The Social Construction of Militancy in the Israeli­ Palestinian Conflict: Masculinity, Femininity and the Nation.

Mark Sanagan

Master's of Arts

Institute of Islamie Studies

MeGili University Montreal, Quebec, Canada Aug.31,2006 A thesis submitted to McGili University in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the degree of Master's of Arts. ©Copyright Mark Sanagan 2006 Ali rights reserved. Library and Bibliothèque et 1+1 Archives Canada Archives Canada Published Heritage Direction du Branch Patrimoine de l'édition

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This thesis is dedicated to the people of Palestine. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS First and foremost 1 need to thank my partner Danielle whose consistent intellectual critique has made me not only a better academic but a better person. My parents provided me with the environment and encouragement that fostered my drive for knowledge even when it didn't translate into stellar report cards. The administrative staff at the Institute of Islamic Studies, especially Kirsty MacKinnon and Ann Yaxley, as weil as the Director, Professor Robert Wisnovsky, were an immense help in answering ail my mundane questions over nearly two and a half years. The staff at the Institute's Library, Wayne st. Thomas and Salwa Ferahian proved invaluable as both an academic resource, as collegues, and as friends. Faculty and students at the Institute, as weil as staff and students at Birzeit University fostered favourable academic climates for me to write portions of this thesis at both institutions. Most notably in the case of the former 1 received great support in my Arabie from Fahad al­ Homoudi. 1 need to also thank Professor Malek Abisaab, for his continued advice and counselling on both academic and personal matters. Lastly my advisor, Professor Laila Parsons, thanks for her invaluable and substantial help with not just this thesis but with my scholarship in general. As a thesis advisor, as an instructor and as a teaching supervisor she's been invaluable. She has been able to convince me of many things most notably the great potential of historical scholarship and for that 1am deeply indebted. TABLE OF CONTENTS

DEDICATION ...... ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...... iii TABLE OF CONTENTS ...... iv ABSTRACTS ...... v Chapter 1 Introduction ...... 1 Chapter 2 Imagined Narratives ...... 8 Competing Narratives ...... 8 The National Body ...... 10 Some Preliminary Notes on Nationalism ...... 11 Collective Memory and National Narratives ...... 15 The Imperial Narrative of Adventure ...... 16 Some Preliminary Nores on Masculinity ...... 18 Conclusion ...... 20 Chapter 3 Setting the Stage, Casting the Protagonist ...... 21 Part 1: Israel ...... 22 Zionism and Territorial Space: Writing European Jews into Palestine ...... 22 Erasing Palestinians from Palestine ...... 24 The Protagonist: Zionism and the Diasporic Jewish Man ...... 26 Fighting Back: The Valorization of The Ghetto Warrior ...... 28 The IDF and Making the Israeli Man ...... 29 Part 2: Palestine and The Palestinians ...... 31 Towards a Productive Definition of Militancy ...... 31 The Horsemen of AI-Aqsa ...... 32 Sacred Space in Palestine ...... 34 Stonethrowers of the First Intifada ...... 36 Ritual Abuse ...... 37 Speech Acts ...... 38 Conclusion ...... 39 Chapter 4 Women in Palestinian Nationalism ...... 41 Part 1: Sexuality and the National Liberation Project: 1917-2001 ...... 41 The Emergence of the Nations's Cultural Project...... 41 Towards a Historiography of Palestinian Women's Activism ...... 42 Inchoate Popular Expressions of Anger ...... 43 Sexualizing the Struggle: The PLO in the 1960's and 70's ...... 45 1magery of Sexual Violence ...... 46 National Subjectivities in the Camps ...... 48 The Intifada ...... 49 Underground Communiques ...... 51 Gendered Space of Militancy ...... 52 Part 2:Female Suicide Bombers ...... 53 The "New Woman": Paradox and Participation ...... 57 Militant Movements: Using Women as Symbols ...... 60 Secular Nationalists ...... 62 Religious Nationalists ...... 63 Knowledge and Framing ...... 65 Women Suicide Bombers in Orientalist and Gendered Discourse ...... 67 The Israelis ...... 69 Conclusion ...... 71 Chapter 5 Conclusion ...... 74 Figures ...... 78 List of References ...... 84

iv ABSTRACT This thesis examines nationalism and colonialism in the Israeli­ Palestinian conflict and asks the questions: What is the relationship between these ideologies and "national narratives" constructed of collective historical memory? How do these ideologies praduce recognizable, sexualized, national bodies? What are the defining characteristics of these national bodies and how do they perform raies fram the national narratives? These questions are addressed thraugh a discussion of the raie of masculinity in modern Zionism and the state of Israel, in particular how it relates to the land of Palestine and the Palestinian "other". This thesis also addresses anti-colonial resistance movements in Palestine and argues that performative nationalism praduces a fetishized commodity that can me labeled "militancy". This militancy is found institutionalized in the popular culture of everything fram poetry to political posters. Finally, Palestinian female suicide bombers, like women nationalists before them, do little to challenge how specifie nationalist acts of resistance are defined by patriarchal nationalists and sexualized within a "gendered space of militancy".

v ABRÉGÉ Cette thèse examine le nationalisme et le colonialisme dans le context du le conflit Israelo-Palestinien et pose les questions: Quel est le rapport entre ces idéologies et "récits nationaux" construits avec la mémoire historique collective? Comment ces idéologies produisent-elles des corps reconnaissables, sexualisés, et nationaux? Quelles caractéristiques définissent ces corps nationaux et quel rôle joue t-ils depuis les récits nationaux? Ces questions sont adressées par une discussion de rôle de la masculinité dans le Sionisme moderne et de l'état de l'Israel, en particulier comment il se lie à la terre Palestinienne et du Palestinien comme "autre". Cette thèse s'adresse également aux mouvements de résistance anti-coloniaux en Palestine et discute comment le nationalisme performatif produit un fétichisme, que je nomme comme étant le "militantisme". Ce militantisme est institutionnalisé dans la culture populaire dans toutes ces formes: de la poésie, aux affiches politiques. En conclusion, les femmes palestiniennes, auteure d'attentat suicide à la bombe, comme les femmes nationalistes qui les précèdent, font peu pour défier comment des actes spécifiques de résistance nationaliste sont définis par des patriarches nationalistes et sexualizé à l'intérieur d'un "l'espace de militantisme sexospécifique".

vi Chapter 1: Introduction

TVVO ISRAEL! BOYS CAUGHT IN JORDAN Youths deported for crossing border to see Ancient City

Joel Brinkley

th JERUSALEM, Sept. 6 - Even though Israel and Jordan have both significantly enhanced their border defenses over the last several weeks, two Israeli boys sneaked into Jordan last week and spent two days touring historie sites before they were caught and arrested at a Jordanian police checkpoint. After two days of international mediation, Jordan today returned the boys to Israel, where the two 17 year olds now face criminal charges that carry a maximum penalty of four years in prison. Israel and Jordan remain in a state of war, and Israelis are forbidden to enter the country under any circumstances. Nonetheless, in Israeli popular culture there remains a deep fascination with one particular tourist site in the Hashemite Kingdom. That site is Petra, the ancient capital of an Arab tribe called the Nabateans, just 18 miles inside Jordan. Known here as "the red rocks," the ancient city is carved out of solid reddish rock formations set into the desert of southwestern Jordan. MOST INTRUDERS KILLED - Before Israel was founded in 1948, Jews living in Palestine occasionally visited the site, but none have legally been allowed to go since then. Nonetheless, about two dozen Israeli adventurers have tried over the last 20 years, and most of them have been shot and killed by Jordanian troops. About ten days ago, the two boys, Hananel She'ar-Yashuv and Lior Mizrahi, told their parents that they were setting out on a hike in the Negev. When they did not return at the end of last week, just before the start of the school year, their parents alerted the police. Immediately Israelis began to be worried that the boys had been killed by Palestinians, as had two Jerusalem boys who had disappeared earlier this month. But then the searches found the boys belongings in the desert, and press reports have said that among them was a note saying they had gone off to Petra. Immediately the Israeli government asked the International Red Cross, the United States and the West German Embassy for help - the parents of one of the boys are of German origin - and on Wednesday word came that the Jordanians had the boys in custody. SKULL CAPS IN POCKETS - They returned today and told investigators that they crept across the border at night, unaware

1 that it was mined. They are religious, but put their skull caps in their pockets. They said they walked to Petra, toured it during the day, took pictures and then found their way to Aqaba, the Jordanian port on the Gulf of Aqaba. Jordanian currency can be bought in East Jerusalem. Near Aqaba they were caught at an army checkpoint and placed under arrest. Skullcaps back on their heads, they returned this afternoon over the Allenby Bridge, Israel's unofficial border crossing with Jordan. The Police interviewed the boys for several hours, and told them that above ail they had to discourage other youths from trying to make the trip. So, in a brief exchange with reporters, young Hananel dutifully said: "We made a very serious mistake. We didn't estimate how dangerous it was" But then as a last thought he added: "You know, every young person dreams of going there."

***

ISRAELIS KILL 3 YOUTHS CROSSING FROM JORDAN

JERUSALEM, March 29 (AP) - Israeli troops shot and killed three young men who entered the occupied West Bank from Jordan, including a 12 year old boy, the army command and the Israeli radio said. The radio reported the ages of the three as 20, 15 and 12, and said they were armed with a knife. The army said the three did not carry papers. An army spokesman sa id the soldiers had acted according to routine instructions when apprehending suspects. The spokesman, who could not be identified under official rules, also sa id there had been six previous violent infiltrations in the area. The army banned ail Palestinians living in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip from entering Israel today. Security was especially tight as the start of the Jewish Passover holiday coincided with the Christian observance of Good Friday and with Muslim prayers on the second Friday of the Islamic holy month of Ramadan. The three young men crossed the border into the west bank six miles north of Jericho, the army said. 1

1 Joel Brinkley, "Two lsraeli Boys Caught in Jordan," The Nf5W York Times, September 71990. "Israelis Kill3 Youths Crossing from Jordan," The New York Times, March 30 1991.

2 These two stories - two groups of boys written about and treated so differently - speak volumes to me about the history of the Israeli­ Palestinian conflict. So many structures of power have colluded to leave those three Arab boys nameless and give Hananel and Lior's adventure a mischievous whimsicality. These two stories will serve to introduce my thesis on the triad of interconnected forces of ide%gy, performance and sexua/ity that have come to play such an important role in this conflict. Hananel and Lior decided, sometime in August of 1990 that they would tell their parents that they were going camping in the Negev (presumably they too were equipped with that standard piece of camping gear that had been so dangerous in the hands of the three Arab boys: a knife). As the New York Times story goes, they stole across the border into Jordan and made their way to Petra. This was the moment of adventure that they had been planning for. Hananel and Lior represent a colonial masculinity that has provided them, and countless other adventurers before them, an excuse to transgress social, cultural and political boundaries. To conceive of these boundaries as applying spatially to others but not themselves is indicative of a relationship of power seen in countless colonial narratives. Hananel and Lior, like the original Zionists coming to Palestine, exerted an understanding of "place." The place, for these two boys, is within the history of Israeli military and technological supremacy over their neighboring Arab states and internai Palestinian population. For them, crossing the border into Jordan to see Petra is in fact a cultural artifact, a handed down sense of territorial mastery. From the Biluim and the Zionists who first "made the desert bloom," to the resilient settlements that sprung up in shipping containers atop hillocks in the West Bank, Israeli mastery of the land has informed the national mythologies. The wonders of the ancient Middle East - the sa me

:~. wonders that drew explorers like Johann Burkhart - are an inescapable lure for adventure seekers. The journey to Petra becomes the "making

3 /-" real" of a particular geographic imagining. The dangerous border patrols of the Bedouin military only play into the constructed "other" as villainous Oriental. They are the foil to Hananel and Lior - protagonists of a performative nationalism. And so the boys return to Israel in good health, suffering only the feigned indignity of parental and police chastisement. But their story remains whimsical. Thinking of these stories in terms of performance is important methodologically: 1am going to examine particular aspects of the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and focus my attention on the acting out of these roles, and in keeping with this performance analogy, 1 look to examine the dramatis persona of the conflict. My goal, in the end, is to gain a deeper understanding of how nationalism and colonialism become active ideologies capable of producing National Bodies and how these National Bodies are defined in terms of both internai and external "others". ln this thesis, 1 look to examine the interconnectedness of nationalism, "militancy" and masculinity in the context of the Israeli­

Palestinian conflict. 2 1 ask the questions: How does militancy, as an institution, conceive of the Palestinian Nation and its people? How has this image been reproduced and normalized institutionally through the rhetoric of supposed representatives and culturally through modes of production such as visual culture? Partha Chatterjee, in both The Nation and it's Fragments and Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World, argues that anti-colonial nationalists separated their world into two discursive fields: the "material" (economy, technology, statecraft etc.) and the "spiritual" (the "essential" marks of cultural identity). Nationalists in turn imitated the former while blocking any perceived "intrusion" by the colonial power into the latter. He examines the "fragments" of the nation (confessions, women, peasants, castes) and how they were normalized by the

2 1 will define my tenus explicitly in the second and third chapters.

4 nationalist elites within this framework of the "spiritual domain". It is along the sa me lines and directly to this process of normalization that 1 focus my examination of anti-colonial nationalism in Palestine. Anne McClintock in turn argues that nationalism is by and large a series of executed spectacles. Less important are what are traditionally considered the technological sources of nationalism (the vernacularization of language or the advent of the printing press). Nationalism, through the fetishizing of specifie symbols and signs, becomes a performative set of acts, capable of reproducing itself only as these signs are reproduced collectively. It is my contention that in the case of both Israel and Palestine there is a definite product of a fetishized nationalism: a specifie network of signs that can be labeled "militancy". This network of signs is unique to its context. Anti-colonial nationalism and militancy have been synonymous at various times in nearly ail colonial encounters in Asia, the Middle East and Africa. Palestine is of interest, as 1 noted above, because of its successive (and ongoing) encounters with colonialism. It is for this reason that anti­ colonial militancy in Palestine is a more unique manifestation of nationalism. Returning to Chatterjee's "material" and "spiritual" domains, Palestinian militancy is both an institution and a cultural product. In this thesis 1 am particularly interested in how it has been (re)produced as a national commodity. What becomes apparent from the outset is that this network of signs produces a discursive field with distinct characteristics. Militancy is young, not old; heroic, not weak; active, not passive; as action it exists "outside of politics"; and above ail it is the preserve of the "ideal national man". Chapter 3 will turn some of the "elementary aspects" of colonial and nationalist ideologies that come forth from Chapter 2 into paradigms capable of creating the "National Man". Part One will concern itself with how Zionism has constructed its national narrative, particularly how it

5 conceived of the space of Palestine and how it produced its ideal National Body. Part Two will address the same issues in Palestinian anti-colonial nationalism, with particular attention to specific aspects of its own commodified culture and performative nationalism. Once these sources have yielded the romanticized image of the militant man, 1 will outline in Chapter 4, just how this homosocial image in turn plays out on the discourse of gender. The process that makes militancy a masculine enterprise normalizes specific gender roles in the nationalist movement. Chatterjee in The Nation and its Fragments outlines how the nationalists in India produced the "New Woman" as an educated individual distinct from the previous generation and the lower class in her liberation from perceived archaic aspects of "tradition". He goes on to show how the "New Woman" in turn accepts certain aspects of this mythologized "tradition" to produce a syncretized and new, legitimated patriarchy. In terms of Palestine, Ellen Fleischmann in The Nation and its "New" Women shows how Palestinian women in the British mandate inserted themselves into the nationalist movement. Yet decades later, the image of the ideal woman is still subsumed in the gendered rhetoric of the nation. As Joseph Massad points out in Conceiving the Masculine, the image of motherhood as gender role is codified by the new nationalist elites of the PLO. This creates a "gendered space of militancy" that fluctuates marginally in strategy (allowing women to participate in paramilitary operations) but not in rhetoric (official communiqués and speeches). Despite the perceived growth in women's involvement in the national struggle we still have the old "new" woman. Part 1 deals exclusively with this idea. It follows the strategies women employed towards a goal of nationalist engagement during multiple time periods from the British Mandate to the first Intifada. This thesis was born of an earlier paper 1 wrote on this "gendered space of militancy" as it relates to female suicide bombers. 1 will revisit my argument in Part 2 of Chapter 4, that female suicide bombers were

6 rhetorically marginalized from participation in militant activities by ail the actors involved. From the militant groups to the media in the "west", from the official Israeli response to the women themselves, active involvement of women in militant activities is seen as counterintuitive and counter productive to the creation of a masculine vision of "nationalism". As the most sensational of militant acts, drawing the most media coverage, women's involvement in these suicide bombing operations can be illusory. While their more visible role may suggest a new phase in women's participation in the nation's emancipation, this chapter will show that this isn't yet the case. *** Why have 1started, rather ambiguously, with the story of Hananel and Lior? As 1 have already said, the relationship between ideology, activity and sexuality are human conditions. What 1 described above as the "imperial masculinity" of Hananel and Lior comes from a coherent ideology that encourages a series of actions, a sort of "indocility" that reinforces a relationship of power (power over another population, over territorial space, over history itself). This thesis will describe how ideologies (colonialism/nationalism) manufacture actions (performance) and inscribe upon society guidelines for sexuality (masculinity/femininity). 1 will begin, in the next chapter, with an exposition of the theories and methodological underpinnings of my thesis before moving on to discuss the historiography of the Palestinian­ Israeli national narratives.

7 Chapter 2: Imagined Narratives

Competing Narratives When 1 first came to the West Bank 1 had a friend with whom 1 exchanged stories about our interrogations at Ben Gurion airport - Israel's main international terminal. He explained to me one night that when he told the woman behind the desk at passport control the name of the well-known West Bank town that he was going to be staying in, she replied to him that no such town exists. This caught my friend off guard at first, and when he explained to her that he would first be spending some time in Jerusalem, she seemed satisfied. Of course that West Bank town exists, and it was where my friend and 1 lived for months. And of course the passport control officer knew that this town exists. She just chose to erase it. It was a dramatic reminder to me that so much of the Arab-Israeli conflict has been about the power of naming, the power of memory and the power to narrate. ln a conflict in which cartography often occludes history, 1 plan on using the former as a theme to flesh out the latter. Maps and borders play one of the central roles in the engagement between the early Zionists and the Arab peoples and subsequently between the State of Israel, neighboring Arab states and the Palestinian people living in and outside of various geopolitical configurations. From the negotiations between the Sharif of Mecca and Henry McMahon, and the linguistic ambiguity surrounding the inclusion or exclusion of Palestine from their agreement; to the last significant "peace" talks between the Palestinians and the Israelis in 2000 at Taba, the "map" is central. Maps and borders become talking points and negotiation positions from which the dialect of "great leaders" and their representatives rises above lived experience. The loss of territory and the usurpation of homeland is a common theme in the historical narrative of the Palestinian people. On the other hand, the mythologized Eretz Yisrael and the return of the scattered

8 Jewish people to the literai "promised land" of Moses, in turn locates modern Zionism historically. The stories of return and dispossession influence culture and the ideologies they produce on both sides of the conflict. The Palestinians were dispossessed of their lands, or fled in fear from Israeli forces in 1948 and 1967. The return of the refugees, living in the neighboring Arab states of Lebanon, Syria and Jordan, as weil as those lucky enough to escape the camps for work in the Gulf States or an education and life in Europe or North America, remains one of the most contentious issues in the negotiations between the two parties. The connection between early Jewish history found in the Bible, and the still vivid memories of trauma committed against them in 19th and 20th century Europe constructs Israel as not only a home land for world Jewry, but a refuge. This status of "safe haven" enforces and makes more fervent the desire for a "secure Israel," and the rhetoric of survival and destruction of the State has played into nearly ail conflicts between Israel, and the internai Palestinian population and the neighboring Arab States. Israel has used the "secure Israel" argument to rhetorically justify acts from the preemptive strike on Egypt and Syria in 1967, to collective punishments in the Occupied Territories and Lebanon. From the destruction of Herod's temple in 70 CE to the still vivid memories of the Holocaust, Zionism has historicized itself into the continuum of Jewish ethnicity, while simultaneously asserting a break from the "weak", pre-diasporic Jewish Identity. This break from "weak" Diaspora Jew to strong, Hebrew State further compels the State to act as guardian of the race in a manner that cannot be conceived as

"weak". The State must be seen to act strong. 3

3 This will be discussed further in Part 1 ofChapter 3. See also, Joseph Massad, "The 'Post Colonial' Colony: Time, Space and Bodies in Palestine/Israel," in The Pre-Occupation of Postcolonial Studies, ed. Fawzia Afzhal-Khan and Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks (London: Duke University Press, 2000). and Yael Zerubavel, Recovered Roofs (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).

9 The purpose of this chapter is to outline some elementary aspects of the Palestinian and Israeli narratives. As Ranajit Guha (using Gramsci) describes in his work on Indian peasant insurgencies during the colonial period; "elementary" aspects are the "common forms and general ideas", the definitional pillars of collective action.4 How has the story of the Israeli people been told - how has the story of the Palestinian people been told?5 Common tropes emerge: the conflict between Empire and Nation and their attendant ideologies; the internai, self-definitional tension between Nationalism and Imperialism; the clearly gendered nature of these ideologies. This chapter will focus on specifie elementary aspects to both the Israeli and Palestinian national narratives. From the "Imperial Adventure" to the historiographies of Nationalist Ideologies, one common thread running through it ail is how a specifie, concrete entity was formed: The National Body.

The National Body My study of the National Body argues that it has specifie characteristics and is informed by specifie narratives. The National Body is militant in that it is committed to a singular goal. For both the Palestinians and Israelis that goal is a secure and discrete National

4 Ranajit Guha, Elementary Aspects ofPeasant Insurgency in Colonial India (Delhi: Oxford, 1983). 12 5 Of course, the "historical narratives" of each ofthese nations cannot be reduced to a single story. In fact, the history ofthese two communities make it particularly difficult to suggest that a single narrative can exist: The Palestinians have been scattered and exiled into refugee camps in multiple neighbouring countries, or they live in camps under occupation, or they live in towns and cities in the Occupied Territories, or they live in Europe and North America, or they live within Israel, as second-class citizens. The Israelis are a "nation" composed ofmuItiple, distinct religious sects, collected in a small parcel of land from countries in Africa, the Middle East, North America, Western Europe and Eastern Europe - aIl bringing their own cultural norms and baggage. This is on top of the class divisions, political affiliations, gender hierarchies ... but emerging from these communities, one can still discern distinct themes. That is why 1 will argue that using a concept like "elementary aspects" ofthese narratives is meaningful and productive. The point then becomes to draw comparisons between communities in terms ofideology (colonialism, nationalism), performance and sexuality, and in the end provide a meaningful critique ofboth colonialism and nationalism.

10 collective form (a State).6 The National Body, an individual entity, has generalized characteristics that have been informed by narratives that are often inwardly or outwardly paradoxical or competing (Empire, Nationalism). But these characteristics are, despite these competing ideological forces, largely standardized. The National Body is young, not old; heroic, not weak; active, not passive. 1 intend on outlining a few of these characteristics and focus on some aspects of the ideologies that lie behind them. Starting with a general survey of some particular scholarly ideas of Nationalism, 1 will turn to the relationship between empire and cultural imagination as it is manifested in the Adventure narrative (a domain of young, heroic, active men). Underwriting both of these ideologies is a distinct notion of masculinity that will be my focus in the concluding sections. Throughout, the presence of Hananel and Lior and their trip to Petra, and the absence of our three Palestinian teenagers will cali into question some of the sustained ideological critiques (of nationalism for instance) and remind us that for ail the complex relationships between narratives, there remains an undisrupted structure of power that defines and names the actors in their respective, assigned "plays".

Sorne Preliminary Notes on Nationalism Our understanding of the phenomena of Nationalism comes predominantly from European, mostly British, scholars. 1 am going to focus on the evolution of the scholarship on nationalism by discussing primarily the works of the British Marxists, such as Eric Hobsbawm and subsequently Benedict Anderson. Hobsbawm and Anderson have located the advent of nationalist thought in a distinct period of time in both Europe and the Americas respectively. Partha Chatterjee, an Indian anthropologist, has criticized the way in which the discourse of nationalism has been imposed upon our understanding of the

6 Or for sorne, equal rights within the State. (ie. A binational, dernocratic Palestine).

11 phenomenon in the Third World. While the traditional historiography of nationalism has tended to focus on the elite production of nationalist thought, less attention has been paid to how National Bodies and Subjects have been produced. Hobsbawm furthers the work of Ernest Gellner by stressing the "elements of artifact, invention and social engineering which enters into the making of nations". 7 For Hobsbawm nationalism is a European concept that emerged, as Anderson wililater eCho, with a specific set of socio-industrial developments. The "dual revolutions" of the French Revolution and the English Industrial Revolution produced the historical circumstances (along with other ideas such as Wilsonian principles of self-determination) that allowed nationalism to flourish by the 19th century. The treaty of Versailles and subsequent post-war resolutions simply solidified the now diffuse spread of nationalism.8 But what of the colonial world? To the third world, anti-colonial nationalist movements, Hobsbawm argues that their leaders "spoke the language of European nationalism, which they had so often learned in or from the West, even when it did not suit their situation".9 Here we have a nationalism that has a distinct language and form: a language that is learned by the third world from their colonial masters. Hobsbawm's construction of nationalism as an ideology that emerged in Europe to be appropriated by the third world foreshadows Chatterjee's criticism of Benedict Anderson. Benedict Anderson's now heavily cited Imagined Communities is an evolution in Marxist theorizing of "the nation". From Hobsbawm, Anderson continues to locate the evolution and growth of Nationalism within the historical circumstances of economic developments. His

7 This idea of "invention" or "imagination" has a long history in the study ofnationalism. For Gellner, there is in this act a sense of falsity, while for Anderson, it is a more creative process. E. J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality (Cambridge [England]; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992). Il 8 Ibid. 134 9 Ibid. 136

12 thesis is that Nationalism is a cultural artifact that emerged in the wake of a confluence of historical forces and that once present, became modular; capable of being transplanted to other communities. The confluence of historical forces that he is referring to is seen in the advent of print-capitalism and the vernacularization of languages. Through a sophisticated exposition of ideas such as "homogenous-empty-time" versus "simultaneity-along-time", Anderson focuses on both the nation and the process by which its members come to identify with both the (modular) superstructure and with its content - the fellow national. 10 But it is in this act of the "imagining" of a nation by one person and sharing his identity with another that Anderson's work is problematic. While there is no doubt that there is some sort of intangible force that connects one person with his imagined co-national, the agencyof how that imagination is shaped is absent from the majority of nationals themselves, as citizens of the nation have their imagination provided to them through generally elitist modes of production (ie. news media). In fact, through this confluence of historical forces, nationalism is produced to coïncide with these concepts of time by groups with access to the vehicles of imagination - the print capitalists - in a top down movement of thought, a process critiqued by Louis Althusser. 11 These are social and cultural institutions that produce something very specific, despite the whimsicality of "imagination". Anderson of course acknowledges the class elements of the formation of nationalist thought. Take, for instance, his analysis of the "Creole nationalism" that he argues emerged in the Americas as a response to the alienation felt by colonial-born descendents of colonizers. 12 These Creole nationalists formulated a nationalism that responded to this alienation, a lack of belonging to the Spanish (for instance) Nation in the metropole, by

10 Benedict R. O'G Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London; New York: Verso, 1991). 11 Louis Althusser, Essays on Ideology (London: Verso, 1984). 12 Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread ofNationalism. 59

13 creating an anti-colonial hybrid nationalism that would allow them, as the elites, to produce a pluralistic nation that could include its natives (ie. Peru).13 But again, this formula abrogates any agency on behalf of the native population. The vehicle of this nationalism is formulated by the elites and the native populations are recipients of this elite ideology. Partha Chatterjee has systematically deconstructed Iiberal, conservative and Marxist theories of nationalism. For him, ail three represent a continued form of eurocentric, hegemonic ideas of subjectivity. Inserting himself into the debate between the Iiberal school (Ernest Gellner, Anthony Smith) and the conservative (or irrationalist school of Elie Kedourie), Chatterjee locates the debate squarely in the context of European Enlightenment ideas about thought and identity.14 To debate the ri se of nationalism in these contexts (European, American, socio-Industrial development etc) is "to place thought itself, including thought that is supposedly rational and scientific within a discourse of power.,,15 For Chatterjee, the debate is itself a product of a colonizing enlightenment discourse. Towards Anderson he responds in The Nation and its Fragments: "If Nationalisms in the rest of the world have to choose their imagined community from certain 'modular' forms already made available to them by Europe and the Americas, what do they have left to imagine?,,16 While acknowledging his contribution to the discourse on the mechanics of how Nationalism has been created, Chatterjee, places Anderson within this continuum of a colonizing, totalizing history. Finally - and for the purposes of this thesis, most importantly - Anne McClintock differs from Benedict Anderson in positing the root of

13 Ibid. 51 14 Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse? Third World Books. (London: Zed, 1986). 15 Ibid. Il 16 Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories, Princeton Studies in Culture/PowerlHistory (Princeton, NJ.: Princeton University Press, 1993). 5

14 nationalist collectivity not in the advent of the printing press and it attendant outcomes, but in the execution of spectacles. "Indeed, the singular power of nationalism since the late nineteenth century, 1 suggest, has been its capacity to organize a sense of popular, collective unit y through the management of mass national commodity spectacle. ln this respect, 1 argue, nationalism inhabits the realm of fetishism".17 For McClintock, the invention of technologies and linguistic vernacularization is less important than the organization of national collective expression. Her study of Afrikaner cultural spectacles such as the Tweede Trek brings out the racial and gendered boundaries of nationalism in practice. 18 She writes: "Nationalism takes shape through visible, ritual organization of fetish objects - flags, uniforms... maps, anthems ... through the organization of collective fetish spectacle - in team sports, military displays, mass rallies the myriad forms of popular culture and so on". 19 For McClintock nationalism is thus, less an ideology formed by slow, evolutionary changes (vernacularization) or abrupt inventions (the printing press), but a performative act. Nationalism is reproduced and solidified through collective performances. Collective consciousness interacts with the content of national ideologies and constructs performing National Bodies. 20

Collective Memory and National Narratives McClintock's definition of performative nationalism provides us with a solid staring point for understanding how Nationalism is passed on and reproduced. The content of that nationalist discourse is provided in

17 Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York: Routledge, 1995).375 ln fact, it's McClintock who best describes how Nationalism becomes an active ideology and it is to this question of performative Nationalism that l will address in Chapter 3. 18 Ibid. 370 19 Ibid. 375. For a case study on this process in Jordan, see Chapter 3 of: Joseph Massad, Colonial Effeets: The Making ofNational Identity in Jordan (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001). 20 See also Lisa Wedeen, Ambiguities ofDomination: Polities, Rhetorie, and Symbols in Contemporary Syria (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).

15 the form of what Yael Zerubavel refers to as "master commemorative narrative": essentially a broad view of history, a basic "story line" that is culturally constructed and provides the group members with a general notion of their shared past. 21 Collective memory as repository for national narratives: are substantiated through multiple forms of commemoration: the celebration of a communal festival, the reading of a tale, the participation in a memorial service, or the observation of a holiday. Through the commemorative rituals, groups create, articulate and negotiate their shared memories of past events. The performance of commemorative rituals allows participants not only to revive and affirm older memories of the past but also modify them ... on the communal level each act of commemoration makes it possible to introduce new interpretations of the past, yet the recurrence of communal performance contributes to an overall sense of continuity of collective memory. 22

Through ritualized performances and spectacles c10sely associated with collective memory, the ideology of nationalism sustains and reproduces itself. How does this commodity spectacle/ritualized performance work in the ideology nationalism's foil: Empire? How have the ideologies of Empire commodified history as fetish? How does Empire commodify land? How does it commodify the culture of it's Other?

The Imperial Narrative of Adventure Let me return to "narratives" and our stories of these five boys. The story of Hananel and Lior has a magical whimsy to it. They were adventurers crossing a hostile border in order to experience an ancient marvel; their youthful confidence not considering the potential danger. Even upon their return, unharmed and ingratiated to the Jordanians who exchanged their confiscated film for postcards, the boys couldn't resist hinting at a pervasive fascination amongst their peers. "You know, every young person dreams of going there." ln fact, this final line from the

21 Zerubavel. 7 22 Ibid. 6

16 interview with Hananel speaks volumes to an epistemic narrative that is echoed through the history of imperialism.23 The lure of adventure and travel fram the metrapole to dangeraus and exotic locales has led countless young men on voyages that range fram the seemingly harmless and exploratory, to wholly destructive. In this way, adventure and Imperialism have a symbiotic history that has written itself ail over the maps of the Colonized World. This history of Adventure and Imperialism simultaneously concerns itself with the histories of youth, gender, and nationalism, the themes 1address in this section. Edward Said writes; "the struggle over geography ... is complex and interesting because it is not only about soldiers and cannons but also about ideas, about forms, about images and imaginings".24 The imaginings of geography and the culture of the "other" come fram different sources. These sources are largely cultural, such as Said's study of the canonical literature of the West, and are reproduced through ideological diffusion. 25 Imperialism was thus an episteme informed in part by the narrative of Adventure; and Adventure then becomes the narrative about geographic imaginings made rea/. Stories about adventure constructed an imaginative space in which colonialism could take place and at times, mapped the course of that colonization. 26 Geographer Richard Phillips has argued that the content of these stories were explicitly racialized, sexualized and nationalized: Adventure, like nationalist politics, was primarily the setting for young, white, men. 27

23 By "epistemic narrative" 1 mean to invoke the Foucauldian understanding that there is a "genealogy" to thought. This narrative of Adventure is informed and produced by antecedent discourses (ie. Imperial Power). 24 Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Knopf, 1993). 7 25 By ideological diffusion 1 mean that at sorne point, for instance, the work of Kipling, Conrad and Austen became canonical by their diffused use in classrooms, their spread through mass media, or correlative artistic vehicles (television, the stage ect.). This is, essentially the content of the Ideological State Institutions described by Althusser. 26 Richard Phillips, Mapping Men & Empire: A Geography ofAdventure (New York: Routledge, 1997). 68 27 And the canvas' on which adventure narratives were written were largely a/d, alien and feminine. The racialized component ofthis comparison between Adventure and Nationalism, of

17 Sorne Prelirninary notes on Masculinity Phillips writes: "Colonial geographies reflect the characteristics - including masculinity - of the geographical imaginations in which they were conceived." 28 And colonialist structures are often reproduced ideologically in nationalism; nationalist imagination works the same way colonial imagination does: It conceives of time and space in specifie, delineated terms such as Anderson's "homogenous-empty-time." If colonialism and nationalism are conceived structurally in a similar fashion, an obvious element of this structure is the gendered discourse that helped produce it. In outlining the conceptual boundaries around nationalist ideology, one facet that cannot be ignored is the role of sexuality and gender. While women have played arguably the most crucial role in producing and sustaining the population of a nation: Nationalist movements have rarely taken women's experiences as the starting point for an understanding of how people have become colonized or how it throws off the shackles of that material and psychological domination. Rather nationalism typically has sprung from masculinized memory, masculinized humiliation, masculinized hope. 29

The relationship between Nationalism, and gender and sexuality has been a topic of study much slower to develop. The pioneering work done within this field is of George Mosse's Nationalism and Sexuality. Mosse's work focuses on two time periods: the late eighteenth to late nineteenth centuries, and late nineteenth century on. In the first phase, Mosse traces the connection between the emergence of nationalism in the late eighteenth century and its connection to bourgeois norms of "respectability".30 Positive ideals of sexuality were developed in line with middle-class morality. Men and women were further distinguished into course, changes in content: ie. Algerian Nationalist discourse wasn't racialized as white but it was nonetheless racialized as something non-white. 28 Phillips. 69 29 Cynthia Enloe, Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics (Berkeley: University ofCalifomia Press, 2000). 44 30 George L. Mosse, Nationalism and Sexuality: Respectability and Abnormal Sexuality in Modern Europe (New York: H. Fertig, 1985).5

18 specific gender roles that lent their weight to better productivity. Reproduction was fashioned as a national imperative. 31 Sex became a mechanical tool for reproducing national children. Sexual distinction also created positive and negative images for men and women. The Masturbator, the Homosexual, the Lesbian and eventually racial groups (particularly "the Jew") were contrasted against ideals of "manliness" and respectable women. 32 Manliness emerges as both a physical and a psychological construction that gives men an ideal code of conduct through which to live their lives. Then, in the late nineteenth century, challenges to these ideas of respectability caused nationalist ideology to refashion old norms of social interaction into sexless outlets for passions. These outlets were

Patriotism and corporeal devotion to a nation. 33 This was enacted through, what Mosse calls "normative masculinity": blueprints and stereotypes of what Men should look like and how they should a ct. 34 Sociologist Joane Nagel, in her work on masculinity and nationalism outlines the different ways in which masculinity has been defined. From Mosse's "Normative Masculinity," to "Positive Masculinity," "Semiotic Masculinity," and negatively constituted masculinity, there emerges an image of an ideal national man. 35

31 Ibid. 5 32 Ibid. 32. The image of "The Jew" will be addressed extensively in the next chapter. 33 Ibid. 66 34 Ibid. 10, see also Joane Nagel, "Masculinity and Nationalism: Gender and Sexuality in the Making of Nations," Ethnie and Racial Studies 21, no. 2 (1998). 35 Let me define these terms from Nagel: "Positivist definitions ofmasculinity are descriptions of men in a particular place at a particular time: They are ethnographies of manhood. They are limited by a lack of generalizability, inevitable researcher bias, and tautology. "Men are what men do", thus it is impossible for men to behave in Feminine ways or for women to behave in masculine ways. Normative definitions ofmasculinity emphasize manly ideals, 'blueprints', or sex role stereotypes. They are limited by their cultural, historical and value assumptions, and by their emphasis on ideal types which exclude many men, that is, many (most) men do not behave according to a 'John Wayne' model of manhood. And finally, semiotic definitions ofmasculinity contrast masculine and Feminine and deduce from the difference the meaning ofmasculinity (and femininity): 'The phallus is mastersignifier, and femininity is symbolically defined by lack.' Semiotic definitions are limited by their emphases on discourse and symbolism which tend to overlook the material and structural dimensions of the social constitution of gender meanings." from Nagel. 5

19 Conclusion As Hananel and Lior went about their lives, likely admired for their bravado by their classmates and friends, the three Palestinian boys made their way to the Jordanian border. In fact, other than their last movements, we know very little about these three. They may have been from Amman or one of the refugee camps that lie just outside its periphery. This small archivai trace of their existence relegates them to silence that is difficult to overcome. But it speaks volumes to the context in which their story has been written. Through Hananel and Lior we are reminded that colonialism creates within young men a narrative to imagine places and cultures without regard to the relations of power that allow them to experience those cultures without any reciprocation. 1 am reminded of Edward Said's definition of Imperialism: "At some very basic level, imperialism means thinking about, settling on, and controlling land that you do not possess, that is distant, that is lived on and owned by others.,,36 This distance between these two groups of boys is at once enormous and ever so small. The rituals that allow Israeli boys to become not just "men" but "Israeli Men" isn't so different from rituals that have allowed Palestinian boys to become "Palestinian Men". What is striking, in the end, is that regardless of the structural dynamics within their respective cultures that inform and produce them, for the readers of the New York Times, the stories of these boys have become two different narratives. One of Adventure and Whimsy; the other of Terror.

36 Said. 7

20 Chapter 3: Setting the Stage, Casting the Protagonist

The construction of the Ideal National Man involves the coming together of many different forces. In the history of colonialism we find the same desire to act out - to perform its ideology - that we find in its successor; nationalism. Hananel and Lior sought out a space to perform not just the colonial sense of territorial mastery and adventure-infused orientalist fantasy, but also a performed masculinity, inherited from colonial and nationalist Zionism. As 1 argued in the preceding chapter, colonialism and nationalism contain in their ideologies a delineated discursive form of masculinity. And following the pioneering work of Mosse, the relationship between a normative masculinity and nationalist ideologies is inextricable. If national ideologies and the institutions they produced are infused with "masculinist memory and hope" - what are the explicit ways that this nationalism becomes performative in the way McClintock described? Masculine nationalism, in the case of anti­ colonial nationalist movements such as those in Palestine, and in a militarized state like Israel, is significantly performative in composition. ln this chapter 1 return to the question of acting out narratives. 1 will begin with respective discussions on Israeli and Palestinian collective memory before delving into their socially performed constructions of nationalist masculinity. ln Part 1 1 begin with a discussion of how Zionist ideology has discursively conceived of Palestine as a "Land without a people" and 1 show how that discourse has played itself into Israeli policies towards the Palestinian population. 1 then turn my focus to the process of conceiving the Israeli National Man - a process begun in Europe before the creation of Israel, yet given new impetus with militarised performances in the new state. ln Part 2, 1 discuss the related concept of "Militancy" in Palestinian society as an institution that defines nationalist agency.

21 Once militancy can be seen to underwrite Palestinian nationalist performance, 1 will discuss the process by which the Palestinian National Man has been conceived in popular, nationalist culture, found in objects like political posters.

Part 1: Israel As 1 argued in the last chapter, Hananel and Lior crossed into Jordan because their imaginations were never bound by political demarcations. Their colonial understanding of space was written by the history of the State of Israel in its reconceiving of Palestine as a "land without a people" and its encounters with an Arab enemy.

The Stage: Zionism and Territorial Space: Writing European Jews into Palestine For Zionism to succeed as colonialism / nationalism, it needed to construct a particular relationship towards the land and its native inhabitants. 37 While much has been made about the other potential sites for a Jewish State that had been presented to Herzl and the Zionist organization, such as Argentina, the Sinai, and Uganda, the historical connection between Palestine and Judaism was too powerful a lure. While a small community of Jews, known as the Old Yishuv, stililived in Jerusalem, Palestine has by and large been inhabited only by Arabs - both Christian and then Muslim - since the dispersal of the Jewish people following the destruction of Herod's temple in 70CE.

37 The debate over terminology (colonialism vs. Nationalism) as it applies to Zionism and the State ofIsrael actually has more to do with contemporary ways to discredit the State or ofthose who oppose it. The reality is that Zionism is at once both a colonial project (and a brutal one at that) AND a nationalliberation project. There are aspects of Zionism that, like so many other nationalist projects, reconfigured Jewish or Hebrew history and culture to fit its modem needs in the same process that Chatterjee isolated in the lndian Nationalist movements. On top ofthat, Zionism and the State ofIsrael continues to violently appropriate land from Palestinians in the Occupied Territories (not to mention the expulsions of 1948) and segregate their population from the natives of the country. .

22 The dispersal of the Jewish people is thematically infused into Diaspora Jewish collective memory: tales of wandering and exile, expulsion and return, are found both within the Hebrew Bible, and were the catalyst for its production. The stories of the patriarchs, of Abraham, of Moses, of Adam and Eve ail contain themes of dislocation. The final dispersal of the Jewish people after the temple's destruction, as weil as multiple smaller migrations and expulsions within Europe ail contribute to what Carol Bardenstein has labelled "Jewish Rootednessl Rootlessness Anxiety" (see Figure 1 in Appendix). She writes: Clearly, "homeland" as a place in which one is securely rooted has been a very precarious construct in Jewish narratives, in which the possibility of uprooting or being uprooted seems to be always just barely at bay. 3

For Bardenstein, this anxiety has clearly led to the modern lionist discursive preoccupation with connectedness and rootedness. This anxiety focuses itself upon asserting a connection with the territory from which Jews were expelled. "lionism therefore reclaimed, redeemed, repeated, replanted, realized Palestine, and Jewish Hegemony over it.,,39 They reclaimed and replanted Palestine through, most notably, the yedi'at ha-aretz "getting to know" projects instituted in Jewish communities in Palestine before 1948 and aggressively in schools after the founding of the State. These programs were designed to: bridge the gap and time lag between the fact of being in what was actually a newly adopted home and the trope of "return" so central and constitutive within lionist discourse. The logic operating here is a circular and retroactive one. Implicit in the notion of Jews "returning" to lion is the assumption that they had been there before and "knew" it to some extent.40

The implications for the lionist project for returning Jews to "not know" the land of Palestine, would be a challenge to the underwriting

38 Carol Bardenstein, "Threads of Memory and Discourses of Rootedness: Of Trees, Oranges and the Prickly-Pear Cactus in Israel/Palestine," Edebiyat 8 (1998). 3 39 Edward Said, The Question ofPalestine (New York: Times Books, 1980).87 40 Bardenstein. 4

23 assumption of the validity of their claim to the land itself. Zionist ideology had relied on a few tropes to sustain the validity of its claim to historie Palestine: "that European Jews are the direct descendants of the ancient Hebrews, that the ancient Hebrews had exclusive rights to Palestine, and that the European Jews have the right to claim the homeland of their alleged ancestors two thousand years later.,,41 One way of facilitating these claims would be to erase the native inhabitants from Palestine or discredit their claims to the land.

Erasing Palestinians from Palestine The unfortunate saga of Joan Peters and her book From Time Immemorial provides evidence of the benefits of discrediting not only Palestinian claims to the land, but Palestinian identity itself. The book, widely discredited in reviews and rebuttals, makes the claim that the Palestinian people emigrated from neighbouring Arab territories during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century in order to benefit economically from European and Jewish merchants and traders. The argument would then be that they had no more of a claim (and in fact less of one) than European Jews to the land of Palestine. While proven to be a fraud, the idea behind the book is not at ail unusual in the history of Zionist attempts to erase Palestinians from Palestine. 42 While the historical arguments that remove Palestinian claims to land within what is now Israel are often found to be without merit, the technological power of the modern Nation-State has in turn been put to work for this project. During the first Intifada, ritualized beatings of Palestinian youths were figured in the Israeli colonial narrative as a collective punishment for the transgressive other. Anthropologist Julie

41 Massad, "The 'Post Colonial' Colony: Time, Space and Bodies in Palestine/Israel." 324 42 See Joan Peters, From Time Immemorial: The Origins of the Arab-Jewish Coriflict over Palestine (New York: Harper & Row, 1984). and Christopher Hitchens and Edward W. Said, Blaming the Victims: Spurious Scholarship and the Palestinian Question (London; New York: Verso,dist by Methuen, 1988).

24 Peteet describes the view of the Israeli military and its Zionist ideology towards Palestinians as: The young male, as metonym for the Palestinian opposition and struggle against domination, the ideas and symbols of which must be rooted out and silenced ... This regime of knowledge, together with a widespread ideology of the rights of the occupiers to the Palestinian land and resources, constitutive of a claim to an Israeli national identity ... fostered an atmosphere where inflictions of bodily violence flourished. 43 ln this sense, Zionism terrorizes the Palestinian body to fulfill an "empty" Palestine landscape: This collective other, however, is denied a national identity. The pregiven defining power of the collective Palestinian body, which requires violently negating intervention, lies precisely in its assertive national identity, which in its very existence denies the mythical Zionist landscape of Palestine.44

Another way that Israel has reconfigured its history in relation to the Palestinians is through the bureaucratie machinery of the modern nation-state. One example of this is the ID cards that are mandatory for ail Palestinians. If a Palestinian was born in the Occupied Territories before 1948, their identity cards read the specifie name of the town or village from which they came (Nablus, Khan Yunis, Deir Dibwan etc.). But if they were born within what is now the State of Israel, under place of birth their cards simply read: "Israel" - A bureaucratie anachronism that wipes out the traces of non-Jewish, pre-Israeli past. Mahmoud Abbas, the President of the Palestinian Authority, who was born in Safed a town in the north of what is now Israel, in 1933 was, according to his ID card, born in Israel. Israeli journalist Amina Hass has argued that a "refugee's place of birth [is thus] erased not only physically but also in the workings of the Israeli bureaucracy ... with a few taps of the keyboard, the Israeli Interior Ministry can enlist every Palestinian

43 Julie Marie Peteet, "Male Gender and Rituals of Resistance in the Palestinian Intifada: A Cultural Politics of Violence," American Ethna/agist 21, no. 1 (1994). 37 44 Ibid. 36

25 refugee in a process that manages to place Israel outside of historie time and to divest him of his own history."45 Zionism's attempts to suppress the positive aspects of the Diaspora and exile while simultaneously denying Palestinians their national subjectivity is an integral component to understanding how the Zionist project dealt not just with the Palestinian "other", but its European as weil. This suppression and denial, as Zerubavel notes, made it "easier to reshape the period of exile as a temporary regression between the two national periods, metaphorically suspending time and space in order to appropriate both into the Zionist commemorative narrative.,,46 While simultaneously coming to know Palestine as a Jewish Homeland and erasing its native population, the Zionist project had to also create a new protagonist for its national narrative: a man simultaneously distinct from its pre-national form, and yet also connected to an ancient and immutable Hebrew past.

The Protagonist: Zionism and the Diasporic Jewish Man George Mosse's history of sexuality and nationalism in Europe argued that "The Jew" was a stereotyped "other", set up within the discourse of European, patriotic Christianity.47 The project of normative ideals of masculinity - ideals towards which young nationalist men could direct themselves - required negative symbols towards which they could contrast themselves. "The Jew" was presented as meek, feminine and cowardly. 48 ln this respect, Mosse argued that both "Zionists and

45 Amina Rass, Drinking the Sea at Gaza, trans. Elana Wesley and Maxine Kaufman-Lacusta (New York: Metropolitan Books, 1999). 180 46 Zerubavel. 22 47 This is expanded upon in Daniel Boyarin's Unheroic Conduct in which he argues that European Jewry complemented this relationship by discursively creating the image of the ideal man as being that of the Anglo-Saxon. Daniel Boyarin, Unheroic Conduct: The Rise of Heterosexuality and the Invention of the Jewish Man, ed. Daniel Boyarin and Chana Kronfeld, Critical Studies in Jewish Literature, Culture and Society (Berkeley: University of Califomia Press, 1997). 48 Mosse, Nationalism and Sexuality: Respectability and Abnormal Sexuality in Modern Europe. 32

26 assimilationists shared the sa me ideal of manliness.,,49 For the Zionist project "the Jew" was a representation of the Diaspora and the root cause of the dispersal. If the Zionist praject would be a success, a new "Jewish Man" - a National Man - would have to be conceived to replace the Diaspora Jewish Man. 5o As Joseph Massad described in The "Post­ Colonial" Colony, "unlike his predecessor, the new post-diasporic Jewish man would engage in agriculture, war and athletics.,,51 There were many archetypes for the new Jewish Man. The requirement that this archetype be culled fram the pre-exilic era compelled early Zionists to imagine characters and events fram Biblical and Second Commonwealth era Judaism as heroic exemplars of manliness.52 For the State of Israel, this relationship is manifested in the ideal of the "Masada Jewish Man." Evoking the destruction of the last holdout of the Jewish community in Palestine at the hands of the Romans in 72 CE, Masada is configured as the last legitimate Jewish State. 53 Through the Masada Man the connection is made between Ancient Jewish history and a masculinized militancy. Taking their oath to

49 Ibid. 42 50 This project ofreinvention of Jewishness in general was integral to the Zionist project as a whole: The reinvention of the Hebrew language, for another example. See Ron Kuzar, Hebrew and Zionism: A Discourse Analytic Cultural Study (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2001). 51 Massad, "The 'Post Colonial' Colony: Time, Space and Bodies in Palestine/Israel." 325. See also Boyarin., and Max Nordau in Paul Mendes-Flohr and Jehuda Reinharz, The Jew in the Modern World: A Documentary History, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995). 52 Boyarin writes that "as emancipated Jews became desperate to remake the Jewish male in the image of the Anglo-Saxon (in particular) as the ultimate white male oftheir world, they sought to discover such male models within something they could cali Jewish - Hannibal, a transformed Moses; Massena, and ultimately the whole biblical tradition of sovereignty and war-making understood as the antithesis of the Diasporic Jewish wont for passivity." Boyarin. 274. 1 use here the term "imagine" (as opposed to "in vent") in the same way Benedict Anderson uses the term: to imply creativity instead offalsity. See Chapter 2 and Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread ofNationalism. 53 This finding is questionable. Arguments have been made by Israeli scholars that Masada was the holdout of a relatively insignificant number of Jewish Zealots called the Sicarii, that these Sicarii committed horrendous crimes against neighbouring Jewish communities along the Dead Sea, and that Masada became the national myth that it is today because unlike the fortress of Gamla in what was Syria, the Jewish National Fund was able to purchase Masada and make it accessible to Israelis in 1934 at a time when such a mythologized national symbol was most needed. See Nachman Ben-Yehuda, The Masada My th: Collective Memory and Mythrnaking in Israel (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995). and Nachman Ben-Yehuda, Sacrificing Truth: Archaeology and the My th ofMasada (Amherst NY: Humanity Books, 2002).

27 "never let Masada fall again," new Israeli soldiers are inscribed into this discourse. 54

Fighting Back: the valorization of The Ghetto Warrior. Men are soap, they hold people in their hands, clean innocent sterilized people. Oh that sterilization ... Any paleface who looks like a refugee is a piece of soap. And soap has no body or 55 muscles. Soap is what they made out of US.

ln Yoram Kaniuk's novel Adam Resurrected a survivor of the Holocaust is taunted in the streets of Tel Avivas "soap". Survivors of the Holocaust, soap without "body or muscle", represent the figure to which the new Israeli National Man would be contrasted. On the other hand, those who fought against the Nazis in whatever capacity they could have been valorized in Zionist discourse. In fact, Zionists in Palestine showed ambivalence towards both those who perished in the concentration camps and those who survived. The dead have been at once appropriated as martyrs for the State of Israel and yet were often viewed with contempt by Zionists in Palestine. Boyarim writes about this ambivalence, saying that the contempt was a "direct descendant of the anti-Semitic representation [of the effeminate and weak diasporic Jew], but those who died in the hopeless Warsaw Ghetto 'Rebellion' were glorified as 'New Jews,' as the Polish branch of the 'Palmach,' the Zionist shock troops."56 ln fact, those who "fought back" against the Nazis are especially commemorated in Israel. At Yad Vashem, the Holocaust museum on Mt. Herzl in West Jerusalem, a towering monument dedicated to those who fought against the Nazis dominates the skyline (See Figure 2). The Hebrew text at the boUom of the monument reads: "Now and forever in memory of those who rebelled in the camps and ghettos, fought in the woods, in the underground and

54 Ben-Y ehuda, The Masada My th: Collective Memory and Mythmaking in Israel. 147 55 Yoram Kaniuk, Adam Resurrected/ Yoram Kaniki (Hebrew), trans. Seymour Simckes (New York: Harper and Row, 1978). 132 56 Boyarin. 291

28 with the Allied forces; braved their way to Eretz Israel; and died sanctifying the name of God." The monument (not so) subtly incorporates the violent resistance of European Jews to the Holocaust into Zionism's metanarrative and renders their deaths examples of national martyrdom. The incorporation of armed Jewish resistance in Europe into Israeli national history marks the beginning of the connection between armed/militarised performance, and the ideal normative masculinity of the New Jewish (Israeli) Man.

The lOF and Making the Israeli Man The Israeli military narrative is complex: It is a national ideology that mythologizes its military-technological superiority over its enemies to the point where these enemies became impotent fighters while simultaneously constructing an ever dangerous threat to the very existence of the State. The way the enemy Arab is envisioned in Israeli military discourse is an interesting field that hasn't been studied as much as say, the American military in Vietnam or Iraq. 57 Focusing then on "threats" to the State; Israeli politicians have employed the rhetoric of "survival" as a means to justify preemptive combat on more than one occasion. This rhetoric is not without legitimate roots. The pogroms of the eighteenth century and the Holocaust of World War Two are horrifie examples of racialized nationalism at its absolute worst. But the use of these historical threats has gone beyond rhetorical justification for wars with Arab enemies. They have become foundational elements for the most potent vehicle of Israeli socialization: the lOF. ln his essay The Military as a Second Bar Mitzvah, Danny Kaplan revisits the Zionist ideology that created an "ideal Jewish Man" as a response to the perceived passive, effeminate image of the Jewish man

57 See Nagel. pgs.17 -18 on the American military' s sexualized terminology in the first Iraq war.

29 of the Diaspora. 58 This ideal man was constituted by Zionist masculinity as a "masculinity of the body, realized through territorial settlement and self-defense, accomplished through military power".59 The vehicle for the realization of this ideal national man was the Haganah and the lOF. The lOF constructs national bodies through a normative masculinity: "It does so through an organizational culture that encourages ideal assets of soldiery such as physical ability... aggressiveness and heterosexuality".60 Kaplan goes on to argue that because military service is nearly universal in Israel, it can be viewed as a prolonged initiation rite into adulthood, manhood and Israeli culture in general. Because of this, the plurality of politics and cultures that make up Israeli society "are linked through a blinding ethos, the quasi-religious ethos of security".61 Finally, this ethos is sustained at the individuallevel "through a unifying initiation rite of masculinity, performed through ritual". 62 These rituals of masculinity and militarism are informed and produced by a national ideology that is best served through the formation of specifie National Bodies with ail the characteristics described above. The corporatism of the lOF homogenizes a diverse society through a delineated assignment of gender values and norms. The Ideal National Man is codified through the performance of specifie militarized rituals within this narrative of "security". Zionist masculinity has become hegemonic in Israeli society through the military. The construction of the Ideal National Man as reborn Diasporic Jewish Man has lead to a new protagonist in Israel's

58 Danny Kaplan, "The Military as a Second Bar Mitzvah: Combat Service as Initiation to Zionist Masculinity," in Imagined Masculinities: Male Identity and Culture in the Modern Middle East, ed. Mai Ghoussoub and Emma Sinclair-Webb (London: Saqi, 2000). 128 See also Boyarin, Unheroic Conduct: The Rise ofHeterosexuality and the Invention of the Jewish Man. 59 Kaplan, "The Military as a Second Bar Mitzvah: Combat Service as Initiation to Zionist Masculin ity. " 60 Ibid. 127 61 Ibid. 138 62 Ibid.

30 historic narrative. The victorious soldier - never letting Masada fall again - becomes emblematic of Israel's struggle against a mythologized enemy. That enemy continues to aUack the State (and everything it thus stands for despite having its national claim to the stage challenged and written out of Israel's narrative.

Part Il: Palestine and the Palestinians Towards a productive definition of Militancy If Israel is a militarized society, to some extent, so is Palestine. While one arms itself to combat ostensible treats to its existence, the other has claimed that its existence has been denied and in order to reclaim its national subjectivity, it must combat that denial using a variety of means. One such mechanism is through militant nationalism. Let me begin by defining my terms. l'm using the word militant and militancy to describe a set of practices that have become institutionalized within Palestinian Society. These practices have been interpreted by some scholars as being inclusive of nearly ail forms of nationalist engagement with anti-colonial resistance while others believe it to be a word thrown around recklessly to discredit certain practices. 63 1 am going to use it as a term that complements the State-centric term "military/militarized" to refer to technologies of violence - in this case, violent opposition to the State of Israel - without necessarily assigning a value judgement. Conceiving of militancy as an institution, on the other hand, requires a great deal more in terms of explication. Joseph Massad's book Colonial Effecfs details the process by which the law and the military as institutions of the new state of Jordan were at the forefront of "imagining" the nation. Massad, using Michel Foucault's understanding of power and Antonio Gramsci's concept of hegemony, has argued that

63 Both Peteet and Fleischmann, for instance, use the term "militant" to describe most nationalist activities committed by Palestinian women. l'm not convinced that this is a necessarily productive way for qualitative descriptions ofnationalist engagement.

31 state institutions such as the military have repressive and coercive functions as weil as generative, productive ones. The role of the military as a productive site of nationalism in Jordan is echoed across the river in Palestine, not in institutional composition but in its mode of production. It is my contention that in the case of Palestine there is a definite product of this functional "power and hegemony": a specific network of signs that can be labeled "militancy". This "militancy" is found, most notably in collective expressions nationalism - most potently through the vehicle of Performative Nationalism. Returning to Chatterjee's "material" and "spiritual" domains, Palestinian militancy is a material institution that uses modern technological innovations while simultaneously employing the rhetoric of the cultural (spiritual) domain. The question that follows is; how has Militancy been (re)produced as a cultural commodity? As l've already stated: what becomes apparent from the outset is that this network of signs produces a discursive field with distinct characteristics. Militancy is young, not old; heroic, not weak; active, not passive; as action it exists "outside of politics"; and above ail it is the preserve of the "ideal national man". Addressing a number of themes 1 will sketch out how not only militancy as an institution was conceived, but more specifically how the agent of this nationalist movement - the militant - is envisioned.

The Horsemen of al-Aqsa Manara square acts as the downtown hub of the twin cities of Ramallah and el-Bireh. A locus of a half dozen streets, it's a busy hive of traffic and human beings. It's also the center of Ramallah's commercial district with food stalls, clothing stores and open air produce markets. Off the square is also where many of the connecting service taxis and busses are located, from which you can get to nearly everywhere in the West Bank and Jerusalem. High up, about 10 feet off the ground, on the

32 side wall of a building of stalls, two familiar faces look down on passers­ by: Sheikh Ahmed Yassin and Dr. Abdul al-Rantissi. Yassin and Rantissi had both been extra-judicially executed by the Israelis in the spring of 2004 in Gaza, and as two of the more recognizable faces of the Hamas leadership, their images are not uncommon on posters in the Occupied Territories. Nationalist poster art in the Arab-Israeli conflict, while occurring on both sides, remains primarily a Palestinian political vehicle. 64 Graffiti and posters appear on nearly every wall and public space in the West Bank and Gaza. Hamas and Fatah appear written in their corresponding colours, they also often appear in specifically arranged patterns such as in the form of a rifle, giving simple guerrilla writing added context. This particular poster contained the image of Yassin and Rantissi in the bottom right corner and immediately above them was written a message announcing the 18th anniversary of Hamas' militant activities (See Figure 3). The date coincides with the beginning of the first Intifada when Hamas began its armed campaign against the Israeli occupation and not the beginning of its equally recognizable (in Palestine) social services. In the top center appears the green standard bearing the Shahada that doubles as Hamas' flag, and standing beneath it a rowof masked Hamas gunmen. The words that accompany the poster again reinforce the connection between active nationalism and militancy: A hand Participates, builds and plants And a hand Defends, protects, preserves.

At the bottom, in the same airbrushed strokes as the other images, there appears a group of more Hamas gunmen (or maybe the same

64 An exception to this can be found in the Old City of Hebron where posters of Rabbi Meir Kahane (the American founder of the militant Jewish settler movement "Kach") are ubiquitous and where incendiary graffiti such as stars of David or slogans referring to Baruch Goldstein (the perpetrator of a massacre of praying Muslims in the Ibrihimi Mosque in 1994) are sprayed on the do ors of Arab homes and shops by Jewish Settlers.

33 gunmen?) emerging fram the background of the al-Aqsa Mosque, not on foot, or in jeeps, but on horseback (see Figure 3.2). The motif of horse riding defenders of the Holy Place is at once highly symbolic within the narratives of not just the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, but of Islam in Palestine generally. This image of the horsemen of al-Aqsa is an attempt by the artist to evoke specifie nationalist meaning fram a fictional performance. Obviously, there are no Hamas gunmen on horseback guarding the al-Aqsa Mosque complex. In fact, the complex is completely under the contrai of the IDF. Both the artist and the audience are aware of this, but by presenting the raie - the performance - of the dutY of defending the Holy Place and assigning that raie to Hamas, the artist is making a performative claim on behalf of Hamas. Hamas and their masked gunmen are narrated as being men of action. They are defending the Holy Places regardless of who technically possess the physical space - in this they are set-up as being outside of politics. And in a nationalist movement that has yet to realize its goal of creating a state, the concept of "extra-political" action takes on added significance and essentially sets up who is and who is not performing their National duties. While riding horseback on the Haram al-Sharif is a fictionalized form of performative and masculine militant nationalism, there are a significant amount of vehicles for such expression within the recent past in Palestinian history.

Sacred Space in Palestinian Militancy As seen in the image of al-Aqsa in the Hamas anniversary poster, the use of sites deemed to be of national importance is not a strategy employed only by Israelis. Palestinians have also used historie locations as discursive claims towards some immutable collective history: the Holy Sites of the Palestinians are used to incite nationalist concern over

34 their protection. The task of protecting them and, under occupation, avenging their defilement is the sole responsibility of men. Young Palestinian men are posed in positions of action, often with weapons at the ready, in martyrdom posters ail over the West Bank. Inevitably, one of the holy sites of Islam - either the Dome of The Rock, or al-Aqsa - are superimposed behind them as Quranic verses exalt the priee they have paid for not just the defense of these holy places, nor the Palestinian nation, but of the Faith as weil. Even the supposed "secular" militant groups such as Arafat's Fatah group employ these familiar tropes. Yet while these posters may explicitly extrapolate the defense of these holy sites as a task performed at the behest of the entire community of Muslims, the reality is that they are first and foremost intended for a local, Palestinian nationalist audience. The visual rhetoric between the defense of these sites and Islam is a strategie manoeuvre. There is nothing necessarily Islamie about the notion of the defense of religious sites. ln the narrow streets that surround Manger Square in Bethlehem the figure of Daniel Abu Hamama appears on shuttered doors and brick walls (See Figure 4). Like many other posters of Palestinian martyrs he is holding an AK-47. Below him is the image of the Basilica of the Nativity, Christianity's "second holiest site" and above him are written the words: "In the Name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. 1 am He, the hereafter, the truth and the life, whoever believes in me, even if he dies will revive." The Christian Abu Hamama becomes a martyr for a Christian holy site that is at once identified as being both Christian and Palestinian. His performed dutY as an ideal Palestinian National Man is, like the more numerous Muslim Palestinian militants, rhetorically connected to his faith community. In this way, these buildings stand in as a visual representation connecting Palestine with the greater, transnational histories of both Islam and Christianity.

35 Performative Nationalism in Palestine Beyond the stock footage of masked Palestinian men marching, chanting and shooting into the air; daily and extraordinary rituals have been reconceived as vehicles of nationalist performance. From the momentous experiences of the first Intifada, male Palestinian youths have been placed at the vanguard of performative nationalism.

The Stone-Throwers of the First Intifada The Intifada, amongst ail the militant nationalist activities within Palestinian society, provided for the most delineated and transferable set of nationalist meanings amongst the youth of the Occupied Territories. Daoud Kuttab in his Profile of the Stone Throwers, sets up the hierarchy of young, masculinized performative nationalism: "to throw a stone is to be one of the guys; to hit an Israeli car is to become a hero; and to be arrested and not confess is to be a man.,,65 This is undeniably the case as men who were arrested (and not confess of course) and those within Intifada leadership positions who were imprisoned, were assigned leadership roles within the larger community upon their release. These positions were normally reserved for older men in the community but the Intifada and the power of the nationalist performances associated with it, renegotiated the relationships between males of different generations.66 This process of delineating new ways of reaching manhood was simulated within the stone-throwing performance as weil as each "unit" had specifically assigned roles for different age groups. Each member of the unit carried out their assigned roles with a great deal of precision and in this precision lie the roots - the signs - of performance. None of the actors involved wanted to make a mistake that could lead to being caught or in the very least, embarrassment in

65 Daoud Kuttab, "Profile of the Stonethrowers," Journal of Palestinian Studies. 15 66 Peteet, "Male Gender and Rituals of Resistance in the Palestinian Intifada: A Cultural Politics of Violence." 38

36 front of one's peers. The tasks assigned to each age group essentially matched them with the level of difficulty and experience. As they aged, they advanced in stature and were assigned new, more difficult tasks. Kuttab describes the task of the seven to ten age group as those responsible for the rolling out of tires and setting them on fire. The burning tires were used to prevent traffic from moving along a particular street and the smoke was meant to draw the attention of soldiers. The eleven to fourteen age group brought in larger rocks to add to the street barricade and were also the more junior stone-throwers. Using slings and slingshots, they hurled smaller, less damaging rocks at the chosen targets. The more experienced stone throwers - those fifteen to nineteen - were the kuffiyah masked veterans of the Intifada. They were the most sought after of youths and they tended to inflict the most damage. Observers (who could sometimes be women) and leaders were those over the age of nineteen and usually took up places on high ground or in homes. They directed the stone-throwers and warned them of incoming danger. 67 The success of the stone-th rowing team was far from guaranteed and beatings and shootings were common. The ritual abuse itself, though, was a vehicle for renegotiated nationalist performance.

Ritual Abuse Palestinians are not only perpetrators of nationalist violence, but also receive nationalist subjectivity through the reception of violence. Receiving beatings - and not collaborating with the occupier - is a nationalist performance. Julie Peteet argues that ritual performances in the context of political violence and asymmetric power can be reinscribed culturally by the victims into an empowering vehicle that can give them agency and/or a new subjectivity. Her work on male gender

67Kuttab, "Profile of the Stonethrowers." 19

37 :~. raies during the Intifada is an important complement to the discussion of masculinity and the institution of the military. Peteet argues that: Since elaborate, weil defined rites of passage to mark transition fram boyhood to adolescence to manhood are difficult to discern, a loose set of rites marking the route to "manhood" must be accompanied by performative deeds to convince and win public appraval.68

ln the context of the Intifada, because of a rupture in the pre-existing social fabric, "performative deeds" required to assert manhood and win public consensus are altered. These performative deeds become enveloped by the increasing requirement for nationalist action against the occupying power. Through beatings and imprisonment, Pete et argues, Palestinian boys experience rites of passage. 69 Because of the nature of these rites - the fact that they are at the hands of an entity outside of the kin graup - the socialization of Palestinian boys become inserted into the dialectic of colonizer and colonized. In this context of nationalist agency, "ritual mediates between relations of violence and domination" so that the Palestinian boys engaging in these rites of passage "defy any notion of directional unilineality between oppression and resistance"?O While Fanon argued that only thraugh revolutionary violence do the colonized acquire political agency, during the Intifada, the recipients of violence became National Bodies. The scars on their bodies become public records of their commitment to a physical nationalism. Through these acts of engaging with an occupying force, Palestinian youths assert both their manhood and their nationalism.

Speech Acts A final set of practices associated directly with the violence of the colonizer can be labelled "speech acts." Peteet describes the routine

68 Peteet, "Male Gender and Rituals of Resistance in the Palestinian Intifada: A Cultural Politics of Violence." 107 69 Ibid. 114 70 Ibid.

38 occurrence during visits with Palestinian families in refugee camps in the Occupied Territories when an adult would cali forth their children and show the outsider the scars from beatings, rubber bullets and live ammunition. This ritualized "showing" of colonial violence is used to at once cali into question the morality of the occupier and display the incorporation of a body into the Nationalist collective.

Conclusion Zionism's need to redefine what it meant to be a Jewish man was intricately connected with how it discursively treated time and space. Pre-exile Jewish life was memorialized by investing a place like Masada and a group like the Sicarii with positive meaning while simultaneously reinforcing a negative image of the Diaspora. In terms of masculinity, the weak and effeminate Diaspora Jewish Man would need to be replaced with a new Israeli National Man, capable of engaging ail of the activities denied to the European Jew - most importantly the ability to defend the Nation against external others. The most effective vehicle for insuring the hegemony of this national masculinity was through the corporatism of the Israeli Defense Forces. ln terms of Palestine, official communiqués released during the Intifada announce that the challenge to the "Occupier's Machines" will come from the bodies of the Palestinian Man. A "giant body", the Palestinian male will "erect himself against the Occupier and not bow". For the Palestinian Man, a limited set of nationalist expressions are permitted. If they weren't direct physical challenges to the Occupier as found in the stone-throwers of the Intifada, they came through the renegotiation of the meaning of what it meant to receive physical abuse at the hands of the lOF. While these acts were permitted and encouraged of males, even fewer forms were (are) permitted of Palestinian women. While taking significant positions within the resistance, Palestinian women have

39 historically (as is the case in most other patriarchal nationalist movements) been marginalized out of a "gendered space of militancy". ln the next chapter 1 examine the history of Palestinian women's engagement and chart their potential methods of nationalist expression.

40 Chapter 4: Women in Palestinian Nationalism

Part 1: Sexuality and the National Liberation Project: 1917-2001 The Emergence of the Nation's Cultural Project Returning to Chaterjee's work on the "fragments" of national communities, we are provided with some weil founded theories on how gender roles are interpreted by the nationalist elites. In the Nation and its Fragments, women's roles within the national movement are mediated by that specifie discursive project of separating national culture into "material" and "spiritual" realms. The "spiritual" realm then becomes that which is in need of protecting. This marks the development of a collectively hegemonic "national culture".71 ln counter-colonial nationalist movements, the separation and determination of that "spiritual" domain not only produces a culture that can be used as a counter-colonial identity, but also creates a set of practices and customs that are to be protected. In the case of the "women of the nation", the patriarchal nationalist movements maintained the traditional domestic/public dichotomy by inscribing customary gender roles of domesticity with new nationalist meanings. In the Indian case, Chatterjee argues that these nationalists placed women into the "spiritual" realm and assigned them the task of protecting that "natural" culture through her work in the home. This new nationalist patriarchy then linked "women's emancipation" with the nation's Iiberation.72 This rhetorical displacement (or delaying) of feminist ideals allowed for women to be maintained in a position of subordination for as long as the nation had yet to be realized (ostensibly a temporary arrangement). Under the colonial period of the British Mandate, women in Palestine, especially the middle class, began to assert their identity as a

71 Chatterjee, The Nation and lts Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories. 9 This development is certainly not free of debate, nor do es it produce a necessarily stable set of identity markers. It can, however, be said to create a relatively consistent set of "elementary aspects" ofboth a national culture, and a nationalist agenda. 72 Ibid. 130

41 politically active social group. From 1917 to 1948, the British controlled nearly everything about the territory of modern Palestine, and this period has been isolated by some scholars as the formative years of a distinct Palestinian Nationalism. Following the 1967 military disaster of the June "Six-Day" War in which Israel quadrupled its size in less than a week, conquering the West Bank and East Jerusalem from Jordan, the Golan Heights from Syria, and the Gaza Strip from Egypt, Palestinian Nationalism entered what Julie Peteet has labelled the "Resistance Era". Lasting from 1968 to 1982, Palestinian nationalism became a movement lead more by Palestinian exiles than neighbouring Arab leaders. Following the expulsion of the Palestinian leadership from Lebanon in 1982 after an Israeli military invasion of the latter, we see the next major "phase" of Palestinian nationalist agitation occurring in the Occupied Territories. The first Intifada began in the late 1980's and ended in 1993 with the signing of the Oslo peace accords. Each of these three eras of Palestinian Nationalism can be seen to alter and redefine in some ways the roles that Palestinian women are to play in the resistance and the national project.

Towards a Historiography of Palestinian women's activism.

Before examining women's nationalist engagement, 1 should begin by discussing the historiography of scholarship on Palestinian women. Ellen Fleischmann, author of one of the few book-Iength works on Palestinian women's political engagement is highly critical of contemporary historiography on the subject. She argues that Palestinian women's history has been written about solely through the prism of the struggle with Israel. 73 This understandable historiographic preoccupation with the national conflict has lead to a near absence of social, economic

73 Ellen Fleischmann, The Nation and /ts "New" Women: The Palestinian Women's Movement, 1920-1948 (Berkeley, Calif.; London: University ofCalifomia Press, 2003).12

42 and cultural histories from being written - which would naturally include women.74 Scholarship on women in Palestinian history thus tends to deal with two specifie time periods: the "revolutionary era" and the Intifada. While many scholars prioritize the "resistance era" and the Intifada, some important work has been do ne on women during the Mandate period. Most scholarship on women in Mandate period Palestine, on the other hand, has reinscribed women into the author's revisionist historiographies. Fleischmann writes that some are dismissive, or hagiographie, or anachronistic: placing women's activities against the British and Yishuv as being "inchoate popular expressions of anger, fear and protest" or "revolutionary". Others ghettoize organized women's activities as special groups, as appendages to the "national narrative" altogether. 75 Finally, natural divisions of generations have placed an unfortunate amount of guilt upon the earlier (Mandate) generation - the "Naqba generation" - for the colossal "failure" of the Palestinian leadership and the stillbirth of the State. 76

"The Inchoate Popular Expressions of Anger" Amongst both the weil organized Zionists and the Palestinian Arab communities there developed significant social and economic changes during the 1920's and 1930's. The organized Jewish labour union, the Histadrut, became an extremely powerful force within the New Yishuv providing essential social services, while amongst the Arabs a middle class began to form alongside labour unions more

74 For an interesting social and economic history of the Nablus area under the Otto,man's see Beshara Doumani, Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700- 1900 (Berkeley: University of Califomia Press, 1995). 75 Fleischmann.13 76 This is of course an unreasonable conclusion. While "failures" certainly took place, an account must be made for the lack ofurgency and vision to predict the requirement ofa European style active nationalism within one's own land territory in order to counter that of an alien Nationalism.

43 advanced than most found in other Arab States. 77 Yet neither these developments, nor the successive, contradictory conclusions drawn in British issued "commissions" (and "Ietters" and "declarations" etc.) into the growing conflict could deter the events of 1936-1939. Known as the Arab Revoit, general strikes, mass demonstrations, random violence made the three years last years of the 1930's some of the most violent between the Arabs, the British and the Jewish community. It was also during these years that Palestinian women organized themselves into movements to address what they felt were the more pressing issues in their community. Building on charitable women's associations first organized in the 1910's following World War Il women organized themselves against the Balfour Declaration in 1920, participated in riots, and raised funds for the Arab Executive. And by the end of the decade, they had organized themselves into a movement inaugurated in October of 1929 at the "Palestine Arab Women's Congress" where an Arab Women's' Executive Council was formed. Fleischmann points out that while these women placed gender concerns in the foreground of the movement ("elevating the status of women"), their stance vis-à-vis emancipatory politics was ambivalent if not altogether muted. 78 The women themselves were by and large young, educated, middle to upper class Jerusalemites and weil acquainted with the political intricacies of Mandate politics. 79 This, along with their literacy seemed to preclude them fram actively recruiting from the majority peasant population, highlighting their classist sentiments. ln 1933 the Jerusalem Branch staged a "highly symbolic and emotionally charged" demonstration, having a Christian representative

77 Mark A. TessIer, A History of the Israe/i-Palestinian Conjlict, Indiana Series in Arab and Islamic Studies (Bloomington; Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1994).216 78 Ellen Fleischmann, "The Emergence of the Palestinian Women's Movement, 1929-39," Journal ofPalestinian Studies 29, no. 3 (2003). 19 79 A number ofthese women were married or related to Palestinian male activists and politicians. Ibid. 20

44 speaking on the Haram al-Sharif, while a Muslim addressed a crawd in front of the Holy Sepulchre. In Haifa members of the branch there smashed windows and poured wax over the praduce of vegetable merchants not observing the general strike in 1936. In pratests, women would mix with men so as to prevent the British fram dealing with the men violently and the women peacefully. Fleischmann notes: "women's frequent participation in demonstrations signified their willingness to engagement in 'unladylike' behaviour thereby defying cultural norms that prescribed limited public visibility of women.,,80 Because of this, when the British brake up the crawds violently, they were perceived, as the Israelis would be fifty years later, as being especially violent towards the more vulnerable of Palestinian society. The response fram the British recalls Chatterjee as they appealed to the patriarchal nationalists to not only "uphold and enforce traditional gender norms, but also [British] restrictions.,,81 This collusion between the colonizer and the patriarchal nationalist in an attempt to limit nationalist sentiment to the male gender would also resurface fifty years later in the context of the second Intifada.82

Sexualizing the Struggle: The PLO in the 1960'5 and 1970'5 The years labelled by some scholars as "the Resistance Era" places the center of Palestinian nationalist agency outside of the territory of Palestine. It was "characterized by a high level of political and military autonomy and the flourishing of cultural forms focused on an ethos of militancy".83 It was also a period essentially defined by the rhetorical force of the PLO, especially after the Fatah take over in 1969. With the defeat of 1967, Palestinian guerrilla groups realized that no longer could they rely on the neighbouring Arab states to defeat the

80 Ibid. 24 81 Ibid. 27 82 To be diseussed in Part 2 83 Julie Marie Peteet, "leons and Militants: Mothering in the Danger Zone," Signs 23, no. 1 (1997). 109

45 Israelis militarily. With this realization, Yasser Arafat and Fatah seized the leadership of the PLO from Ahmed Shuqayri in February 1969, after 2 years of political manoeuvring. During this period (the early "Resistance Era") the PLO sought to redefine the nationalist struggle and this involved explicitly demarcating National subjectivity. No longer were the neighbouring Arab states, who had generally failed so miserably to defend the Palestinian people, to dictate what the National project would be. Instead, the PLO launched, through a set of documents that would supposedly define the Palestinian people and their plight, an agenda that mirrored, in many ways, the nationalist struggles that were taking place ail over the "Third world". Two such documents are of particular note as they form a sort of "Nationalist Constitution". AI-Mithaq al-Qawmi al-Filastini (the Palestinian Nationalist Charter) and al-Mithaq al-Watani al-Filastini (The Palestinian National Charter) define "Palestinian political goals, Palestinian rights and indeed, Palestinian-ness itself.,,84

The Imagery of Sexual Violence The land as mother image is fairly typical within Palestinian nationalism and the Nationalist Charter perpetuates that same discourse. 85 Joseph Massad deconstructs both the National and Nationalist Charters and comes up with a set of specifie sexualized themes related to "Palestine as mother". First, Palestinians are presented as the children of Palestine, the mother, and from this position Zionism emerges as the usurper of the traditional reproductive life cycles. Second, Zionist conquest of Palestine becomes the "rape/usurpation" of Palestinian land. Third, in this configuration,

84 Joseph Massad, "Conceiving the Masculine: Gender and Palestinian Nationalism," The Middle East Journal 49, no. 3 (1995).470. 85 Palestinian artists such as Sliman Mansour and Abd al-Rahman al-Muzzayin often take the Palestinian woman as visual allegory for Palestine the land. See Dana Bartelt and others, eds., Bath Sides ofPeace (Raleigh: Contemporary Art Museum, 1996). and Ismail Shammout, Art in Palestine, trans. Abdul-Qader Daher (Kuwait: Al-Qabas Press, 1989).

46 Zionism becomes masculinized, and as a perpetrator of this rape, a violent sexual predator. The conquest of Palestine is thus configured as sexual violence. 86 The rape (conquest) by a violent sexual predator (Zionism) of the mother (Palestine) thus is narrated into the history of the Palestinians as an act requiring retributive action (militant nationalism). As a traditionally "conservative" society, which places importance upon sexual propriety, the configuration of Zionism as rape adds an extra weight to the conflict. In this way, nationalist militancy can be inscribed as being normalized in to the discourse of social norms relating to proper kinship relationships. The relationship between a mother and her male kin requires that the former receive protection from the latter, and as the mother (Palestine) has been violated, her children (the Palestinians) must seek retribution. One dynamic related to this is the kinship relations of these characters as they are delineated through official nationalist rhetoric. Chronologically, Palestinians up until 1948 had been considered as those born of residents of the motherland (Palestine). After the "rape" of the mother, citizenship, and generally Palestinianness itself, becomes handed down patrilinearly. "In sum, while the land as mother was responsible for the reproduction of Palestinians until 1947, the rape disqualified her from this role. It is now fathers who reproduce the nation. Territory was replaced by paternity.,,87 Massad ties this change in reproductive descent to the fact that conceptually "since the rape [Palestine] can no longer be relied upon to reproduce legitimate children.,,88 This transference from motherhood to patrilinear descent further reinforces the mantle the male Palestinian must carry as national duty.

86 Massad, "Conceiving the Masculine: Gender and Palestinian Nationalism." 473 87 Ibid. 472 and Peteet, "lcons and Militants: Mothering in the Danger Zone." III 88 Massad, "Conceiving the Masculine: Gender and Palestinian Nationalism." 472

47 National Subjectivity in the Camps This territorial focus that moved from beyond the Occupied Territories located National resistance within the social dynamics of the refugee camps - primarily those in Lebanon and Jordan (although it could be said the refugee camps in the Occupied Territories had similar dynamics, the presence of the Israeli military and the "newness" of the Occupation wouldn't dramatically alter this dynamic until the Intifada). In these camps, new forms of social relationships developed alongside the reimplementation of traditional norms. It was from within these camps that new "cultural forms focused on an ethos of militancy" and where gendered relations acquired new, nationalist meanings. 89 The bombings and massacres that occurred within Lebanon in particular during the 1970's and 1980's Peteet argues, blurred the lines of the traditional public/private dichotomies of space (this would be repeated during the Intifada). As families were required to seek communal shelter, and undamaged homes would serve as temporary living quarters for a host of homeless families, the family as extended yet independent unit, to some extent disintegrated as families were brought together in times of crisis. No longer were explicitly "masculine" and "feminine" spaces so clearly distinguished as wel1. 90 This collapse of spaces however, changed very little in terms of performative acts of national militancy. In fact, the violation of the home - traditionally the "feminine space" - was a further violation of social-sexual ideals at the hands of a national "other" (be it the Israeli, Jordanian or Lebanese State of Militias). "In the context of exile and continued crisis, reproductive capabilities were increasingly connected to larger communal political concerns by an official discourse that cast mothers as repositories of a nationalist reproductive potential and as sacrificial

89 Peteet, "Ieons and Militants: Mothering in the Danger Zone.". 109 90 Ibid. 108

48 icons.,,91 ln response, however, women themselves often renegotiated the meanings involved in "motherhood", to assert nationalist agency. One way of doing this was to openly assert that the home be made a nationalist front not through the acts of violence of the enemy, but through women's agency. Ouring the Lebanese civil war (1975-1991) women conceived of the homes as being fortresses from which to protect and shelter their (and others) children, whom they considered current or future national protagonists. Ouring crises, women could be mobilized quickly to provide "cooking and nursing care" and while the camps were under siege, it fell to the women to care for and search out supplies for the more vulnerable (the elderly and young children).92 ln these camps supposedly "traditional roles for women were configured as being nationalist activities. This configuration would repeat itself slightly differently when, during the Intifada, women would have to engage the Israeli military in a much more direct and intimate way. The Intifada marked a shift in women nationalist engagement not in terms of militancy but merely in form.

The Intifada On the evening of Oecember 8th 1987, and lOF tank transport vehicle crashed into a line of parked cars killing four men from the Jabalya refugee camp, returning to Gaza after a day of work in Israel. The funerals that night for three of the men quickly turned into angry demonstrations against the Israeli occupation. What was reportedly an "accident" proved to be the catalyst for the first Intifada.93 Because of the relocation of the center of nationalist agency from the exile communities in regional Arab countries to the Occupied Territories, a number of changes occurred during the Intifada, both within the discourse of nationalism, and Palestinian society as a whole.

91 Ibid. III 92 Ibid. ll3 93 See TessIer.

49 Julie Peteet has argued in Male Gender and Rituals of Resistance in the Palestinian "Intifada": A Cultural Politics of Violence that "ritual performances in the context of political violence and asymmetric power can be reinscribed culturally by the victims into an empowering vehicle that can give them agency and/or a new subjectivity.,,94 This new-found empowered subjectivity has lead to significant changes in social relationships in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Among them: altered "traditional" relationships between generations, new modalities of class differentiation, and newly emergent forms of hegemonic sexuality. Emerging from the daily, violent encounters between Palestinian youths and the Israeli military were new forms of ritualized customs. Public beatings and bone-breaking allowed younger men to be placed at the vanguard of a performative nationalism. Peteet argues that societies under occupation took the public beatings and made them tests of an emerging masculinity. Turning the intended punitive, humiliating meaning on its head, women too had roles to play within these acts: "Women experience the phenomenon of beatings from a multiplicity of subject positions.,,95 Women were tasked with interjecting into violent confrontations and shaming the abuser with mockery and taunts about the morality of heavily armed soldiers inflicting such violence on stone­ throwing youths. Women, however were rarely themselves the targets of such violence. Instead, the Israeli military sought out young, male bodies upon which they could exercise their colonial power. The actual number of women beaten, arrested or detained is relatively minor in comparison with the males in these communities. This, however, doesn't accurately reflect their active participation in nationalist struggles, but it does indicate the level of their own "militancy" in combating the Occupation.

94 Peteet, "Male Gender and Rituals of Resistance in the Palestinian Intifada: A Cultural Politics of Violence." 31 95 Ibid. 44

50 Underground Communiqués Massad notes that in the official communiqués of the UNLU, standardized tropes about how women should be seen emerge. Women are the "soil" ("Manabit") or "nursery" from which the Palestinian people grow. 96 He notes: "While men actively create glory, respect and dignity, women are merely the soil on which these attributes, along with manhood, grow." 97 The productive capacities inherent in these soil metaphors extend back into the traditional representation of women as reproductive agents of the Nation. Motherhood returns to play an important rhetorical role in relegating female agency. The Intifada is set up as a pregnancy (ostensibly to give birth to Statehood) that Israel is trying to "abort". Memorializing the "miscarriages" caused by the "poison gas and tear gas grenades" further reinforces the images of pregnancy and violence. Finally, the standard role returns in these communiqués as the "mothers of martyrs" are exalted as exemplars of a nationalist femininity.98 A leaflet from "Palestinian Women of the Occupied Territories" distributed in March of 1988 urges the women of the Occupied Territories to "consider the wounded and the imprisoned her own children" and thus continue to challenge (through these rituals mentioned above) Israeli soldiers and settlers. 99 A later communiqué urges women to rejoice at the death of their children (or ostensibly ail males) and Peteet argues that "these kinds of statements reiterate national expectations of maternai sacrifice and the formation of the nation." 100 Undoubtedly, official communiqués during the Intifada reassert women's national agency as being marginal and outside of accepted norms for male nationalist activities.

96 Massad, "Conceiving the Masculine: Gender and Palestinian Nationalism.". 474 97 Ibid .. 98 Ibid .. 99 Peteet, "!cons and Militants: Mothering in the Danger Zone." 120 100 Ibid. 121

51 So while males were asked to engage in (internai) socially disruptive behaviours for the sake of nationalist agendas, women were assigned actual tasks that again reinforced their marginality when it comes to physical engagement with the colonial authority, tasks which themselves would not disrupt existing social norms and in many cases reinforce them. 101 Peteet writes that generally speaking "mothers acted as a collective moral representation of a community testifying to the abusive nature of the occupation".102 Their immediate engagement with the Israelis was supplemented with certain speech acts such as describing (and showing the physical marks) of abuse found on the bodies of children and young men. This was done, in the same vein as active intervention, to test ify to the power (technological) asymmetry of the Intifada.

Gendered Space of Militancy Women's nationalist activities have been represented as marginal or as "appendages to the national narrative". This is unfortunate as we've seen that official nationalist rhetoric has placed patriarchal values and restraints on women's militancy. In fact, both in rhetoric and in action, women were either unwilling to, were prevented from, or were highly critical and thus dismissive of participation in militant nationalism. The mandate period saw the increasing violent confrontations between the British colonial administrative force, Jewish settlers, and the Palestinian population. The Resistance Era was characterized by an increased Palestinian nationalist leadership that took the form of insurgent guerrilla groups similar to other anti-colonial nationalist movements in the "third world." The Intifada was a daily engagement of diffused and small scale violence against the Israelis. In each of these

\01 The internai, socially disruptive behavior that l am discussing is outlined in Peteet's Male Gender article and includes the altered generational relationships that occur when a young man retums from prison and his social status as a Nationalist begins to outweigh that ofhis traditionally respected father. 102 Peteet, "Icons and Militants: Mothering in the Danger Zone." 122

52 three diverse political climates what emerges is not a democratic and inclusive response to colonial power but a concerted masculine attempt at what Fanon called "revolutionary violence". 103 While both men and women organized theirs and the nation's struggle, it was up to men to violently confront what was/is colonial violence. This "gendered space of militancy" remained remarkably consistent through three extremely different contexts of Palestinian Nationalism. This accounts for young men and women who are mothers or of an age where motherhood is stressed. What of young, able bodied women imbued with nationalist sentiments physically capable of exercising militant activities? The next Part of Chapter 4 explores the phenomenon of women engaged in the militant activities - most notably suicide bombing - among the most sensational of tactics employed in contemporary militant Palestinian nationalism during the al-Aqsa Intifada.

Part 2: Female Suicide Bombers On the morning of January 2yth 2002, in front of an audience of a thousand, Yasser Arafat addressed the Palestinian people from al­ Muqatta', his compound in Ramallah. In the speech, he stressed the role of women in the Intifada. 104 "Women and men are equal" he proclaimed with his hands raised above his head and his fingers forked in a sign of victory "you are my army of roses that will crush Israeli tanks." 105 "Shahidas (sic) ail the way to Jerusalem,,106 he exclaimed. Arafat may or

103 Frantz Fanon and Richard Philcox, The Wretched of the Earth / Frantz Fanon; Translated from the French by Richard Phi/cox; with Commentary by Jean-Paul Sartre and Homi K. Bhabha, Damnés De La Terre. English (New York: Grove Press, 2004). 93 104 Intifada - "The shrugging off' - is the "spontaneous" local Palestinian uprising that first occurred in the Occupied Territories in 1987. For an introduction to this and the Arab-lsraeli­ Palestinian conflict as a whole, see William L. Cleveland, A History of the Modern Middle East (Boulder, Colo.; Oxford: Westview Press, 2000). 105 Barbara Victor, Army ofRoses: Inside the World ofPalestinian Women Suicide Bombers (New York: Rodale, 2003). 19 106 "Shahida" is the feminized (and anglicized) version of the Arabic word "shahid", commonly defmed as "martyr". It is the active participle for a common word and feminized through the

53 may not have also known that later that day, Wafa Idris would detonate a backpack full of explosives in the doorway of a Jaffa road shoe store in central Jerusalem to become the first temale Palestinian suicide bomber. From Sri Lanka to Chechnya to Israel, the phenomenon of women Suicide Bombers has spread significantly since the 1990's. "Dhanu," the now infamous assassin of former Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, blew herself and Gandhi apart as she draped a garland of flowers around his neck during one of his campaign stops in March of 1991.107 Her suicide was not the first female suicide bombing but is seen as the most sensational and is often credited as inspiration to those who followed in both the Tamil conflict and others. In turn, since January 2002 women's participation in suicide bombings in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has become a relatively minor - yet nonetheless significant phenomenon. Christoph Reuter in his book My Lite is a Weapon estimates that close to sixt Y percent of LnE (Tamil) "suicide commandos" are women. 108 Female participation in suicide missions is also extremely high in the Chechen conflict. There, women have been predominant in the large and sensational attacks in Russia proper including the near simultaneous downing of two Russian jetliners and the Beslan school attack in the summer of 2004, and the Moscow theatre siege in October of 2002. So while women take an ever increasing role in suicide attacks in other arenas, Palestinian female suicide bombers remain a relative small phenomenon.

The use of women as suicide bombers in the AI-Aqsa Intifada 109 has come to surprise a number of analysts in both the Middle East and

cornmon addition of the feminine marker, the taa marbutta. Barbara Victor contentiously credits as the tirst instance of the word's use, to Arafat's speech. But this seems highly unlikely. In Victor. 19 107 Christoph Reuter, My Life Is a Weapon: A Modern History ofSuicide Bombing (Princeton NJ: Oxford University Press, 2004). 155 108 Ibid. 160 109 The "al-Aqsa Intifada" refers to the second Intifada beginning in September 2000.

54 "The West.,,110 Since Yasser Arafat's cali for an "army of roses" was followed on the same day by Wafa Idris' suicide bomb attack, women have taken what many see as the last symbolic step towards female participation in Palestinian paramilitary activities. But the way these women are presented and appropriated by the numerous "sides" of the conflict in fact testifies to the ongoing use of women as symbols a contest over concepts of "modernity" and "tradition." ln countries throughout the Middle East and elsewhere, outward trappings of gender roles, from the use of the veil to women's involvement in labour outside the home has been the subject of conflict between different segments of society, heightened since the beginning of Colonialism. During the colonial administration of various states in the Middle East, for instance, nationalists, religious-nationalists and colonial powers have he Id various and often conflicting ideas about women in society. The consistent theme is the concept of a static binary between "modernity" and "tradition" where the latter represents some sort of authentic cultural form and the former as an outside innovation, discredited as insidious. Women thus become the primary vehicle for this discourse - at times without being involved in how this discourse about their position is a rticu lated. 111 While not the first challenge to patriarchy, women here are no longer the inactive participants in this discourse, in fact the women who volunteer for these suicide missions often engage in a diverse interaction with these symbols. Putting women's engagement into multiple contexts, 1 will argue however that contrary to particular beliefs,

110 "The West" here is defined in the pattern set out in Edward Said's Orientalism as an ontologically distinct body set up in binary opposition to "The East" (or "The Orient"). 1 will later address this distinction and Said's writing in relation to how "the West" conceives of the "the East" when it cornes to the topie of violence and representation. So while 1 will stop surrounding "The West" and "The East" (or Middle East for that matter) with quotation marks, it should remain that 1 use the terms as meaning something very specific (as representative of a specific set of discourses and discursive relationships), yet not entirely homogenous. 1 will try to explain my utilitarian essentalising in each instance in a footnote. J J J As seen, women have taken significant roles in the construction of nationalist discourse.

55 women's engagement in suicide terrorism is not always a challenge, but often a reinforcement of a "gendered space of militancy" within Palestinian society.112 Let me first define what 1 mean by a "gendered space of militancy." 1 will argue that militant Palestinian nationalism (Iike most other nationalisms) has been conceived of as an exclusive domain for males in both rhetoric and practice. As discussed in the previous chapter, the rhetoric of official doctrine of Palestinian nationalism, as Joseph Massad has argued, has been conceived of as solely a masculine enterprise through the use of gender specific language and imagery.113 Practically speaking, men have historically he Id a near monopoly on paramilitary operations in the Palestinian context. 114 The confluence of these two realities has created this gendered space of militancy in which militant acts are necessarily coterminous with one gender. ln turn, women now participate in suicide bombing missions in Israel for a number of reasons. The response, however, is also framed often within the context of the gendered space of militancy. This section intends to highlight the historical actors involved in the construction of the "female suicide bomber/martyr". Men have dominated this gendered space and now construct the framework and dominate the discourse about the appropriateness of female engagement in suicide bombings. The debate about women's involvement in female suicide bombings is primarily done by males.

112 Let me explain here what 1 challenging - what these "particular beliefs" are: the argument could be made that women's participation in suicide bomb attacks somehow represents a feminist nationalism that manifests itself in the ultimate levelling ofthe gender imbalance in militant activities. Like the challenge to combat roles in western armies that exclude women, women as suicide bombers cou Id be claimed to be the vanguard of a militant, Woman Nationalist - 1 am going to challenge this claim. 113 Massad, "Conceiving the Masculine: Gender and Palestinian Nationalism." 114 As described in Chapter 4, women have been engaged in nationalist activities in the Palestinian context since the first incarnations ofNationalist confrontations with the British and Jewish militants in the 1930's. For a description ofwomen's involvement in the national movement - including their involvement in violent street protests, see Fleischmann, "The Emergence of the Palestinian Women's Movement, 1929-39."

56 On the other hand, both Israel and the mainstream media in the West play a significant role in this contest over specific gender roles. Media in the West often frames how those outside of the region view the conflict and its corresponding social effects. But while voicing a "collective" concern for the position of women in Islamic/Middle Eastern societies, they have paradoxically placed women in a subordinate position through the use of a series of specific, de-Iegitimizing images in relation to female militancy. Using a similar, yet more direct rhetoric, the official Israeli response to such attacks has usually been to discredit the agency of the bomber, and in the case of female bombers, to relate their decision to their sexuality. The response of the media and the Israeli State to these bombings present women as transgressing the boundaries of this gendered space of militancy. Ali parties are involved in the construction of a gendered militancy and in fact the challenge to the concept of an exclusive male space of militancy is only marginally voiced by those female suicide bombers - and in a very narrow form. In fact, rather than be manifested as a challenge to it, these women at times reinforce this concept of delineated gendered "place" in the nationalist movement. This section intends to address this concept by considering each group of participants: The women themselves, the militant groups, the "western media" that reports and informs popular perceptions of these acts, and the state to which these violent acts are aimed. 115

The "New Women": Paradox and Participation Undoubtedly some in Palestinian society, including and especially women, see female suicide bombers as a manifestations of a final apparent equality between men and women in the nationalist struggle.

Ils Again, 1 am essentialising what are in truth, heterogeneous categories for the sake of discourse analysis. When 1 write of an Israeli response 1 am referring to official State sources; when 1 refer to a "western media" 1 will be referring to the most popular, mainstream news sources; when 1 discuss militant groups 1 will outline the specifie ideologies ofthese groups. AU ofthese categories, at sorne point in the chapter, will be either be addressed or unpacked.

57 Some successful and unsuccessful suicide bombers have cited Wafa Idris as an inspiration for their acts. In a place where the celebrity of martyrdom plays some sort of role (it is certainly debatable as to how much Palestinian society is saturated with this "celebrity of martyrdom") in the collective conscience - the arrivai of female martyrs is significant; liUle girls, however widespread or perverse the phenomenon is, can look up to a female martyr from their community. However, like their predecessors, women involved in militant movements have expressed ambiguity towards their own participation. 116 ln fact, female suicide bombers both challenge and reinforce ideas and hierarchies of patriarchy. Before suicide bombing operations, Palestinian militant groups often film and distribute what are known alternately as martyrdom or final testament videos. In these videos, the suicide bomber is pictured, often in front of a backdrop of their choosing, usually the al-Aqsa Mosque, reading a statement explaining their forthcoming actions. While these videos are made for a number of reasons - including as currency in this "celebrity of martyrdom" and conversely as social collateral to ensure that the bomber doesn't decide to back out - these videos are primarily propaganda vehicles. Because of this, the words read by the bomber carry important communal weight. While themes and scripts are often recycled, from verses of the Qur'an to oaths of loyalty to militant leaders, the message from women suicide bombers often include allusions to the leadership of neighbouring Arab states. According to Victor; "In their final videos the main focus of the women's words is their sense of nationalistic pride and the abandonment of Palestinians by their Arab brethren.,,117 This sense of abandonment was expressed by Ayat al-Akhras before she detonated a bomb in a Jerusalem grocery store. Identifying

116 See Fleischmann, The Nation and 1ts "New" Women: The Palestinian Women's Movement, 1920-/948. 117 Victor. 192

58 herself as a member of the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, she affirms her intention to die in an act of martyrdom and, further, she assails Arab leaders for "doing nothing while Palestinians women are fighting to end Israeli occupation."118 She continued: "1 am going to fight instead of the sleeping Arab armies who are watching Palestinian girls fighting alone.,,119 This cali to the Arab leaders for "doing nothing" to end the occupation is telling for some specifie reasons. First, Arab leaders are ail males. This is a challenge to a group of powerful men who, in years past, had routinely gone to war with the Israelis practically every decade since Israel came into being. This is a challenge to those men voiced not by the wealthy of Palestinian society, but by the poorest. It is a challenge to the most powerful Arab men in the region voiced not by powerful Palestinian men, but by the least powerful- young women who became powerful only in death. They are implying that the Palestinians have been pushed into the situation where those in society who would normally receive male protection and support have become the ones to stand up to the enemy. Second, by implying that the removal of the Israelis should be the responsibility of these men, the female suicide bombers are reaffirming the gendered "space" of militancy. They are implying that in normal circumstances (normal modes of conflict supposedly) men are the ones

118 Ibid. 209 119 Mia Bloom, Dying ta Kil!: The Allure afSuicide Terrar (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005). 145 Blooms book, along with Robert Pape's Dying ta Win are among the first "academic" books to be published solely on the subject of suicide bombing as a strategic tool of militant organizations. Both Bloom and Pape argue that suicide bombings are employed by militant organizations for a variety ofreasons. Pape argues that we see a rise in suicide terrorism against foreign occupation by democratic states because democracics have a low tolerance for the loss ofhuman life. Re argues that we see suicide bombing primarily because militant groups who use the tactic have decided that "it works." Bloom also argues that the use of suicide bombing is a rational choice/strategic decision on the part of militant groups. Though both can be highly problematic (ifnot completely mistaken) they both offer sorne insight into the specifies of suicide bombing despite the 10ss ofhistorical context (ie. Bloom would have benefited from Ellen Fleischmann's work on women nationalists during the mandate years). See Robert Anthony Pape, Dying ta Win: The Strategie Lagic afSuicide Terrarism (New York: Random Rouse, 2005).

59 to conduct militant operations. The situation has become so desperate because of the inaction or impotency of these Arab leaders that women must become the soldiers in the nationalist struggle. While women's involvement in suicide bombings is a tangibly symbolic step towards full equality in militant operations, through their own rhetoric they highlight the unusual predicament that necessitated their actions and undermine its emancipatory effects. By explicitly referring to the inability (or unwillingness) of neighbouring Arab nations to remove the Zionist presence in the Middle East, they challenged "Arab masculinity." While simultaneously challenging Arab men by implying military impotence, they reinforce patriarchal structures by implying that their participation in martyrdom operations contradicts the natural "space of militancy" normally reserved for males.

The Militant Movements: Using Women as Symbols Joseph Massad argues in "Conceiving the Masculine" that Palestinian nationalism has been rhetorically conceived of as a place of male agency: "The respective responsibilities of men and women to the nation emerged as epistemic corner stones of nation-building.,,120 While Massad was primarily addressing the early evolution and development of Palestinian nationalism, manifested in the charters of the PLO, his conclusions can be extrapolated further to include more recent developments in this arena. Thus, struggling against the Israeli occupiers and colonizers is not only an affirmation of Palestinian nationalist agency, it is also a masculinizing act enabling the concrete pairing of nationalist agency and masculinity (the two being always already paired conceptually) and their logical inseparability within the discourse of nationalism. Resisting occupation therefore can be used to stage masculine acts as it performs nationalist ones. Through this national anti-colonial resistance, a new figuration of masculine

120 Massad, "Conceiving the Masculine: Gender and Palestinian Nationalism." 467

60 bodies is mapped out on the terrain of the national struggle, one that becomes the model for Palestinian nationalist agency itself. 121

The 1980's saw a significant development in Palestinian nationalist politics with the advent of the Intifada. The standard bearer of nationalist aspirations to that point had been the institutionalized (and exiled) PLO. The Intifada itself, directed partly through leaflets printed by a local, underground outfit called the Unified National Leadership of the Uprising (UNLU), proved to be the catalyst for the development of local nationalist organizations. While local Fatah and PFLP members formed the UNLU and were instrumental in the organization of the uprising, the Intifada helped propel newer, "Islamic", organizations to prominence. The first, Jihad Islamyy (Islamic Jihad) was formed sometime between 1985 and 1986 by Palestinians recruited and organized in Israeli prisons and remained a small outfit of several dozen members in its pre-Intifada days. 122 Harakat al-Muqwama al-Islamiyya (the Islamic Resistance Movement) known as Hamas emerged in January 1988 officially describing itself as a wing of the Ikhwan al-Muslammy al-Palestinyy (Muslim Brotherhood of Palestine). Together, Islamic Jihad and Hamas form what can be seen as the religious-nationalist bloc of Palestinian 123 militant organizations and 1 will treat them here as such. As opposed to these to groups, which 1 have hesitantly labelled "Religious Nationalists", stood the "Secular Nationalist" of both the Institutional PLO

121 Ibid. 453 122Tessler. 693. Palestinian lslamic Jihad is thought by sorne to remain a relatively small and arguably elitist organization within Palestinian society and that, unlike Hamas, does not maintain a network of social service outfits. See also Hass, Drinking the Sea at Gaza. 78-79 123 Not to be too reductive: there is in fact a rainbow of ideologies involved in these paramilitary groups. For instance, Palestinian Islamic Jihad is thought to have connections with the Shi'a paramilitary wing of the Lebanese group Hezbollah while Hamas has historically been linked to Sunni Muslim Brotherhood groups in Egypt. While both religious, they are significantly different ideologically. In the 1960's the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) was linked to Marxist groups in Europe and Japan and thus distinct from other "Marxist" or "secular" groups such as the PLO and Tanzim. Yasser Arafat, as he ad ofthe PLO and PA, cynics argue used the rhetoric of secularism and religion when most strategically advantageous. Many Palestinian Muslims (or Christians for that matter) may be deeply religious and devout, yet not subscribe to the ideology of say Hamas, and instead be a member of Fatah, or remain outside of any such nationalist group ail together. See Cleveland for a history of Palestinian militancy in the context of Middle Eastern politics.

61 and Fatah under Yasser Arafat, and the "Ieftists" of the PFLP, DFLP and the Palestinian Communist Party.

"Secular Nationalists" Now, because of the transition of PLO leaders into positions of power within the Palestinian Authority, Fatah's militant activities are primarily carried out by what has been labelled a "splinter groups" or "offshoot"; the al-Aqsa Martyr's Brigade, which has risen to such prominence since the second, "al-Aqsa," Intifada. The al-Aqsa Martyr's Brigade (AMB) has been at the forefront in the use of women as suicide bombers. Of the seven female suicide bomb attacks (as of June 2004) four were carried out by AMB, one was jointly executed by AMB and Hamas and two were Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ).124 ln fact, the mobilization of women by the AMB may have been a more strategie political move than a push towards equality. Dr. Boaz Ganor, the director of the 'International Policy Institute for Counterterrorism' in Israel, claims that the use of women was a strategie move to displace the popularity of Hamas and PIJ: When the al-Aqsa Brigade saw that Hamas was taking the lead in the Intifada and threatening their status on the street by a spate of suicide bombings, they adopted the suicide strategy that the Islamists could not, according to the Koran, which was women and young girls. 125

Thus, the use of female bombers may have marked a tactical shift by the AMB in an attempt elevate their prestige and popularity "on the street.,,126 Again, we see familiar historical patterns. Now, women have become a symbol in a battle not between nationalist and colonial powers, but within the nationalist movements. The use of women as suicide bombers symbolically, in an attempt to displace the popularity of

124 Debra D. Zedalis, Female Suicide Bombers (United States Army War College, 2004). 3 125 Victor. 95 126 Ibid. This is part of a process described by Bloom in the context of Palestinian militancy as "out-bidding". See Chapter 2 of Bloom.

62 one faction by another, doesn't facilitate gender equity, it diminishes it. Their involvement is not framed as an inclusive strategy, but a symbolic one.

"Religious Nationalists" During the first Intifada, Islamist movements in Gaza began to draw substantial public support. With a broad foundation of charitable societies that supported clinics, mosques and both secular and religious schools, Hamas attracted supporters to their distinctly religious form of nationalism. 127 Hamas provided services to the population beyond what the Unified National Leadership and the PLO could from their base in Tunis. 128 Dominated by young, university educated individuals from the refugee camps of Gaza, Hamas framed the conflict with Israel in terms of "Islam": ln its 1988 charter, Hamas refers to itself as a Palestinian resistance movement that takes "Islam as a way of life." 129 The paramilitary wing of Hamas, known as the Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigade (named for a Syrian cleric who organized armed resistance to the British in Haifa during the 1920s), has been conducting suicide bombings against the Israeli soldiers since the spring of 1989.130 Hamas along with the smaller Palestinian Islamic Jihad, regularly invest religion into their policies. With suicide bombings this becomes especially the case as rulings from clerics are published navigating the nuanced theological arguments between suicide and martyrdom. 131 But when it comes to women's involvement, the Hamas leadership was fairly straightforward after Wafa Idris carried out her suicide bombing in the name of the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade. Dr. Abdul Aziz al-Rantisi, the

127 Cleveland, A History of the Modern Middle East. 460 128 Ibid. 129 Ibid. 461 130 Reuter, My Life Is a Weapon: A Modern History ofSuicide Bombing. 99 13l For a discussion of the "fatwas" on suicide bombings (both male and female) see Reuter. Chapter 5

63 former (he was executed by the Israelis in April of 2004) head of Hamas, says unequivocally: ln the Koran, there is room too for women to share in the struggle, and we understood that when our land fell under occupation and enemies invaded Islamic land. Women and men should share in the struggle to defend our land. 132

The "spiritual founder" of Hamas, the wheelchair bound Sheik Ahmad Yassin (he too was executed by the Israelis, in March 2004) voiced the sa me enthusiasm for women's involvement in militant actions: Once women were squeamish about seeing blood or committing acts of martyrdom. Now they are willing to die for the sake of our cause. For me, it is a good sign that women are beginning to take up the fight alongside our men. 133

Yet Hamas was unwilling to recruit female martyrs from among its ranks. It was not until the al-Aqsa Martyr's Brigade - the more "secular" of the militant movements - began achieving multiple "successful" attacks using women. While the first four female suicide bombers struck under the banner of the AMB, Reem al-Raiyshi's Hamas sponsored attack in January 2004 would come more than two years after Wafa Idris. 134 The delay may imply unwillingness on the part of Hamas and PIJ (who have had the most "success" in the past with suicide bombings) to use women in their "martyrdom operations" and further put women's involvement into a political contest between militant groups. It may also be the unwillingness of some in the male dominated groups to cede their reserved "space" of militancy to women - regardless of what they may profess.

132 Victor. 113 133 Ibid. III 134 Zedalis.3

64 Knowledge and Framing: the West and the Paradox and Power of Language The mainstream media in North America and Europe in many ways now frames how "the West" views the Arab-Israeli conflict. 135 By replicating specifie texts and images these media sources have facilitated a specifie discourse surrounding issues in the Middle East. This 'framing' is but the latest in an asymmetrical process of cultural exchange between "The Orient" and "The West" that has been going on for centuries. Edward Said's Orientalism has traced how knowledge in "the West" has created a distinct power imbalance towards "the Orient". Knowledge means rising above immediacy, beyond the self, into the foreign and distant. The object of such knowledge is inherently vulnerable to scrutiny; this object is a "fact" which, if it develops, changes, or otherwise transforms itself in a way that civilizations frequently do, nevertheless is fundamentally, even ontologically stable. To have such knowledge of such a thing is to dominate it, to have authority over it. And authority here means for "us" to deny autonomy to "if' - the Oriental country - since we know it and it exists, in a sense, as we know it. 136

Knowledge, manifested in the principal source for "western" communal knowledge, the media, thus becomes a central component of this asymmetrical exchange. The argument in this section is less about how this knowledge is collected or disseminated, but how the language of the discourse on women in the Middle East is paradoxically framed.

135 Here, 1 am referring primarily to news sources such as the Associated Press (AP) and Agence France Press (AFP) which report, contribute and pro duce news stories that are used worldwide by local and national media sources. AP and AFP are the two oldest news agencies in the world, operating since the 1840's and AP is the largest supplier of news globally. Thus, news stories in most major markets use these news agencies for most oftheir overseas reports. While not making this a homogenous discourse, the significance ofthese sources in framing how the consumers of media in the West see the rest of the world cannot be overlooked. 136 Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1994).32 Take, for instance, my recent trip to the West Bank: when telling others ofmy plans 1 was routinely met with worried looks and advice not to ride Israeli public buses - a response to the images of the late 90's of bombed out shells of buses. The instinctive response of my family and friends to the dangers of my trip was that 1 am most threatened by Palestinian Terror and not the IDF even though, according to Amnesty International, 1 am 7 times more likely to die from an IDF bullet than a Hamas or AMB suicide attack. This ignorance is born directly out of media exposure to Palestinian terror attacks and its neglect oflsraeli violence.

65 By vOlclng liberal values, mainstream media often calls for greater individual freedoms and particularly the emancipation of women in Middle Eastern countries. Paradoxically, this cali for "emancipation" is narrowly framed within boundaries of accepted gender roles. While the outward trappings of patriarchy such as the veil are used as symbols of a society's "backwardness," cross-cultural gender roles - su ch as, say women's involvement in the executive branches of government - are rarely challenged. One example of this is how female militants have been "conceived of" in this discourse. Edward Said criticized Orientalists for conceiving of the Oriental in a specific set of images (despotic, licentious, fanatical, irrational, terrorist, etc.).137 The same act of conceiving has taken place - in a far more insidiously paradoxical fashion when applied to women as objects of this gaze. For instance, French colonialists in Aigeria conceived of women as prostitutes; the British conceived of women in Egypt as cloistered victims of Arab patriarchy.138 Both of these images were done so to construct a colonial system that alternately kept the Aigerian woman in a position of sexual servitude (and native men emasculated) and the Egyptian woman as symbolic justification for a civilizing mission. Now, these same systems of power through representation continue in western discourse on the position of women in Islamic and Middle Eastern societies. The media as repository of collective imagery - Saidian knowledge - in "the west," as it pertains to women in "the Orient," conceives of these women again as victims of patriarchy. While there is no doubt that such a patriarchy exists, the question is whether the patriarchal power structure has become so ail consuming in these societies that women's agency has been completely abrogated? Or has

137 Ibid. 286 138 See chapter 3 of Mamia Lazreg, The Eloquence ofSilence (New York: Routledge, 1994). and chapter Il of Leila Ahmed, Women and Gender in Islam: Historical Roots of a Modern Debate (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992).

66 this abrogation been facilitated by external power structures such as a neo-coloniallsrael or a proto-colonial "West."

Women Suicide Bombers in Orientalist and Gendered Discourse

While the image of the Middle Eastern/Arab/lslamic Woman 139 is that of veiled victim of an ail powerful patriarchy, their agency towards auto-emancipation has limits. One such limit involves the transgression into a clearly defined boundary around the gendered space of militancy. Towards maintaining these boundaries, reporting on female suicide bombings uses the same strategy that Said describes in Orientalism. 140 Using common images, the female suicide bomber is posthumously placed into distinct categories of "womanhood." These images are inevitably constructed around her sexuality and have multiple purposes. First, the inclusion of the bombers sexuality is manifested through different tropes. They produce a set of uniform patriarchal language and symbols: motherhood, domesticity, virginity, infertility etc. Their marital status is one of the usual topics. In one of the first reports on Wafa Idris after her suicide bombing in Jerusalem, The Associated Press reported that: [Idris'] marriage soured when it emerged that she could not bear children. Her husband divorced her after eight years, and she moved back in with her mother and other relatives in a cramped Amari home made of concrete blocks. 141

The fact that Idris had worked as a Red Crescent worker treating the Palestinians wounded by Israelis, or the fact that she had been shot three times with Israeli rubber bullets while doing this work is overshadowed by her "womanhood." Her divorce and infertility are presented as principal causes of her violent attack.

139 These images are often presented as interchangeable. The differences between and among Arabs, Muslims, and the Middle East is often never addressed. 140 The important point here is that the strategy is similar: the tropes, be they Orientalist or simply gendered, are used strategically. 141 Associated Press Newswire, 30 January 2003

67 Motherhood, on the other hand, is another usual image. The first news reports that followed the suicide bombing by Reem al-Rayishi, each presented along with her name, the fact that she was a mother (fatherhood among male suicide bombers is rarely reported). The opening line of the New York Daily News read: "A Palestinian mother with two toddlers chose murder over motherhood.,,142 The headline of the November 13th issue of Australia's national daily newspaper The Australian read "Mother, Murderer, Martyr,"143 summing up the imagery presenting al-Raiyshi's womanhood and her decision to become a suicide bomber - and inextricably linking the two. As if women, because of their reproductive capabilities, are incapable of wanting to take part in such violent acts. So while al-Raiyshi was an unfit mother, Barbra Victor in her dubious book on the subject, titled Army af Rases, presents Idris as a woman depressed over the collapse of her marriage and/or her infertility, suggesting that these women carry underlying motivations that supersede their religiosity or nationalism. That these women are incapable of expressing the sa me intangible connection to political motivations, such as nationalism, denies their agency in choosing to become suicide bombers. Victor and others like her go so far as to suggest that these women rarely choose to become bombers in the first place. They often argue that these women are forced, brainwashed, or manipulated into becoming suicide bombers. But while no doubt this occasionally happens, it likely happens as often to male bombers as weil. The fact that the culture in which these women live is presented as being static in its androcentric control only reinforces the irony within these arguments, and serves to highlight the structural power dynamics between those who assign or deny agency, and their subjects.

142 New York Dai1y News, 16 January 2004C1eve1and, A Historv orthe Modern Middle East. 143 The Australian Magazine, 13 November 2004

68 The Israelis: Strategically De-Legitimizing Agency and Reinforcing Gender Roles The official Israeli (State) response to the families of female suicide bombers are equally as violent and vengeful as their response to male suicide bombers, yet their rhetorical response often iranically undermines the autonomy of the female bomber. With every suicide bomb, the Israeli government exacts a series of specifie retaliatory punishments meted out to the family and community fram which the bomber came. These punishments are carried out with near uniformity regardless of the bomber's gender. It includes the destruction - by bulldozer or dynamite - of the bomber's family home. It includes the retention and disposai of the bombers remains in an unmarked field. It also includes a form of rhetorical revenge that in the case of female militants directly attacks their agency. The official response from the Israeli Defense Forces labels the female perpetrators of such attacks as having "personal baggage.,,144 Why are female bombers the subjects of "personal baggage" and not male bombers? l1's understandable that the Israelis would rather imply that "personal" issues provide the motivation for suicide bombers and not "societal" issues - such as the difficult existence under military occupation. Yet this "personal baggage" encompasses a series of images - similar to those seen in the media - that consistently portray women as being innately incapable of being the agents of such destruction. One way they do so is by setting up the Palestinian female suicide bombers as second class militants. An example of this came following the death of Wafa Idris. The Israeli government, after "investigations" announced anonymously through press contacts that Idris had detonated the bomb by accident;

144 While 1 don't like to use web sources, it is difficult to find official lsraeli documents in English otherwise. See the lsraeli Defense Forces official website at wwwl.idf.il and specifically the official release titled "The lnvolvement of Female Palestinians in Terror" 18 February, 2003.

69 "Wafa Idris, who has been called the first Palestinian woman suicide bomber, apparently had no intention of killing herself in the blast which rocked Jerusalem late last month, a senior Israeli police official said Monday. 'It is almost certain the bomb the young woman was carrying in a bag was supposed to be given to a man who was supposed to hide it or blow himself up with it,' the official, who is close to the probe into the attack, told AFP, asking not to be named".145

The Israeli government, aware that a segment of the Palestinian population would exalt the first female suicide bomber into a position that could spark a new trend in female militancy, rhetorically de­ legitimizes Idris' agency. The maintenance of a gendered space of militancy, especially as it relates to suicide bombings, is a logical security tactic on the Israelis part. Having women facilitate suicide bombers and general paramilitary activities through logistical support is one thing; to have them actively participate would be more than symbolically devastating to their counterterrorism measures. While one of the reasons women are used by militant groups in ail aspects of militant activities is strategie (women are thought to be able to "blend" into a crowd easier etc.) the same strategie advantage is a threat to the Israelis. One way of decreasing the likelihood for further female suicide bombers is by eliminating the precedent - by claiming Idris died while delivering the bomb to a male bomber, the Israelis reinforce the gendered space of militancy as an aspect of their own counterterrorism policy. Another way to de-Iegitimize female militancy is to again invoke the bombers sexuality. Using Reem al-Rayishi, the "mother-martyr," as an example again, the Israelis posthumously discredit the bombers agency; Israeli security officiais sa id yesterday that the young Palestinian mother who blew herself up last week in a suicide bomb attack was an adulteress forced to carry out the attack to restore her family's honor. It is not uncommon for Palestinian women accused of adultery to be killed by their families trying to rid themselves of perceived disgrace. The Israeli officiais, speaking on condition of

145 Agence France Press Newswire, 4 February 2002.

70 anonymity, sa id Raiyshi's lover recruited her, glvlng her the suicide-bomb belt. Palestinian security officiais sa id her husband drove her to Erez to carry out the attack. 146

Again, the recycled tropes of women's sexuality are used to discredit their actions. While suicide bombers are often looked at with incredulity - the typical: "what would drive someone to commit such an act?" - male suicide bombers are rarely individuafed, whereas women suicide bombers are a/ways individuafed. Michel Foucault's theory of "descending individualism" argues that by individuating people in society (isolating their individuality through various acts of surveillance), the State is better able to control them using various disciplinary too1S. 147 ln the case of female suicide bombers, the disciplinary tools at the Israeli state's disposai are exercised through posthumously examining and discrediting the bombers agency through a series of sexualized images. The Israelis discredit the female bombers sexually (either positively: "they were mothers," or negatively: "they were adulterers") by individuating each case. By deligitimizing the agency of female suicide bombers on an individual, case by case basis, and simultaneously essentializing male suicide bombers (religious, nationalist, fanatics etc.) they reinforce a strategically beneficial gendered space of militancy.

Conclusion While the argument can be made (as it is by many of the bombers themselves) that evolution of women's involvement in Palestinian suicide bombings is a step towards symbolic equality between the sexes in Palestinian society, this can hardly be conclusive. While Palestinian nationalism has historically been framed in masculine terms, the militant movements that direct and organize suicide bomb

146 Associated Press Newswire. 19 January 2004. This story was further reported in The Seattle Times on 19 January 2004, The Daily Mail (London UK) on 20 January 2004, The Daily Telegraph (London UK) on 21 January 2004. 147 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth ofthe Prison, Discipline & Punish (New York: Vintage Books, 1995). 193

71 attacks in Israel have been ambiguous about the role for women in their ranks. Arguing that women have an equal place in the struggle against an occupying force, they have been reluctant to employ them in these most sensational forms of militancy. Most striking is the possibility that the use of women as suicide bombers is in fact a strategie tactic in an ongoing battle between militant factions for popularity "on the streets" of the West Bank and Gaza. Mainstream media in the "West" paradoxically presents Middle Eastern and Islamic society as being oppressive towards women, but use, in their reports on female suicide bombers, patriarchal language. They tie the woman's sexuality as a woman together with their actions. They thus frame the discourse of women's involvement in militancy in specifie gendered terms, denying the women independent agency in the process. Using similar tropes, official Israelis response to female suicide bombers is to individuate them and attack their autonomy. They are consistently presented as being forced into their actions whereas the motivating factors for men are rarely considered beyond basic essentialisms. While in many other circumstances, women are the victims of such essentialisms, the Israeli individuation of female suicide bombers is designed to abrogate their agency. This is done for specifie reasons: reinforcing the gendered space of militancy, the Israelis are decreasing the population from which militant operations are manifested. Finally, the women themselves present an ambiguous stance vis­ à-vis their participation in these operations. While some claim to be doing it for the sa me motivating reasons as their male counterparts, there are secondary implications that often emerge through their own voice 148. By isolating the impotency of the leadership of neighbouring

148 This ambiguity may be a result of some process of internalizing patriarchal values and ideals, a process not exclusive to women.

72 Arab states, they in many ways reinforce the gendered space of militancy by implying that their participation is not the norm. These implications normalize male militancy. The role of women in Palestinian nationalism is a fascinating topic for its nuances and ambiguities. From the early conflicts between Palestinians, and Jewish settlers and British colonial officers, women have been engaged in a struggle against colonial powers. The latest manifestation of this struggle places women in the most extreme of militant operations - the suicide bomber - and does so in the continuous tradition of negotiations between women in society and the patriarchy and colonial powers. By isolating ail of the institutional interests of the actors in the conflict, one can better appreciate the constant struggle women are engage in with ail of the power structures (both internai and external) that are trying to define their "raie."

73 Chapter 5: Conclusion On top of Masada, the Herodian fortress a stone's throw from the Dead Sea, elite members of the lOF take a vow that transforms this plateau from a 2000 year old refuge for Jewish rebels into a metonym for both the State of Israel and the global Jewish community as a whole. ln a back alley of Jenin's refugee camp a poster of a teenager named - Omar begins to peel from the wall of a two-storey home (see Figure 5). ln the image, Omar stands poised with an AK-47 pointing down and to the right of the camera. Above him is printed a passage from the Qur'an exalting his death in defense of Islam. Islam and Palestine, that which he died defending, is manifested in the image of the al-Aqsa mosque, super-imposed behind his tense body. A building he likely never saw in person, al-Aqsa becomes a symbol of the Palestinian people and the Muslim Umma as a whole. Masada and al-Aqsa operate the sa me way for Israelis and Palestinians respectively. They are symbols that remind each national community that their existence and survival is challenged by an "other". They are points to which their defense transcends politics and becomes the preserve of action. Theirs (and the nation's) defense becomes a matter of national performance - a hegemonic national culture whose historical narrative becomes inextricably militarized. Masada beeomes Israel; al­ Aqsa beeomes Palestine. Diplomacy, negotiations, polities cannot acquiesce and endanger the Nation: these sites require physical, heroic, non-negotiable defense. Defense provided by young, strong men: a homosocial performative nationalism, legitimized in the nation's historical narrative. This thesis has attempted to outline a few of the many ways that each national community has gone about creating the content for what Chatterjee called the "spiritual" domain of nationalism. By focusing on some "elementary aspects" of nationalism and colonial culture in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, many structural similarities in the two ideologies emerge.

74 Nationalism and colonialism are best understood in terms of performance. While technological inventions such as the printing press; and innovations in communications such as the vernacularization of languages played significant roles in the development of nationalism, understanding how nationalism is perpetuated requires an understanding of how it is commodified. McClintock's focus on the fetishized commodity of nationalism's spectacles with ail their attendant symbolism and meanings allow for a more complete understanding of contemporary nationalist thought. The Palestinian-Israeli conflict perpetuates historical (national) narratives by commodifying places like Masada and al-Aqsa, and incorporating their history and defense into the modern ideology of nationalism. The defense of Masada and al-Aqsa, while a national priority, remains the responsibility of the ideal national man. The performative acts of national bodies are sexualized and genders are assigned specifie roles in the nation'·s defense or its liberation. Men stand as the vanguard of performative (and militarized) nationalism while the traditional roles for women are perpetuated both rhetorically and strategically. Israel at once appropriates pre-diasporic Jewish/Hebrew traditional cultures into the modern ideology of nationalism while simultaneously denying a similar history to the Palestinians. Zionism's need for an ideal national man also requires it to construct an image of a new "Jewish Man" as an antidote to the traditional, European view of the weak, effeminate and defenseless "Diasporic Jewish Man". The mythology of the Masada Zealot - choosing death over enslavement at the hands of the Romans - becomes the archetype for the new Israeli Man. Palestinians, on the other hand, also use a number of discursive strategies to legitimate a new relationship between the nation, it's liberation struggle, and it's history. Holy sites such as the Haram al­ Sharif (the Dome of the Rock and the al-Aqsa mosque complex) as weil as the Christian sites of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher and the

75 Basilica of the Nativity become violated sacred spaces that for the sake of the nation must be defended and whose violations must be avenged. Beyond the symbolic relationship between performative nationalism and collective memory, the practicalities of occupation and resistance further lend themselves to the perpetuation of performative nationalism and militancy. The conscription of most of Israeli society into the IDF lends it a corporatism that homogenizes difference (sexual orientation, race, class ... ) and serves as a national initiation rite into both Israeli society and culture in particular, as weil as adulthood in general. In confrontations with Palestinians - most notably during the Intifada - soldiers were, as Julie Peteet notes, able to act out the narrative of an empty Palestine. 149 ln response, Palestinians youths developed an intricate system of actions and meanings that challenge the colonial power of the IDF. Through ritualized, performed acts such as stone­ throwing, to the reception and display of physical abuse, young Palestinian males acquired a new national subjectivity. Lastly, the masculine pursuits of the militarized elements of performative nationalism place the nation's women into subordinate roles. Patriarchal nationalism in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict prioritizes militancy above other forms of national agency and this relegates women's nationalist activities to an inferior status. While female suicide bombers have superficially challenged the male monopoly on sensational militant acts, these women's agency is often strategically undermined by ail the actors involved. The historical narratives of the Palestinian and Israeli communities are two of the more interesting facets of the conflict. Understanding how these narratives are in turn performed and reproduced is an important first step in accomplishing a challenge put forth by Edward Said before he died. Acknowledging the great traumas and injustices committed

149 Peteet, "Male Gender and Rituals of Resistance in the Palestinian Intifada: A Cultural Politics of Violence." 36

76 against each of these communities is integral to the task of taking a historical inventory of "the other." Understanding where they come from - both the physical and psychic origins - is the only way a justice will ever be realized.

77 Figures

Figure 1. "Roots" Artist: Ben-Ami Ratinsky, 1991.150

150 Bartelt and others, eds., Both Sides of Peace. 34. From the book: "The artists states; 'Some say that Israel is ephemeral. But 1 say Israel is deeply rooted for thousands of years and will stay here forever'."

78 Figure 2. "Memorial to the Fighters", Yad Vashem. (Collection of the Author)

79 Figure 3-1. "The Horsemen of al-Aqsa". (Collection of the Author)

80 Figure 3-2. "The Horsemen of al-Aqsa" (Detail). (Collection of the Author)

81 Figure 4. "Daniel abu Hamama". (Collection of the Author). r-..

82 Figure 5. "Omar Poster" with al-Aqsa Mosque. (Collection of the Author)

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