WOMEN AND THE POLITICS OF MILITARY CONFRONTATION
WOMEN AND THE POLITICS OF MILITARY CONFRONTATION: PALESTINIAN AND ISRAELI GENDERED NARRATIVES OF DISLOCATION. Edited by Nahla Abdo and Ronit Lentin. Berghahn Books, New York, 2002
As an Israeli feminist peace activist I find this book extremely
interesting and illuminating as well as provocative. It gives us a chance
to read both Palestinian and Israeli history and its analysis, as written
by women through their personal narratives-a form that is very powerful.
The seventeen contributors are all accomplished women, in academia, writing
and social activity.
The introduction to the book is presented as a fascinating,
very academic
yet also personal dialogue between the two editors. Zionism and the meaning
of class and gendered construction of nationalism are discussed and analyzed
throughout the introduction and some of the essays.
Part One of the book is devoted to the Palestinian contributors. These
are
divided according to place of exile. The first section relates to "Exile
in
Lebanon". Rosemary Sayigh tells of the mother/daughter relationship
over
time in refugee camps in Lebanon. Samia Costandi speaks of her life in
Beirut, of the gradual development of her identity as a Palestinian, of
her
need from her position of lecturer at McGill to be the mouth of "hundreds
of women I had left behind back home." She ends her essay rather
optimistically regarding the role of women in bringing peace forward.
Souad Dajani declares in an imagined letter to the "other" who
replaced her in her homeland: "I was born of parents whose very existence
your people made into a fabrication and a myth." She speaks of the
bewilderment of Palestinians of the generation that experienced the Nakba
(catastrophe) and ends with a very provocative note to Jewish Israelis
(and maybe to all Jews).
The second section, "Home as Exile: Living under Israel's
Racialised Rule",
deals with the experience of women whose parents were internally dislocated
within the State of Israel after its establishment. These essays reveal
the delicate struggle of identity undergone by Palestinians in Israel
and their struggle to achieve equality as citizens of the state. Isis
Nusair
interviews her mother and grandmother in an attempt to understand the
continuity and discontinuity between their three lives.
Nabila Espanioly elaborates in her essay on the struggle
of the
Palestinians in Israel, the peace movement in Israel-particularly the
women's peace movement-Jewish and Palestinian women working together,
racism in Israel and the internal conservative forces in Palestinian
society in Israel. As Badea Warwar grapples with her identity as a
Palestinian in Israel she writes, "the ambiguity of our position
stems from
the fact that we never fully belong to the Palestinians/Arabs, nor can
we
ever be Israelis. And yet, we belong to both camps." Nahla Abdo relates
her everyday life experience as a Palestinian "national/other"
of Israeli
citizenship. She analyzes Zionism and speaks of the challenge of being
an
outspoken Palestinian in Canada. These stories are so different from the
experience of growing up as a Jew in Israel-or an Ashkenazi Jew, to be
specific-that it is amazing how blind we were, and still are, to the
Palestinian citizens of Israel.
The third section, "Life Under Occupation: West Bank
and Gaza Strip",
articulates the unique experience of exile and dispossession of each
contributor, detailing the severity of present life living the Intifada,
with all the horrors it entails as told by Mona El Farra. Hala Mannaa
brings a brief account of the lives, dreams, struggles and hopes of four
refugee women. Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian takes us on a Palestinian woman's
journey. Her point of departure is others' denial of her existence as
a Palestinian. She tells of her life struggle against gender oppression
and
concludes that she will carry out her mission to stop oppression and
decolonize the mind.
Part Two of the book is devoted to the Israeli-Jewish contributions.
The
first section is interestingly called "Exile as Home", in a
reversal of the
second section in Part One named "Home as Exile". This encapsulates
the
very different points of departure in the essays of the Palestinian and
Jewish women. Alice Shalvi, whose experience as a refugee from Nazi
Germany brought her first to England and then to Israel, speaks of the
pride she felt in being an Israeli, a Jew, of finally feeling completely
at
home. With the outbreak of the first Intifada she became aware of the
injustices of occupation and "above all, of the inevitable coarsening
of
the moral fibre of the occupiers", a concern shared by many women
activists. Rela Mazali analyses from a feminist point of view her mother's
experience of voluntary dislocation, and through this story does somehow
convey the attitudes of militarized Israeli society towards women,
war-widows and children. Ultimately she became active and outspoken in
a movement working for the demilitarization of Israeli society. Gila Svirsky
details many feminist anti-occupation activities, stressing how it is
empowering to the women participating, but remains largely invisible to
the
Israeli public. These descriptions may be of interest to readers, but
they
leave me with the disheartening question of what kind of resistance can
be
made effective in a democratic state where the vast majority of citizens
voted for Sharon in 2001, and voters again gave him overwhelming support
in the recent elections.
In the second section, "Exile as an Oppositional Locus",
Nira Yuval-Davis
takes us on her journey from being brought up in the heart of the Zionist
establishment to involvement in the anti-Zionist left, which led to her
leaving the country. Ella Habiba Shohat speaks about one of the myths
central to Zionist thinking, Kibbutz Galuyot - the "ingathering of
the
exiles". She tells the story of her family's dislocation from Iraq
and the
cultural plight of the Arab-Jews in Israel.
The last section of the book is named "Existential
States of Exile". Esther
Fuchs tries to understand her identity as an Israeli and a Jew, after
rejecting Zionism and leaving Israel, and how being the daughter of
Holocaust survivors affects all this. Ronit Lentin, also the daughter
of
survivors, uses her writing, both literary and academic, to chart her
trajectory from "ordinary" Israeli to diasporic Jew with anti-Zionist
politics.
Throughout the reading and rereading of this book I couldn't
help but
wonder how Jewish Zionists on the left would react to it, both to the
Palestinian and to the Israeli essays. I think it is worth the emotional
effort, and will be of great intellectual value to all readers.