uprising initially began with large-scale demonstrations reminiscent of the previous one, it quickly turned toward armed resistance. According to political scientist Marie Principe's research for the United States Institute for Peace, nonviolent movements create openings for a wide range of people, including women, children, and the old, to get involved in a way that violent campaigns don't. Due to the armed nature of the Second Intifada, the space for the involvement of women, in particular, began to shrink radically. In this period, according to Abdelalim, women activists refocused their work in the international arena, attempting to expose the violence of the occupation to the world through documentation, media reports, and international conferences.
This sort of activism, however, was predominantly open only to women from a higher socio-economic class -- those, in particular, who worked for NGOs, had access to university education, and had some ability, however restricted, to reach the outside world, whether through travel or the Internet. Many of the women who had been out on the streets during the First Intifada were left without roles to play.
In 2006, Hamas (an Arabic acronym for Islamic Resistance Movement) won the Palestinian legislative elections over the previously dominant Palestinian National Liberation Movement, or Fatah. Some Gaza-based leaders of Fatah then sought to oust Hamas (with U.S. backing), leading to a bloody internecine civil war on the Strip in which Hamas violently gained control in 2007.
The Hamas-Fatah divide became a new focal point for women activists in Gaza. In those years, women generally called for Palestinian unity, remembers Abdelalim, insisting that their enemy should be the Israeli occupation, not a competing Palestinian faction. The official reconciliation negotiation team (which signed multiple unity agreements starting in 2011 that were never implemented) did not include women. Abdelalim and other women activists nonetheless held weekly demonstrations to protest the internal split in Gaza, even drafting a joint statement by women on both sides of the political divide calling for national unity.
Under the Hamas regime, however, the situation of women only continued to deteriorate. "Hamas took us back decades," says Iktimal Hamad, noting the regime's desire to impose Islamic Sharia law in place of the Palestinian law in force on the West Bank. "Hamas doesn't believe in equality between women and men," she says bluntly.
Palestinian society has indeed grown ever more religiously conservative over the past decades, especially in Gaza. Siwar Alza'anen remains among a small minority of women in that imprisoned strip of land who do not cover their hair. She admits, though, that most women in Gaza have little choice but to adhere to restrictive societal norms in dress and culture. They generally can't even leave home without the permission of a male relative. Abu Mosa remembers protesting during the First Intifada alongside women with uncovered hair who were wearing short skirts. "Now they ask girls to wear head scarves at the age of 12," she adds with obvious disapproval, though she herself does cover.
Yet throughout those repressive years, Hamad points out, women continued to play a central role in the Palestinian struggle through family education. Women were the mothers of the martyrs, the wounded, and the prisoners. A woman, as she puts it, remains "half of the community and the community is not complete without her contribution."
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