The Women’s Movement in Palestine: A Journey from the First Intifada and the Oslo Peace Accords to Modern Day Fragmentation and Loss

Abstract

Reviewing the journey of the women’s movement in Palestine, this research focuses on three events: The First Intifada (1987-93), the Oslo Peace Accords (1993-95), and finally the work of the movement after the peace agreement (1995 onwards). This project provides an analysis of the current day situation of the Palestinian women’s movement by first understanding how the past has played a role in forming the present. Arguing that the women’s movement in Palestine today is one that is deeply fractured and weak, the three chapters of this research project demonstrate how this weakness unraveled temporally. During the First Intifada, the women’s movement started losing its momentum by aligning itself with an inherently masculine movement; namely the national resistance movement. Further, the Oslo agreement failed Palestinian women by excluding them from the process in its entirety, just as transitional justice theories historically failed to truly include women. This research examines the “secularism myth” (Braidotti et al. (2014)) that was employed by the Palestinian Authority as a new approach aimed at attracting foreign aid. It proposes an urgent need for a postsecular debate within Palestinian politics in order to achieve a discourse that is free from the secular/ religious binary, allowing space for true gender equality and woman empowerment to ultimately emerge. The PA was a favorable receiver of Western aid, allowing universal feminist agendas to established INGOs programs which sought to liberate and empower Palestinian women. Targeting women through these highly funded programs, obstructed the way in which the women’s movement operated in Palestine. To overcome this challenge, this research project ends by making a second proposition to use Mohanty’s (2002) “anticapitalist transitional feminist practice” as a way forward in order to break away from dependence on a globalized feminist discourse, and to go back to creating an authentic Palestinian feminist voice that calls for liberation from all layers of oppression.