Conclusions
In conclusion, the tentative picture we can draw from various survey data is that while there is a strong emotional commitment for shaτi'a to remain the framework for personal status law in Palestine, there is a lot of room for negotiating change within this.
More specifically, there is a popular legitimacy for an extension of women’s rights in family law, although there is clear male resistance in some areas, the most notable being the issue of property claims either in divorce or inheritance.However, the specific principles of reform, while tending towards expanding women’s entitlements, are also marked by a host of conflicting values and interests. For instance, commitments to social equality and justice (framed in the nationalist sentiment of equality and rights) coexist with strong impulses towards preservation of the family and masculine authority within it. Similarly, contradictory attitudes exist towards the issue of legal authority. On the one hand, support is professed for the expansion of religious authority into wider arenas of life, which coexists with the preference that ‘the people’ vote to decide on what the letter of religious law should be. The point here is that these contradictory values do not represent discrete contending social groups, but are multiple and contradictory stances within the same individuals and ultimately the population as a whole. As such, a successful legal reform strategy cannot base itself on only one underlying principle, such as equality, without addressing the other multiple and countervailing values with which it coexists.