Palestinian Women and Popular Resistance: Perceptions, Attitudes, and Strategies

This book explores Palestinian women's perspectives on popular resistance in the West Bank and examines the factors influencing their involvement. Despite the Oslo peace accords, Israeli occupational control has intensified, and political, humanitarian, security, and economic conditions have worsened. The book demonstrates that Palestinian women are committed to national liberation but feel alienated from collective popular resistance due to low legitimacy and the impacts of settler-colonialism, spatial control, civil society, patriarchal constraints, repression, and violence.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 248 pages
Publication date: 09 January 2023
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd

This book delves into the perspectives of Palestinian women regarding popular resistance in the West Bank, exploring the various factors that shape their involvement in this movement. Despite the signing of the Oslo peace accords in 1993 and 1995, the Occupied Palestinian Territories have faced heightened Israeli occupational control, deteriorating political, humanitarian, security, and economic conditions. Through ethnographic fieldwork conducted with women in the West Bank, this book examines how Palestinian women perceive, negotiate, and enact resistance in the post-Oslo period. It emerges that, contrary to some observers' claims, Palestinian women remain deeply committed to the goals of national liberation and actively seek to contribute to an effective popular resistance movement. However, many Palestinian women feel alienated from prevailing forms of collective popular resistance in the OPT due to the low levels of legitimacy they accord them. This alienation is exacerbated by the gendered and intersecting impacts of expanding settler-colonialism, tightening spatial control, a professionalized and depoliticized civil society, reinforced patriarchal constraints, Israeli and Palestinian Authority (PA) repression and violence, and a deteriorating economy. These barriers have significantly hindered Palestinian women's active participation in the resistance movement.

By undertaking a gendered analysis of conflict and resistance, this volume highlights significant changes over the course of a long-running resistance movement. It is of interest to readers engaged in gender and womens studies, the Arab-Israel conflict, and Middle East politics.

Weight: 404g
Dimension: 233 x 155 x 18 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780367616366