Palestinian Women Writers and the Intifada

While many have attempted to analyze various aspects of the intifada, one aspect that continues to be elusive is the contribution of Palestinian women to the uprising. Media analysts, reporters, and Arab intellectuals have had a great deal to say about the role of hidden forces, the United National Leadership, and the outside leadership, responsible for the uprising, yet all fail to recognize the active participation of middle aged traditional women who sometimes form human shields between the youths and the Israeli soldiers. It is of course possible to argue that the initial impetus which drove women out of the private sphere of the home and into the public sphere of the street-to the extent that the term public and private are applicable to life on the West Bank and Gaza-was simply the desire to protect their children. By the same token, however, women have expressed willingness to question traditional values which require their exclusion from the political sphere. Their very participation indicates a transformation of consciousness: women have questioned values that insure the economic security of the family, the safety of its members, that require women's seclusion from the political sphere. Their priorities have shifted from protecting the traditional values at all costs to risking everything in order to loosen the grip of occupation.1 At a time when most men where crippled by a sense of defeat in the aftermath of the 1967 invasion, women were the first to carry the burden of ensuring a greater degree of compliance with family needs in a difficult environment. It can generally be said that by encouraging self reliance and nurturing trends, the intifada has feminized Palestinian society on the West Bank and Gaza. The willingness of Palestinian women to reevaluate traditional norms through their impact on resistance can best be understood through Franz Fanon's notion of violence. In writing of the Algerian revolution, Fanon proposes that the act of violence directed at the source of oppression-in the case of the intifada the throwing of stones-should be measured not by degree of damage inflected upon the oppressor but by the degree to which this act empowers the victim of oppression. Following Fanon, the intifada can be read as initiating a process of liberation in a psychological sense. For Palestinian women this sense of liberation takes place on two