Introduction

§ THE main aim of the Palestinian case study is to assess the legislative and Iobbydng initiatives related to Islamic law (whether affirmation or reform) in the six years of a Palestinian interim authority (1994-2000) in the West Bank and Gaza, and to delineate the constraints and opportunities that will shape the struggle over legal reform and personal status law in the coming period of Palestinian statehood.

Although existing personal status law was not substantively amended during this period, a series of critical events and debates occurred which revealed a number of major constraints and opportunities for the reform of existing law. Among these were the debates, both within the new Palestinian Legislative Council and in other fora, surrounding successive drafts of a Basic Law and a year-long ‘model parliament’, initiated by women’s NGOs. The model parliament proposed wide-ranging legal reform on the basis of gender equity; its agenda erupted into public debate in the wake of a sharp attack from some leaders of Islamist move­ments. The attack brought political parties, the religious establishment and the Authority itself into the debate and the issue of legal reform and gender equity was to some extent subsumed by the issue of the nature of Palestinian democracy.

The research team from the Institute of Women’s Studies at Birzeit University attempted to situate the issues in this debate into both the processes of state formation and social dynamics within Palestinian society. We thus analysed public opinion polls (including our own polling) as well as draft legislation and develop­ments in the shari'a court system, in an attempt to understand how women and men articulate their own needs and interests. To strengthen this understanding, the team also interviewed the families of fourteen women workers who lost their lives in a factory fire in the town of Hebron in October 1999, in order to examine how poor families sought and received, or did not receive, public compensation, diγa (the institution of financial reparation for death and bodily injury in Islamic law) and justice.

The full report is a lengthy document including two background appendices by Ala al-Bakri (on legal developments in the shari'a court system since 1994) and Jamil Hilal (on secularism in the Palestinian national movement), along with full polling results and the full report of the investigation into the Hebron factory fire by Fadwa al-Labadi, and is held on file at the Bir⅛eit Institute of Women’s Studies and at Emory School of Law with the Project Director, Abdullahi An-Na'im. As the team was preparing the full report for submission, in September 2000, the profound ‘interim inequalities’ of the transitional period, which the report briefly discusses, and the long delay in Palestinian independence erupted in Palestinian mass protest, Israeli excessive force, and bloodshed that at the time of preparing this edited version for publication, at the end of 2001, had claimed over a thousand lives, the majority Palestinian. The research team cannot submit this case study for publication without expressing its hopes that out of this tragedy, a new framework based on recognition of rights, equality between the parties and the implementation of international resolutions and international law will lead to a genuine and just peace and an independent and democratic sovereign Palestinian state capable of meeting the needs and fulfilling the rights of all of its citizens.