State security, 're-masculinization' and civil society
A number of analysts have noted the dominance of security in the formulation of the Israeli-Palestinian agreements and their unpublished annexes (Shehadeh 1997; Jad et al. 2000) as well as in Israeli and US policies towards the nascent Palestinian Authority’ and in the Authority’s own practice of governance.
While Israel retained overall responsibility’ for security under the agreements and exercised it widely, the agreements also mandated the establishment of a ‘strong Palestinian police force’ to maintain internal order (and tactictly to control opposition) and to safeguard Israeli security. As a consequence, and given the Authority's own security concerns, over 50,000 Palestinian security, army and police personnel deployed in seven to nine security agencies consumed almost a third of the Authority’s budget each year (Hilal et al. 2003). The dominance of security also reflected the militarized structure and ideology of the Palestine Liberation Organization returning from exile. Indeed, the PLO’s ‘statist character’ in exile (Sayigh 1997: ix) strongly contributed to the Authority’s inability to see civil society7 as separate from the state, conflating state and society into a ‘unitary model’ (Giacaman 1998: 8) that undermined democratic prospects and public debate.In addition, the post-Oslo crisis in Palestinian nationalism and national ideology was brought about not only by the seeming abandonment of armed struggle, long ‘the defining dynamic that drove the reconstitution and reorganization of Palestinian national politics’ (Sayigh 1997: 23), but also by the deferral of the pressing national issues of refugees, settlements and Jerusalem to final status negotiations. This crisis seemed to have been partially ‘solved’ by the continued use of militarist symbols and to some extent the militarization of public life that led one early observer to declare that security services had a ‘monopoly on public space’ (Bishara 1998: 1g4).
In this view, legal reform would seem to have to either attempt to fit into the narrow bounds of a monopolized public space and advocate change mostly within circles of the Authority, or become part of a wider struggle for democracy and human rights. In the history of the Basic Law, and in other efforts for legal reform, however, we find that both strategies tend to exist simultaneously.Security-driven agreements and agendas contribute to a ‘re-masculinization of politics’ (Craske 1998: too) that has been noted in other contexts in states in transition, most notably in Latin America. Women’s informal political activity - taking the form of social movements against dictatorship (Latin America) or occupation (Palestine) — is replaced by masculinized formal politics where political ‘parties have returned to their pre-eminent position as the terrain of political action, displacing social movements’ (ibid., p. 109). While the distinction between political parties and social movements is not entirely apt in the Palestinian context, an observation from Latin America that this move includes a ‘reassertion of the public—private distinction’ (ibid., p. 111) is important to consider in the context of Palestine and legal reform of ∫Aαπ'α-based family law. Family law has been characterized as the ‘last bastion’ of shari'a in contemporary Arab and Islamic states (Mir-Hosseini 1993: 12), where it remains the one general area of law where legislatures claim to maintain overall the sway of provisions drawn from fiqh. The distinction between private and public has a different history in the Arab context than in the West, and in Western liberal thought in particular, where the ‘propensity to categorize entire spheres of life as either public or private’ (Thorton 1995: xiii) is quite acute. However, in the perhaps more appropriate division of state, market and domestic spheres, the state’s ‘protection’ and ‘preservation’ of the domestic sphere (and by extension women) as a repository of cultural and national authenticity in times of the assertion of (repressive) state power, rapid change and market penetration is a political act that strengthens state legitimation.
If wτe use ‘public sphere’ in a Habermasian sense as a realm where issues can be debated and discussed for public action, the activism of Palestinian women during occupation certainly enlarged the public sphere, sometimes by expanding their family roles into public resistance. The reassertion of a barrier between public and private could serve to place the domain of family law into a realm beyond the fora of public debate and ‘public rights’, as affirmed in the Palestinian Declaration of Independence discussed below.