Divisions and compromises in the women's movement

The official initiatives spurred model parliament organizers to consider a process for drafting a unified Palestinian family law themselves, based on the painstaking process of applying the equality argument to existing legislation and the sub­sequent recommendations of the model parliament.

A low-key strategy emerged to develop a declaration of principles and issues for discussion for a new Palestinian family law that would first be presented to allies in political parties, human rights organizations and other non-governmental organizations. The aim was the formation of a national committee for a new Palestinian family law to lobby the Palestinian Legislative Council and other relevant parties. A preparatory⁷ committee of women’s organizations who par­ticipated in the model parliament began work on these documents in the summer of 1998 and almost immediately ran into problems both on the general approach and specific principles. There were a number of fissures between women’s organ­izations, including differences between the West Bank and Gaza, but there were two main strategic divides. The first, between legal reform towards civil law and reform within shari'a, is familiar from other contexts. The second is more specific to the Palestinian context, but has resonance elsewhere: between an approach which can be crudely characterized as ^ςNGO^,, where legal reform is a project with a number of specific activities, and an alternative approach which can be equally crudely characterized as ‘political’, which sees legal reform as embedded in political (and social) processes.

The working out of the first division is embodied in a document prepared in February 2000, but not, at the time of this writing, presented as widely as had originally been planned, largely as a result of the circumstances of the new intifada which have both hampered physical movement for purposes of consultation, meetings etc., and directed intellectual and social energies towards other priorities.

In an interesting point, the document notes that family law is the most contro­versial of all the laws, given that it touches on family relations and is embedded in the culture of the society and therefore requires the ‘efforts of the whole society to develop a Palestinian family law built on equality between the sexes’. The point that conflicts over family law mean that more, not less, democratic participation is required is a rather neat rejoinder to the religious establishment’s appropriation of shari'a and family law as its sole province.