Pre-Oslo agents of political mobilization

During the period of direct Israeli military occupation over the Palestinian popu­lation in the West Bank and Gaza (1967-93), Palestinian mass organizations were ‘agents of political mobilization’ (Iaraki 1990: 62) that targeted specific social groups, primarily students, women and workers.

In this context, a new generation of Palestinian women activists founded women’s committees, linked to clandestine political parties. These activists had a strong commitment to the grassroots mobilization of women — usually cast as reaching women in villages and refugee camps, rather than the urban-based character of the established women’s charitable societies — and an unwavering commitment to national liberation. From their inception, they also explicitly aimed to improve the status of women; agendas for this last goal developed slowly and unevenly in the context of national struggle.

Reform of prevailing Islamic family law was occasionally discussed among activists, but did not become an explicit part of any women’s committees’ plat­forms; the prevalence and repression of Israeli military law and the absence of any address for legal reform made family law reform a moot issue. The secularism of the political culture of the Palestine Liberation Organization, discussed by Hilal (2000), was reflected in the absence of religious references in women’s committee literature, but this secularism did not generally offer any challenge to prevailing short'«-based law or indeed to religiosity in the lives of the population.

At the same time, this period witnessed aspects of a religious resurgence with a politicized cast. Funds from Gulf states assisted in the development of religious institutions, with the number of mosques in Gaza increasing from 200 to 600 in the 1967-87 period and from 400-750 in the West Bank (Sayigh 1997). In the wake of the 197g Iranian revolution and the 1982 PLO defeat in Lebanon, Islamist groups, particularly the Muslim Brotherhood and its offshoots, were particularly successful in organizing Islamic blocs on university campuses and promoting Islamic dress among young women, particularly students. A new university, the Islamic University, established in Gaza in 1978, offered an Islamic alternative to the organization and curricula of the nationalist West Bank universities. Sharp clashes between nationalist and Islamist students occurred on several West Bank campuses in the mid-1980s. Although there were some attacks reported in Gaza on women wearing ‘improper’ clothing during this period, the women’s movement in general was not involved in Islamist—nationalist confrontations and, inter­estingly, was not a particular target of Islamist anger.

Only in the wake of the most intense moment of nationalist resistance, the first Palestinian intifada (December 1987 to 1993) did explicitly feminist concerns and agendas begin to emerge, as women activists both sought to advance women’s claims by virtue of their struggle and sacrifice, and also found this struggle relatively unacknowledged by their own political parties. At the peak of the intifada, in late 1988, the creation of a Higher Women’s Committee provided a forum for discussion of social agendas where three out of four of the main women’s committees advocated ‘the replacement of shari^,a... with civil legisla­tion’ (Giacaman and Johnson 1990: 168), reflecting the leftist background of these women activists and the secular outlook of their politics.

However, the intifada also saw the initial emergence of Hamas (Harakat al- Muqawama al-Islamiyya) the main Palestinian Islamist movement, from the more established Muslim Brotherhood. Women’s increasing public visibility - with young women demonstrating and organizing in public space — met with a hostile response from Islamists and from conservative portions of the national movement (Hammami 1990); attacks on unveiled women in Gaza led to one of the first national conferences discussing social and gender issues, held in Jerusalem in December 1989 and entitled ‘The Intifada and Some Social Issues’ in which leading nationalist figures joined the women’s movement to condemn coercion, a move that is echoed in the defence of the model parliament.