Women's Political Activism in Palestine by Sophie Richter-Devroe

Author:Sophie Richter-Devroe [Richter-Devroe, Sophie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, General, Women's Studies, History, Middle East, Israel & Palestine, Political Science, World, Middle Eastern
ISBN: 9780252050558
Google: 48FwDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Published: 2018-09-19T05:53:06+00:00

From Suspension to Affirmation of Life

The shift in post-Oslo Palestine toward the informal and the everyday—to survival, coping, and leading a normal life—has been accompanied by a resurgence of the debate on the meanings of ṣumūd, and more specifically the dispute of what counts as normalization or accommodation (taṭbīc) versus resistance (muqāwama). Is living normally in the abnormal situation of the occupation a submission to the status quo of injustices, or is the stubborn insistence not to give up, not to emigrate, and instead to stay put under such harsh circumstances an act of resistance in itself? Many of my interviewees stated that today in Palestine “to live is to resist” or even “to exist is to resist.” Women, in particular, often used the terms muqāwama or ṣumūd to describe their everyday survival and coping acts. There has thus taken place a significant change in the everyday political culture of ṣumūd over the last decades—a shift from ṣumūd as “suspension of everyday life” during the First Intifada (Jean-Klein 2001, 84) to ṣumūd as “affirmation of life” today (Junka 2006, 426).

But ṣumūd has a much longer history in the Palestinian political landscape and has undergone important shifts, both in official and informal politics, before. Until the mid-1970s, it denoted a strategy closely related to the land and agriculture and one that, in contrast to armed struggle, could be practiced by every individual.7 From the 1970s onward, ṣumūd gained importance as an official political strategy, when the PLO institutionalized it through Arab ṣumūd funds, promoting ṣumūd as complementary to armed struggle (niḍāl) (Lindholm Schulz 1999; Tamari 1991). In the institutionalized PLO ṣumūd agenda, the term was suggested as a political strategy to halt the mass exodus of Palestinians from the occupied land, find alternatives to their growing dependency on Israeli economy, and counter Israeli expropriation of and control over their land. This agenda was, however, soon criticized by Palestinians, particularly inside the occupied West Bank and Gaza, for not resisting but merely prolonging the status quo of occupation, and for reinforcing the external PLO elites’ power over the burgeoning internal leadership (see Tamari 1991).

During the First Intifada, ṣumūd was reconceptualized from its static PLO-institutionalized sense of holding on to the land to a more active form of everyday resistance. While of course the First Intifada is known for its spectacular mass-based acts of popular resistance, running in parallel to these public collective protests (muqāwama shacbīyya) was the covert politics of ṣumūd, demanding steadfastness and endurance from all Palestinians. People engaged in what Jean-Klein (2001) has termed “self-nationalisation,” carrying the national steadfastness into the realm of their everyday lives by boycotting Israeli products, not paying taxes, refusing to sell land, and even discontinuing life rituals, joyful events, and celebrations. Resistance steadfastness demanded that life as usual be suspended and sacrificed for the greater nationalist cause. Time for normality and pleasure was only to come once independence had been gained (see Jean-Klein 2001, 94). But some, particularly those from lower socioeconomic classes, such as

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