How Israel Exploits Gender Roles To Discredit Palestinian Female Activists


“You’d known him for three days.” They acknowledged this was true. Next time, I said, they should think of more flattering adjectives. “Despite this fatwa, Palestinian customs and traditions will be maintained as families will stick to the traditions, even though the religion has officially authorized connection between sexes,” Ayad told Gulf News.

What did hold me back from embracing my queerness was the colonized aspect of it and how it intersected with my experience as a colonized person. Yet the way I experienced it was quite different, and those experiences help us to confront the colonial myths that have helped support the occupation of Palestine and the massacre of our people. In those early years, I didn’t question my queer identity, since I knew that I was interested in girls my age, and when I later came to understand that my attraction extended to a much wider spectrum of gender, I simply embraced it without a challenge. That is because of the fact that my family was one that embraced pluralism.

Zionist paramilitary groups launched a vicious process of ethnic cleansing in the form of large-scale attacks aimed at the mass expulsion of Palestinians from their towns and villages to build the Jewish state, which culminated in the Nakba. At least ten percent of the Palestinian male population had been killed, wounded, exiled or imprisoned by the end of the revolt. By giving their support to Zionist goals in Palestine, the British hoped they could shore up support among the significant Jewish populations in the US and Russia for the Allied effort during WWI. They also believed the Balfour Declaration would secure their control over Palestine after the war. In 1896, Viennese journalist Theodor Herzl published a pamphlet that came to be seen as the ideological basis for political Zionism – Der Judenstaat, or “The Jewish State”.

Dating and Marriage

Despite the danger and the social opprobrium, Jamil describes the gay community in the Gaza Strip as “huge” and claims that the number of people who are secretly involved in gay relationships is increasing. I met them all during the past four years,” he writes in an instant message. In a telephone conversation, he adds that it’s hard to keep a secret in Gaza; rumors spread there quickly, and everybody knows everything about everybody.

The time at which they move out generally depends on their financial capacity to rent or buy a house. Traditional gender roles are quite distinct in some families, with sons and daughters expected to help their father and mother with duties respectively. For example, most of the women of a household typically cook together and share other responsibilities. Many men contribute to the domestic housework in their households, though some may see this as a sign of weakness or lack of manhood. However, the status and role of the father as the family breadwinner has shifted in many households – partly due to the effects of poverty, displacement and conflict.

Sometimes, I think all I truly need to exist is my beauty and this mentality is not healthy at all. This, in my opinion, is probably why most of the older women I know do not opt for receiving an education higher than a bachelor’s degree. I’ve witnessed a few Arab women undermining their true aspirations because out of fear of failure, not being good enough, or the idea of starting a family later than planned. In the Arab world, dating is not common and premarital sexual relations are heavily taboo. This lessens the double standard a bit, since the rule is not usually gendered, but women are still subconsciously pressured more than men to portray a sense of innocence, purity, modesty, and eventually get married at a relatively young age.

Netanyahu’s Coup for Dummies: Israel’s Constitutional Crisis, Explained

A young Israeli Jew who was in touch with Jamil via one of these apps told me that they talked about politics, about Jamil’s life and his family relationships – but not only about these things. Nour Ahmad, 25, left Gaza after her family finally agreed to let her marry a Palestinian man living in Saudi Arabia. “Polygamy has hit high rates in Gaza over the few past years, seemingly due to an increase in people’s religious inclination, especially after Hamas took power in 2007,” Ms. Seyam said, referring to the militant group that rules over Gaza.

From among the executed, 6 were killed by a firing squad outside a mosque in front of hundreds of spectators including children. Capital punishment in the Gaza Strip has been practiced by the Hamas Administration since it assumed power in 2007. The punishment is given for offenses such as crimes against Islamic law, land sales to Israelis, and treason. Palestinian law requires approval from the Palestinian Authority president for the death penalty, but Hamas in Gaza has carried out executions without permission. Palestinians have farmed the land for centuries, and their connection to the land is a powerful symbol of rootedness, making clear the injustice of displacement. Palestinians, along with most of the international community, consider settlements to be a major obstacle to peace.

“She is beautiful and a widow of a martyr at the same time,” Mr. Abu Mustafa said, using the word preferred by Palestinians for a killed fighter, often a terrorist to Israelis. Arab is an ethnicity – there are plenty of non-Arabs in the Middle-East. I’m also not religious, but I’m pretty sure he’s Muslim since his mom wears a hijab. Most of my family , who decided to leave Palestine moved to the US. Find many more handsome and eligible Palestinian guys inside looking to socialize.

Across symbols: the creation of a grammar of refugee and Palestinian identity

In Acre , the authorities prevented Arabs fleeing Haifa from disembarking; in Ramallah, the predominantly Christian population organized its own militia—not so much to fight the Jews as to fend off the new Muslim arrivals. Many exploited the plight of the refugees unabashedly, especially by fleecing them for such basic necessities as transportation and accommodation. As the fighting escalated, Arab civilians suffered as well, and the occasional atrocity sparked cycles of large-scale violence. Had the vast majority of Palestinian Arabs been left to their own devices, they would most probably have been content to take advantage of the opportunities afforded them. This is evidenced by the fact that, throughout the Mandate era, periods of peaceful coexistence far exceeded those of violent eruptions, and the latter were the work of only a small fraction of Palestinian Arabs.

In Arabesques, Anton Shammas’ winding tale is rooted to a Palestinian farmtown, Fassuta, that was captured by Israeli Zionists in 1948. Shammas fills the tale with references to olive groves as a life-source of Palestinians, depicts how they serve as a crucial element of Palestinian culture, and alludes to olive trees in the winding structure of the novel itself. Palestinians have rich and significant relationships with the land.

I remember nights upon nights where my parents, my uncles, and my aunt would gather to drink together while they discussed plays and poems or got into arguments about their different political and religious beliefs, all in loud screams and with much love. In these gatherings, I also vividly recall the countless times they would crossdress and wear wigs, with my aunt helping them with https://hookupranking.org/ makeup, so they can perform an improvised drunken sequel of their choosing. During decades of Israeli occupation, thousands of Palestinian women have been arrested; like men, they are jailed for their activism or detained to inflict pressure on activist relatives. Sometimes, the cries of a woman under “interrogation” are used to force her brother, husband, or son to confess.

Meanwhile, fathers and husbands may see it as their duty to be the guardians of family honour and keep their female family members free from scandal . Fathers and brothers are generally expected to be responsible for female family members socially and financially until they are married – at which point a woman’s husband will assume responsibility for her. The senior male of the family has the authority to make decisions about his female family members’ behaviour in order to preserve the family honour. Family positions on this may vary depending on their social attitudes. Gender roles can vary significantly depending on one’s level of conservatism, income status, urbanisation and location.

On the other hand, there are the actors who do not necessarily call themselves artists, some of whom even reject this label. In any case, how they produce their paintings always takes into consideration how the message they want to deliver is going to be displayed. It reveals a reflection on technique and style that we presume to consider artistic in the sense that it involves an aesthetic perspective. Moreover, in terms of intericonicity, what the second group of actors produce directly refers to what the self-called artists are doing. Despite their own rejection that what they create could be called “art”, their paintings enter into dialogue with artwork. In a context of colonization, some consider art as a tool for resistance, whereas others do not claim to create art, considering their actions to be subsumed within resistance.