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Despite colonial constraints and their triple alienation as refugees, Palestinian Nakba-generation women rely on their memories of place to construct their subjectivity. By practicing the methodology of ground-truthing narratives among eight Shu'fat refugee Nakba generation women, this article draws mainly on Du Bois's conceptualization of double consciousness to map the temporality of Palestinian women journey in three stages. First, it shows how memories of place are re-arranged based on new events, a process of constructing double consciousness via Othering. Second, they re-define the now space of the refugee camp, while the physical and cultural landscapes of their pre-Nakba homeland are frozen in time, if not completely absent. Third, they conjoin two separate modes of spatial expressions, the pre-Nakba peasant (fellahat) and the post-Nakba refugee status (laji'at), in an overarching narrative filled with dogged strength as an outcome of a second sight. Overall, such a journey is a collective creation of memory, place, and culture that contributes to indigenous knowledge. By exploring how Palestinian Nakba-generation refugee women experienced Zionist colonization and constructed their subjectivity across time and space, the article traces their ontological resistance in the process of conjoining their double-consciousness, as both peasants and refugees. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Palestinian women's engagement with politics and their appropriation of conventionally masculine acts of martyrdom during the Second Intifada (2002–2005) have been subject to intense public debate, media scrutiny and contested cultural representations. This article, drawing on studies of terrorism as well as translation theory, examines first-hand accounts of acts of martyrdom by Palestinian women, which uphold Palestinian national and religious discourses of sacrifice. Failing to grapple with how and why Palestinians recognise these women's acts as martyrdom, many Euro-American and Israeli scholars focus on personal, social and psychological motivations. While many Euro-American and Israeli scholars construct Palestinian female martyrs as socially deviant, we develop a different framework to understand female martyrdom on more local terms that resonate with Palestinians' lived experience. We introduce five Palestinian female martyrs' video testimonies that scholarship to date has overlooked. We contend that Palestinian female martyrs (shahids) are conscious agents whose final acts underscore their adherence to religious and national discourses of sacrifice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite their success as agents in social, political, economic, and cultural spheres, Palestinian women face tremendous hardships due to Israeli occupation and the patriarchal social and political structure. One issue that the literature has not sufficiently explored is how women use various forms of art to make sense of these obstacles and navigate the struggles of daily life. By narrating the story of one Palestinian woman and her relationship with writing, this article explores Palestine women's attempts to redefine public space and discourse while reflecting on broader questions of the relationships between art, agency, gender, and power. The article sheds light on how art can be mobilized both to navigate daily obstacles and challenge the hegemonic power of official institutions and to induce paradigm shifts within the genre of writing itself. The article argues that writing can be considered a tool both for managing everyday life and for confronting larger questions of power imbalance and enforced suffering. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Natural menopause is associated with somatic, vasomotor, psychological, and sexual complaints that may affect women's quality of life (QOL). Aims: To determine the prevalence and severity of menopausal symptoms and their impact on QoL among Palestinian women visiting primary care centers. Methods: A cross-sectional study was conducted from November 2018 through March 2019. Convenience sampling was used to interview 380 women aged 45–60 years attending primary care centers in the West Bank city of Nablus. The Menopause Rating Scale (MRS) assessed the prevalence and severity of menopausal symptoms and QoL. Mean scores of menopausal categories were compared for different symptoms. Descriptive and analytical analyses were performed. The level of significance was set at P<0.05. Results: The age of menopausal onset (12-month absence) was 49.37 ±3 years (N = 200). The most prevalent symptoms were physical and mental exhaustion (86%), anxiety (85.5%), and irritability (85.3%). Only the prevalence of sleep problems was statistically different between the pre-, peri, and post-menopausal groups (P <0.001). The average MRS score was 18.64 ± 9.19, indicating severe symptoms and a low QoL. Conclusion: The physical and psychosocial problems experienced by Palestinian post-menopausal women negatively impacted their QoL. Therefore, all women approaching menopause should have access to supportive networks and preventive programs for a healthy transition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The current article aims to shed light on the impact of social networking sites on Palestinian women in the State of Israel. It began researching the extent of women's involvement in work, the consequences of women's work, and the obstacles they face in the labor market. Then it highlighted the impact that social media has had on the labor market in general, and then the effects of social media on women’s work in particular. Finally, it highlights the impact of social media on the work of Palestinian women in Israel, and how these sites helped them gain income and self-realization in addition to education and awareness, all from within their homes.

On 8 August 2019, Israa Ghrayeb, a 21-year-old Palestinian living in Beit Sahour, was brutally beaten by members of her family. Since that moment, protests have erupted throughout historical Palestine and beyond, also reaching Palestinian women of the diaspora. Not only did this eventful protest mark the resurgence of a wave of women's protests in Palestine, but it also brought about the start of a new feminist and anticolonial movement: Tal'at. Using frame analysis to examine the movement's declarations, Facebook posts, and the archival material available at the Basso Foundation Archive, together with firsthand data collected through interviews conducted during my fieldwork in Historical Palestine, I will try to answer the following questions: How does this new feminist protest-movement differ from the previous ones? What are the elements of continuity with previous Palestinian women's movements? How did this movement manage to frame an aggregating message in such a fragmented territory? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study identified the factors associated with adequate knowledge, attitude, and practice of exclusively breastfeeding women who visit maternity healthcare clinics in Palestine. This study was conducted in a cross-sectional design. A pre-tested questionnaire was used to collect the data. The women were recruited from different maternity care and primary healthcare clinics. In this study, 51 (51.0%) of the exclusively breastfeeding women reported that they did not receive counseling on breastfeeding from healthcare providers on the last visit to the maternity clinic before delivery, and 43 (43.0%) of the women reported that they did not receive counseling on breastfeeding from healthcare providers after delivery. Of the exclusively breastfeeding women, 36 (36.0%) reported facing challenges while breastfeeding the last child. Exclusively breastfeeding women who had a male last-child, pregnancy of = 37 weeks, received counseling on breastfeeding from healthcare providers in the last visit to the clinic before delivery, experienced sore/cracked nipples, and planned for another pregnancy were 5.55-fold (95% CI: 1.10-28.14), 6.51-fold (95% CI: 1.09-38.94), 7.08-fold (95% CI: 1.42-35.26), 7.26-fold (95% CI: 1.46-36.12), and 9.36-fold (95% CI: 1.93-45.55) more likely to score = 60% in the knowledge and attitudes test. Women who believed breastfeeding changed their body shape were 3.87-fold (95% CI: 1.12-13.44) more likely to score = 80% on the practice items. Most Palestinian women who practiced exclusive breastfeeding had good knowledge and positive attitudes toward breastfeeding. However, women reported less than optimal counseling by healthcare providers during their visits to the maternity healthcare clinics before and after delivery. Healthcare providers should counsel women about the benefits and good practices of breastfeeding, notably those whose last child is a female, had a short pregnancy period, and did not plan for another pregnancy. Larger studies are still needed to investigate the prevalence of exclusive breastfeeding among Palestinian women. Additionally, more studies are still needed to investigate the effect of support from husbands and families on practicing exclusive breastfeeding among Palestinian women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Highlighting twenty-first-century Palestinian feminist formations, this essay chronicles a trajectory of over a century of women's organizing that led to the contemporary moment. The essay argues that women and feminist praxis have been exemplified in each moment of Palestinian intifada, though national anticolonial liberation politics did not always accommodate feminist language or ideas. Palestinian women have played an instrumental role in each phase of contestation and community organizing against colonial, military, and state formations. Whether creating a women's front, making space for women within the national movement, or developing a communal politics of care from within, the labor women have performed for the Palestinian liberation struggle can be read through a feminist ethos. The essay argues that feminist praxis was always present and that, while the language of feminism is contested in Palestinian social and political spheres, Palestinian feminist trajectories are compatible with and necessary for the actualization of Palestinian liberation and freedom from Zionist rule. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Resumen: Pese al reciente aumento del nivel de estudios de las mujeres árabes palestinas en Israel, sus tasas de actividad y ocupación siguen siendo inferiores a las de las mujeres judías. En este estudio, basado en datos de la Encuesta de Población Activa y la Encuesta Social de Israel (periodo 1995‐2016), se investiga si este patrón se explica por factores socioeconómicos y demográficos, la religiosidad, los activos de capital humano, la estructura familiar y políticas públicas conexas, y la jubilación anticipada. Se constata que estos factores afectan a la participación de las mujeres árabes palestinas en el mercado laboral, de lo que se extraen algunas recomendaciones de políticas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the process of identity formation as it pertains to two Palestinian American women in the United States, specifically in New York City. It considers the answer to a characteristically conversational question in the West: "What is this Palestine, anyway?" through a reading of Najla Said's and Suheir Hammad's memoirs, Looking for Palestine: Growing Up Confused in an Arab-American Family (New York: Riverhead Books, 2013) and Drops of This Story (New York: Writers & Readers, 1996), respectively. While the memoirs are set in socioeconomically different parts of New York City, both narrators chronicle their complicated negotiations around issues of belonging, integration, self-worth, and body shame as second-generation Palestinian women in the United States. The paper argues for the necessity to narrate such experiences, or else risk being outwritten by various Others. Given the reality of "Palestine" geographically and politically, the literary space can be powerful in locating and registering an imagined postcolonial Palestinian experience today. It can coherently articulate a broken Self, rehabilitate body politics, retrace violently digressive journeys, find meaning in a confounding kind of nationalism, and resist dominant and hostile ideologies. Indeed, the act of narration could not only heal the fraught relations between the Palestinian Self and various Others, but can allow for the envisioning of a postcolonial space from within. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper traces Palestinian women's political mobilization for social change emphasizing historical and contemporary involvements in national struggles against colonial occupation and patriarchal oppression. Second, critical Middle Eastern feminists' analyses, through their attunement to gendered orientalism, unmask a troubling pattern of culturizing categories of violence against women (VAW) within global feminist and human rights discourses. In particular, culturized framings of gender-based violence in the lives of Palestinian women ignores the multiple sources of violence and power of settler colonialism as ongoing everyday realities. Third, I share how social science instruments like the Conflicts Tactics Scale (CTS), criticized by US gender scholars, is widely used as a measure of VAW in the global South. By overestimating interpersonal gender-based violence among Palestinian women, Global feminist discourse and the otherness of women outside the West continue to reciprocally constitute each other. Thus covertlsolidifying global feminist discourse universalistic assumptions in scientific and objective forms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Whereas previous studies examined intergroup interaction in organized and professionally moderated encounters between Israeli-Jews and Palestinians, the present study deals with a unique type of encounter. Recently, there has been a significant increase in the number of Palestinian students from East Jerusalem studying at Israeli universities. In this context, our study examines the dilemmas, experiences, and feelings of Palestinian female students from East Jerusalem regarding their intergroup interactions with Israeli-Jews in Israeli academic institutions. In-depth qualitative interviews were conducted with 10 young Palestinian women from East Jerusalem studying in Israeli academic institutions in which the dominant language is Hebrew. The findings identify different aspects of this unique encounter while bringing into the discussion concepts such as microaggression and intersectionality. At the same time and importantly, the findings also make it possible to identify patterns of constructive intergroup interactions in this context of the protracted asymmetric conflict between Israeli-Jews and Palestinians. Public Significance Statement: The findings of this study promote understanding of the challenges that female students from marginalized ethno-national groups, involved in asymmetrical protracted conflict, experience when encountering members of the majority group in mixed academic settings. The findings help identify constructive patterns of such intergroup interactions that may provide support and help coping with some of the challenges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Since the termination of the British Mandate in 1948 and Israel's subsequent occupation of Palestine, the Israeli government has punitively demolished hundreds of Palestinian homes in the West Bank. After a slight downturn during COVID-19, numbers are once again on the rise. Israel's punitive demolition strategy targets the innocent families of Palestinians allegedly involved in security offenses against Israel. When a suspected offender is detained, Israel orders the demolition of their family home--usually, before the suspect is tried or convicted, and regardless of whether they own or permanently reside in the house. In support of its punitive demolition campaign, Israel cites Regulation 119, a British Mandate-era law sustained by and parasitic to Israel's perpetual "state of emergency." Regulation 119 affords broad discretion to the Israeli military in ordering punitive demolitions and is met with considerable deference from the Israeli High Court of Justice. However, this Note contends that Israel's punitive housing demolition strategy creates tension with due process norms elsewhere affirmed in Israeli jurisprudence. First, punitive demolitions violate Israel's respect for fair trial rights and the presumption of innocence, unlawfully constituting pre-conviction punishment. Second, they defy Israel's esteem for individual responsibility, manifesting collective punishment. Given Israel's stated desire for legal consistency and normative harmony, it is incumbent on the High Court to resolve the jurisprudential hypocrisy inherent in its treatment of punitive demolition orders and to curtail Regulation 119. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract Background In a geopolitically at-risk environment, such as Palestine, gender-based violence (GBV) is still a crucial problem rooted in discriminatory laws and traditional habits exacerbated by the ongoing Israeli military occupation. Moreover, the lack of updated data makes it difficult to grasp the magnitude of the phenomenon entirely; the purpose of the current study was to explore mental health professionals’ perceptions and concerns on GBV among Palestinian women during the COVID-19 pandemic. Methods Participants in the study were 30 Mental Health Professionals (MHP) selected using convenience and snowball sampling techniques from among MHP in northern West Bank, Palestine. Results A thematic content analysis revealed seven main themes of GBV during the pandemic. Palestinian MHP reported that the increased number of GBV cases among women during the COVID-19, quarantine, physical distancing measures, and closure of non-essential services significantly heightened the risks of GBV among Palestinian women. Moreover, Palestinian women involved with or married to older men or married at a very young age were at risk of GBV more than others. Results of qualitative analysis also showed that Israeli occupation and the political violence characterizing the area for decades (including restriction of movement, house demolitions, separation of family members, etc.) have also exacerbated and increased GBV in the occupied Palestinian territories. Conclusions Improving intervention skills and supervision services among Palestinian MHP to help women who face GBV is recommended. Moreover, additional research should be conducted to explore the risk and potential factors of GBV, agency, and coping strategies to deal with GBV.

Copyright of Omran for Social Sciences is the property of Arab Center for Research & Policy Studies and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The study examines how young Palestinian women in Israel, who decide to settle in the "liberal" "world city" of Tel Aviv-Jaffa upon college graduation, cope with the anticipated response of their family and community of origin. Applying a qualitative methodology, we interviewed 12 such women, supplemented by analysis of two TV series about young, single, educated Israeli-Palestinians living away from home. Thematic analysis of the data sheds light on how these women negotiate their move to Tel Aviv-Jaffa to study and their decision to stay there after graduation, focusing on the threat posed by Tel Aviv, as well as the benefits and challenges of life there. This study offers innovative insights: how young women from an excluded minority group are able to pave their way to liberty using urban space; and how the women use the tools of patriarchal society to conduct sophisticated negotiations with it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Several Palestinian women and girls have witnessed the experience of detention along the years of the Israeli occupation. Despite that, they resisted the prisons with faith and steadfastness, and maintained their right to resistance after their release. This study aims to realize the Israeli practices against the female prisoners, and highlight their social role after their freedom. The researcher uses the historical methodology. Also, the study addresses two claims: 1) the Israeli Violent Measures against Female Prisoners, and 2) Role of Female Prisoners in the Struggle and Community. This study has found that the Israeli arrests increase during the Palestinians' confrontation to the occupation's attacks against the citizens and holy places. Also, the female prisoners suffer from different ways of physical and psychological torture, as well as they provide a model of national unity by supporting every prisoner exposed to the prison's administration's arbitrary measures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using feminist anthropology and interview data, this article investigates the gendered dimension of hunger striking in Israeli prisons. It draws on other cases from Ireland to the United States to explore the gendered nature of resistance to political imprisonment. I argue that women hunger strikers are active participants who weaponize their lives to resist the Israeli matrix of power and patriarchal societal norms. There have been less women in number when compared to male prisoners, but women have been more effective in collectively coordinating their pioneering action. Through necroresistance (transforming their body to a site of resistance) and the strategy of sumud (Arabic for 'steadfastness'), women prisoners practice a dual resistance of the colonial authorities and the patriarchal society — simultaneously reclaiming ownership of their bodies and lives from both systems. This does not entail constituting their bodies as masculine (or de-feminizing themselves) so they are protected from sexual abuse. Rather, they insist on feminizing their experience and challenging gendered stereotypes of women as 'victims' with 'fragile bodies'. For them, gender is not a barrier but a motivational factor in which self-sacrifice to protest injustice is far superior to enduring the wrongs of political imprisonment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Esferas is the property of Esferas and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article presents a qualitative study of nineteen Palestinian female students in Israel. In doing so, it promotes a context-informed approach in social work education, which takes into account power relations, issues of gender, and socio-political and socio-cultural backgrounds. The students participated in a context-informed course held at Ruppin Academic Center in Israel. The findings focus on two contexts in the students' lives: (1) their socio-cultural background, which includes their family and cultural space; and (2) the socio-political context, which includes majority-minority relations. A discussion on the intersection of these two spheres follows. Whereas students felt the socio-political realm was blind to their identity as Palestinian female students, they felt that the course was like their 'home' in terms of language and identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Israeli officials have long denied that rape was used as an instrument of war against Palestinians. Most of the files relating to the expulsion of Palestinians during the Nakba in 1948 and its aftermath remain sealed in Israeli archives and have been reclassified as top secret. Palestinian oral narratives have long been considered a poor alternative to historical research based on archives or written texts. In addition, some of the narrative in many instances was driven by ideology that favoured the male voice, resulting in the silencing of Palestinian female voices. Hence, Palestinian stories were either the official narrative or stories told by their menfolk. Oral histories or testimonies by women were often missing, not only in the collective narrative but also in stories told through first-hand experiences of the Palestinian Nakba in 1948. Of late, suppressed accounts by women who witnessed the Nakba and its aftermath have emerged. My essay analyzes two fictionalized historical novels that are not only grounded in actual events but also depict incidents of rape, a subject that has long been silenced in Palestinian and Israeli narratives on the Nakba. The novels present accounts of two female villagers who survive the ordeal of displacement, exile, and rape to tell their stories. The Blue Between Sky and Water by Susan Abulhawa is a story of survival of a peasant family from the village of Beit Daras, while The Woman from Tantoura by Radwa Ashour tells the story of the aftermath of the 1948 massacre of Tantoura. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: In a geopolitically at-risk environment, such as Palestine, gender-based violence (GBV) is still a crucial problem rooted in discriminatory laws and traditional habits exacerbated by the ongoing Israeli military occupation. Moreover, the lack of updated data makes it difficult to grasp the magnitude of the phenomenon entirely; the purpose of the current study was to explore mental health professionals' perceptions and concerns on GBV among Palestinian women during the COVID-19 pandemic. Methods: Participants in the study were 30 Mental Health Professionals (MHP) selected using convenience and snowball sampling techniques from among MHP in northern West Bank, Palestine. Results: A thematic content analysis revealed seven main themes of GBV during the pandemic. Palestinian MHP reported that the increased number of GBV cases among women during the COVID-19, quarantine, physical distancing measures, and closure of non-essential services significantly heightened the risks of GBV among Palestinian women. Moreover, Palestinian women involved with or married to older men or married at a very young age were at risk of GBV more than others. Results of qualitative analysis also showed that Israeli occupation and the political violence characterizing the area for decades (including restriction of movement, house demolitions, separation of family members, etc.) have also exacerbated and increased GBV in the occupied Palestinian territories. Conclusions: Improving intervention skills and supervision services among Palestinian MHP to help women who face GBV is recommended. Moreover, additional research should be conducted to explore the risk and potential factors of GBV, agency, and coping strategies to deal with GBV. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A personal narrative is presented which explores the author's experience of living in Barqa, a Palestinian Arab village located north of Gaza near the modern-day Israeli city of Ashdod.

In fragile and conflict-affected contexts, the COVID-19 pandemic hit communities much harder than elsewhere by adding another layer of vulnerability to their already precarious circumstances. Around the world, many pandemic recovery plans were devoid of gender-sensitivity, such as lacking explicit recognition of, or introduction of, substantive steps, supporting women's quest for improved care services. In the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT), where the pandemic coincided with other crises such as the occupation, an escalated military offensive (May 2021 in Gaza), heatwaves due to climate change, and a longstanding economic crisis, pandemic recovery is particularly challenging. This paper examines the channels through which Palestinian women's multi-layered vulnerabilities continue to worsen despite the Palestinian Authority's pandemic recovery measures. It does so by documenting the plethora of ways in which women's wellbeing is hampered by critical factors such as informal modes of employment, patriarchal social norms, unpaid care responsibilities, and the longstanding absence of any social protections. The policy analysis reveals that there is widespread fragmentation in the design of pandemic recovery policies which attempt to address their highly complex and multi-layered challenges. Using the case of women in the OPT as an example, it proposes several policy recommendations to help address Palestinian women's unique vulnerabilities even within their existing limitations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many studies have broadly addressed the status of the Naqab/Negev Bedouins in Israel, particularly the status of women. However, women from the West Bank and the Gaza Strip who are married to male Bedouin citizens of Israel in the Naqab face a particular experience of vulnerability that has not been sufficiently explored. Based on 26 semi-structured interviews with women from the West Bank and Gaza who are married and living in the Naqab, as well as additional interviews with six psychosocial and legal professionals working with these women, this article describes the vulnerability and precarity of these women within the precarious context of the Naqab. Drawing on Judith Butler's concept of precarity as a heightened risk of disease, poverty, starvation, displacement and exposure to violence without protection, this study examines layers of precarity in these women's lives. These layers are described through an examination of the intersections between Israel's settler colonial management of Palestinians' lives and the Palestinian patriarchal management of women's lives, thereby uncovering how both these controlling structures intensify women's precariousness and make them the precariat of the Naqab. Further, the study addresses women's performativity through their self-erasure and creation of invisible communities as a way to survive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the role of rural Palestinian women in the South Hebron Hills (SHH) in fighting back against both Israeli settler colonial practices and environmental destruction resulting from such practices. We contend that Israel is waging a war on the environment as a tool to deprive Palestinians in Area 'C' of what sustains life, land and natural resources. Through their everyday practices of defiance, we argue that, rural women wielding an indigenous lifestyle of farming in the SHH create an agro-ecological structure of sumud, or steadfastness through their domestic everyday practices, where they strengthen their attachment to the land and regenerate the environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The cultural industries are major fields of producing, distributing and reflecting national icons and norms. They form major sites of contestation and conflictual self-categorization, especially in conflict zones. Our article explores the intersection between nationality and gender in cultural production in such contexts. It examines the engagement of Palestinian women filmmakers within the Israeli cultural industry, seeking to facilitate a better understanding of national minorities in the field of cultural production in conflict zones. Palestinian women filmmakers in Israel have introduced new themes that do not only address national issues that stand in tension between the Palestinian experience of oppression and the hegemony of the Zionist narrative in the Israeli cultural industries, but also challenge the prevalent patriarchal social values in Palestinian society. Exploring their experience allow us to better explicate the intersection of professional, gender and national factors in conditioning the cultural production of creative labour in conflict zones. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I explore how ‘narratives of sacrifice’ shape the lives of Palestinian women living under Israeli occupation in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and in exile in Lebanon and affect the choices they make. By focusing on women’s ‘everyday practice’, I argue that, in response to the dangers and apparent hopelessness of their situation, Palestinians have adopted sacrifice as a conscious mode of struggle, one that also offers a way of giving meaning to senseless events. There is a tendency to identify sacrificial acts as male, but such assumptions need to be reconsidered. The concept of sacrifice is complex and is also gendered. I investigate inadvertent sacrifice – the role of the victim or resister – and deliberate sacrifice, as a way of protecting the community. The notion of sacrifice is closely linked to practices of resistance. As well, it has a strong affinity with the preservation of identity and should therefore not be interpreted solely as a symptom of powerlessness.

Women constitute 49 percent of the Palestinian population, but the participation of Palestinian women in economic and social development in Palestinian society is low. The low participation of women is due to many obstacles and constraints preventing them from contributing to the economic and social development of Palestinian society. This study aims to address the most important obstacles facing Palestinian women in achieving development, focusing on the problems and constraints facing rural women in Nablus Governorate. The study used the descriptive, analytical, inductive, and historical approach based on references, books, periodicals, and field work. The data were collected through personal interviews and questionnaires. One hundred questionnaires were distributed to obtain scientific results in an objective manner. The study found that there are a number of factors preventing Palestinian women from contributing to the development process, most importantly social, economic, political, security, media, and personal factors. The study concluded with a number of important recommendations and proposals necessary to increase the role of rural women as well as the economic and social development of Palestinian society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Palestinian female identity has been constructed and reconstructed as an amalgamation of patriarchal-oriented roles (daughter, wife, mother, sister, grandmother or even aunt), demonstrating women's exclusion from the realm of men who have proper names to locate them within a family group. This article examines the suppression of the female name and the use of reference and terms of address as euphemisms for women in contemporary, non-urban Palestine. While the exclusion of the female name from the public sphere fuels feminists' criticism of this patriarchal dehumanization, objectification and commodification of the female, we contend that the possibility of undermining Palestinian patronymic culture is shattered because women publicly advertise themselves as the sister, mother, daughter and wife of someone and, hence, their participation in the conventionally male-dominated sphere of politics upholds their subordination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Domestic violence (DV) damages health and requires a global public health response and engagement of clinical services. Recent surveys show that 27% of married Palestinian women experienced some form of violence from their husbands over a 12 months' period, but only 5% had sought formal help, and rarely from health services. Across the globe, barriers to disclosure of DV have been recorded, including self-blame, fear of the consequences and lack of knowledge of services. This is the first qualitative study to address barriers to disclosure within health services for Palestinian women.Methods: In-depth interviews were carried out with 20 women who had experienced DV. They were recruited from a non-governmental organisation offering social and legal support. Interviews were recorded, transcribed and translated into English and the data were analysed thematically.Results: Women encountered barriers at individual, health care service and societal levels. Lack of knowledge of available services, concern about the health care primary focus on physical issues, lack of privacy in health consultations, lack of trust in confidentiality, fear of being labelled 'mentally ill' and losing access to their children were all highlighted. Women wished for health professionals to take the initiative in enquiring about DV. Wider issues concerned women's social and economic dependency on their husbands which led to fears about transgressing social and cultural norms by speaking out. Women feared being blamed and ostracised by family members and others, or experiencing an escalation of violence.Conclusions: Palestinian women's agency to be proactive in help-seeking for DV is clearly limited. Our findings can inform training of health professionals in Palestine to address these barriers, to increase awareness of the link between DV and many common presentations such as depression, to ask sensitively about DV in private, reassure women about confidentiality, and increase awareness among women of the role that health services can play in DV. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines Palestinian women's marriage preferences and the ways they incorporate national/cultural elements into their self-initiated marriage process in order to mitigate the reactions of their families and local community in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Marriage decisions among Palestinians in diaspora are a complex affair defined by notions of nationalism, kin relations, and religion, with their inherent gendered aspects. These notions reveal an array of actions and choices that testify to the ways in which women build strategies to deal with their realities and increase their agency. Their access to higher education, careers, and residences in multi-cultural locations allow them to redefine gender roles and control their marriage choices. Intermarriage outside their ethnic and national groups, increase in marriage age, and marriage processes that are self-initiated yet devised and presented in the form of customary marriage patterns emerge as visible phenomena among second-generation Palestinian Muslims. The decreasing number of suitable potential spouses drives a considerable number of Palestinian American women to look outside their national and ethnic group for marriage partners, thereby prioritizing their universal, religious identity as Muslims over Palestinian ethnic identity. This study uses oral interviews and community observation to examine how Palestinian Muslim women maintained some symbolic customary practices and challenged others by conceptualizing, utilizing, and modifying their group cultural and religious values in order to expand the boundaries of their gender roles and increase their power in negotiating marriage choices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article brings women to the fore of a discussion of checkpoints in Palestine to understand better the ways that Palestinian women's lives—even as they may not regularly cross checkpoints—are affected by Israeli security infrastructure. Drawing on fieldwork near Checkpoint 300 between Bethlehem and Jerusalem, we examine women's lives in the context of a gendered system of permits and the nearby checkpoint that makes men's days of labour both long and exhausting, a fact that has profound effects on the family home in terms of restricted mobilities and the division of domestic labour. The article thus builds an account of checkpoints that: (1) situates women's everyday lives in Palestine in the context of Israel's military occupation; (2) extends the temporality of checkpoints beyond the checkpoint itself; and, therefore, (3) enables an understanding of the effects of borders beyond the immediate space of the border. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Given the multifaceted obstacles facing Palestinian Muslim women in Israel, this article aims to understand what enabled the impressive sea change marked by the 2017 appointment of a Palestinian Muslim woman to the position of qadi (judge in a Muslim Shari'a court of law). The article describes some of the events leading up to this historic moment and analyzes what led to this shift in policy. The 2017 appointment is a groundbreaking achievement for the feminist struggle of Palestinian women in Israel, which primarily affects the status of Muslim women, yet it also impacted Jewish Israeli women. As understood all too well by ultra-Orthodox (Haredi) elements who hold sway in Israeli politics and strongly objected to the move, allowing Muslim women to serve in this role threatens male hegemony within the state-run rabbinic courts as well, where Jewish women are currently barred from serving as judges [ dayanot ]. This article analyzes the legal struggles of Muslim and Jewish feminists in Israel via Robert Cover's theoretical perspective of nomos and narrative, which explores links between sociocultural and legal transformation. Applying Irshai and Zion-Waldoks's concept of a narrative ripeness test , our analysis sheds light on complex processes involved in struggles for Palestinian women's rights in Israel who, as a minority within a minority, must overcome multiple intersecting layers of discrimination. The article argues Jewish and Muslim cases interconnect—to women's detriment or benefit—yet when women achieve rights for themselves, the principle of gender equality can potentially be expanded to benefit others as well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on a decade of research on terrorism in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, we show how subjective "rational choices" motivate some women to engage in terrorist activism. Focusing on the motives of young women who engage in terrorism is consistent with feminist theory's insistence on women's agency-even at the extremes. In addition to the well-established motivations for terrorism reported in the literature, interviews with young women involved in terrorism reveal mixed personal motives for their gender-defying choices, including thrill-seeking and some conscious rebellion. However, we contend that women's subjective rationale for participation in such violent behavior needs to be contextualized. A cost-benefit approach, we maintain, highlights the strategic considerations supporting the deployment of women as combatants by Palestinian terrorist organizations. We argue that the inclusion of women in terrorist activism in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict exposes a major fault line in attitudes to the role and proper place of women in what remains largely a patriarchal culture. This social ambivalence accounts for why, on all measures, women fare worse than their male counterparts. The implications of the findings for feminist research as well as policy are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Breast self-examination (BSE) is one of many first-line screening practices aimed at early detection and prevention of fatal outcomes of breast cancer. The present study aimed to identify Palestinian women's practices, awareness, and barriers to BSE. Using descriptive-analytical methods, a previously validated questionnaire was administered to a conveniently selected sample of women. The study was conducted among women who visited primary health clinics (PHCs) in Gaza City. A total of 390 participants who met the selection criteria answered the self-administered questionnaires. We used SPSS version 24.0 to analyze the data. The findings suggest that the practice of BSE among women in Gaza is low, with only 40% of the study participants reporting that they never practiced BSE before, even though 76.7% reported that they were aware of BSE. In general, the main barriers to BSE practices were that participants had wrong perceptions and lacked knowledge about BSE. Others also reported fear of detecting breast cancer as a barrier. The practice of BSE among Palestinian women in the Gaza Strip is low and marred with trivial issues as barriers that could be eliminated with dedicated and extensive educational campaigns in the area. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]