Palestinian Women : Narrative Histories and Gendered Memory

Palestinian Women About the author Fatma Kassem completed her Ph.D. in the Department of Behav- ioural Science at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. Her research stemmed from deep interest in how structural and hegemonic power relations work within and between societies, and how they influence women and marginal groups. Kassem has both academic and practical training in conflict resolution, with practical experience of facilitating dialogue in groups of Jews and Palestinians in Israel. During 2007–08 she was a fellow of the research programme Europe in the Middle East/The Middle East in Europe (EUME). Palestinian Women Narrative histories and gendered memory fatma kassem Zed Books london & new york Palestinian Women: Narrative Histories and Gendered Memory was first published in 2011 by Zed Books Ltd, 7 Cynthia Street, London n1 9jf, uk and Room 400, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, ny 10010, usa www.zedbooks.co.uk Copyright © Fatma Kassem 2011 The right of Fatma Kassem to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988 Designed and typeset in Monotype Joanna by illuminati, Grosmont Index by John Barker Cover designed by Rogue Four Design Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne Distributed in the USA exclusively by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of St Martin’s Press, llc, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, ny 10010, usa All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise, without the prior permission of Zed Books Ltd. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data available isbn 978 1 84813 423 2 hb isbn 978 1 84813 424 9 pb isbn 978 1 84813 425 6 eb Contents acknowledgements vi Introduction 1 one My Family Stories 19 two Life Story: Methodological Aspects 41 three The Researcher’s Story 64 four Language 82 five The Body 129 six Home 189 Conclusion 237 notes 241 references 250 index 257 Acknowledgements This book is based on my Ph.D. dissertation, which I completed at Ben-Gurion University in Beer Sheva, Israel. I considered quitting many times. The reasons for this are as many as my moments of despair. The persistent well of inspiration that energized my writing was the resilience that the elderly women I interviewed demonstrated in telling me their life stories. I am indebted to them for two reasons: first, for sharing their life stories, without which this research would have been impossible; second, for infusing me with the motivation necessary to finish this project. In heartfelt thanks, I dedicate this book to them. I would also like to dedicate this book to my mother, Zakieh Mhimad Omar, and to the memory of my father, Ahmad Ibrahim Kassem, both of whom lived through the events of 1948. The story they told me when I was growing up shaped my life as much as it did theirs. It is a great privilege to thank Dr Lev Grinberg, of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Ben-Gurion University, and Profes- sor Hanna Herzog of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Tel-Aviv University, for the professional guidance, patience and wisdom they brought to my academic work. Professor Herzog was supportive in reading and offering critical comments on my dissertation. I would like to convey special thanks to Dr Grinberg for vi acknowledgements vii guiding me from the initial stages of this research, through the many frustrations I encountered along the way, right up to the writing of this book. His steadfast availability and advice, as well as his moral and practical support, were invaluable. Without him, this research would not have been possible. Several other individuals and foundations deserve thanks for their roles in providing me with the resources necessary to complete the research. I would like to thank Professor Rivka Carmi, cur- rently president of Ben-Gurion University, for her contribution in making transcriptions of the life stories possible, and Professor Jimmy Weinblatt, who awarded me the Rector’s Scholarship of Ben-Gurion University. I would like to extend my thanks to the Council for Higher Educa- tion in Israel, which selected me for the scholarship of Excellent Ph.D. Student Award. In addition, I greatly appreciated the support and contributions of the Chaim Herzog Center for Middle East Studies and Diplomacy at Ben-Gurion University, and of Shaml, the Palestinian Refugee & Diaspora Center in Ramallah. I would also like to thank the Foundation Friends of Nazareth in Tilburg, the Netherlands, for their encouragement, and for lending their moral and financial support to my research, in particular the translation of this book. I also would like to thank the Berlin–Brandenburg Academy of Science and Humanities, along with the Fritz Thyssen Foundation, for providing me with a scholarship to be a fellow in the research programme ‘Europe in the Middle East/The Middle East in Europe’ (EUME) at Berlin during the academic year 2007–08. I would also like to thank my co-fellows and the staff of EUME. Professor Cilja Harders of the Free University Berlin also deserves special thanks for her collegial support. I wish to thank Kate McGuinness for her editorial advice and comments on the text. Olga Kuminova also assisted in translating parts of the text from Hebrew to English. I would like to thank Amney Athamney for her assistance in transcribing the life stories. Finally, it is crucial to state the following. The academic analysis and interpretations expressed in this book solely reflect my perspective as viii palestinian women the author. They do not reflect the positions of anyone acknowledged above; nor do they reflect the opinions of any of the interviewees. I alone am responsible for these views. If there is any correspondence between my views and those of others, this is just a happy coinci- dence. Likewise I bear full responsibility for any errors in the text. Introduction This book traces and documents the gendered memory and narrative histories of a group of ordinary urban Palestinian women who witnessed the events of 1948, when the State of Israel was founded. Importantly, these women have all remained on their homeland after it subsequently became Israel, the Jewish state. Told in their own words, these women’s experiences serve as a window for examining the complex intersections of gender, history, memory, nationalism and citizenship in a situation of ongoing colonization and violent conflict between Palestinians and the Zionist State of Israel. Known in the Palestinian discourse of nationalism as the Nakba, or the Catastrophe, this event and those that have followed since 1948 still exert a powerful influence on the present-day lives of these women – as women, as members of the broader Palestinian community to which they belong and as Israeli citizens. Examined from a sociologi- cal perspective, the unique experiences of these Palestinian women from the margins can shed more light on the multiple continuing effects of the Nakba.1 The year 1948 is the most crucial in the lives of Palestinians, at both the personal and the collective level. At this time, between 750,000 and 780,000 Arab Palestinians were dispossessed and dis- placed, taking to the road of exile (Said, 1980: 14; Masalha, 2003: 26). palestinian women Of this number, only 156,000 Palestinians remained on their homeland, indicating enormous devastation. At the end of 2008, the Arab population in Israel numbered nearly 1.49 million people, or 20 per cent of the total population in the State of Israel (Central Bureau of Statistics, 2009).2 Although Palestinian scholars, among many others, have investigated 1948, ‘the story is still full of silences regarding the experiences of different Palestinian communities’ (Lentin, 2008: 211). The experiences of the Palestinians in Israel are more in the shadows; information about ordinary Palestinian women’s experiences in marginal cities is scarcely documented. This study is based on the analysis of twenty interviews with Palestinian women living in Lyd and Ramleh, cities that were popu- lated by an overwhelming Palestinian majority before 1948 but are now radically transformed. It addresses two central themes: (1) the ways in which these women formulate their sense of agency as a result of experiencing collective trauma within the context of an as yet unresolved violent political conflict; 2( ) their roles in relation to, and the ways of telling, the forbidden story of their experiences, as women, as part of a collective Palestinian identity, and as citizens in the State of Israel. The primary assumption guiding this undertaking is that these women are active agents in the production and preserva- tion of knowledge and history. As such, it is possible to demonstrate their equivocal position with respect to power relations. How do power relations shape and influence their perceptions, and how do these women simultaneously subvert these very relations? The book examines three specific contexts in which these women exercise their manifold history-making agency: their language, their sense of body, and the way in which they conceptualize home. This study therefore accompanies the increasing shift in focus away from top-down approaches to theorizing that have prevailed in most modern histories (Al-Ali, 2007). In particular, it seeks to contribute to a small yet growing body of knowledge in the social sciences that places greater emphasis on forgotten communities. Suffering multiple forms of marginalization and exclusion, the ordinary Pales- tinian women interviewed here constitute just such a community: a introduction forgotten one.

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