The impact on women of the wars fought between the Israelis and Arabs since the proclamation of an independent Jewish state in 1948. During any national emergency, such as a war, women’s traditional roles in society are usually altered to meet the needs of the population in crisis. The Arab-Israeli conflict is no exception. For more than fifty years, Israeli and Palestinian women have fought with knives, guns, and bombs; they have formed clubs and associations to achieve peace; and they have fought against the traditional gender roles in Jewish and Arab societies. In other words, Palestinian and Israeli women have been fighting a multifront war: against each other, against those who wage war, and against their traditional roles in society.
Gender itself has been an important element of the conflict. For example, the Israeli prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, called on Jewish women to have at least four children each and stated that to do so was their duty and obligation to the newly established Jewish state. For Israeli women who had ten or more children, Ben-Gu-rion bestowed the title "heroine mothers" and distributed monetary awards. Palestinian women were considered to be the "mothers of the nation," and it would be through their reproductive prowess that the continued expression of a Palestinian reality would live on (Sharoni 1995, 34-35). For both Arabs and Jews, motherhood is seen as the highest expression of nationalism, sometimes referred to as "patriotic wombs" (Kandiyoti 1996, 91).
During the Great Revolt of 1936-1939, Palestinian women provided food, water, medical attention, and shelter for countless Palestinian guerillas, and they smuggled weapons through British checkpoints. During the Intifada (the Palestinian "uprising"; 1987-1993) Palestinian women threw stones, marched in protest, burned tires, and acted as field medics to the injured. Most recently, some Palestinian women have become suicide bombers. On January 27, 2002, Wafa Idris became the first Palestinian woman to do so. One month later, Darine Abu Aisha, an undergraduate at the Al-Najah University in Nablus, blew herself up at an Israeli army checkpoint.
Israeli women must serve two years in the military, yet the vast majority of Jewish women perform what are described as traditional womanly roles as they fulfill their obligations to the state in such positions as clerks, secretaries, typists, kitchen workers, and entertaining the male troops. The rest are loaned out to various Israeli government agencies to work as teachers, nurse’s aides, and other traditional womanly jobs (Sharoni 1995, 39). Israeli women in the military belong to a gender-specific organization called the Women’s Corp, referred to as chen in Hebrew, which translates as "charm and grace" (Sharoni 1995, 46). As Rachel Persico, who spent two years in the Israeli military, points out, "women are the auxiliary force." When the October War began in 1973, all women, civilians and those in the military, were evacuated from the conflict zone (Kandiyoti 1996, 117).
The Palestinian Women’s Union was the first all-woman Palestinian group and it was established in 1921 primarily to demonstrate against Jewish immigration and to halt Palestinian prisoners from being tortured by the British governing authority. The Arab Women’s Congress called on Arab women to form women’s groups throughout the country to fight politically against increased Jewish immigration in particular and the British Mandate in general (Sharoni 1995, 59).
Between the establishment of Israel in 1948 and the 1967 War, or the Six-Day War, Palestinian women continued to establish political organizations, such as the General Union of Palestinian Women in 1964. Yet increasing pressures from the governments of Jordan, Egypt, and Syria as well as the continued occupation resulted in a rather stunted political front. Nonetheless, Palestinian women found spaces for themselves in such political organizations as the Palestinian Women’s Association (1964), which sent delegates to attend the Palestine National Council in Jerusalem in 1965. Their work in the West Bank, however, was officially terminated in 1965 when King Hussein of Jordan declared that all organizations tied to the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) be officially disbanded (Sharoni 1995, 61-62).
When the Intifada broke out in 1983, numerous Jewish women’s organizations emerged such as Women in Black, Israeli Women against Occupation, Peace Quilt, Women for Women Political Prisoners, and Women’s Peace Net. Holding signs on Jerusalem street corners that read "Stop the Occupation" in Arabic, English, and Hebrew, the Women in Black endured verbal abuse and curses from others Jews, some with their own signs that read "The Women in Black Are Longing for Auschwitz" and "The Women in Black—A Knife in the Back of a Nation" (Em-mett 1996, 23 and 33).
Palestinian women, for the most part, did not articulate a collective response to the Israeli occupation during the Intifada in part because of the fight for control of the leadership of the Intifada that was taking place between the PLO and a relatively new group, the Islamic Resistance Movement, or Hamas. Nevertheless, it was during the Intifada that Jewish and Arab women first began on a massive scale to work together to bring an end to the Arab-Israeli conflict. For example, in 1989, Israeli and Palestinian women met in Brussels. At this meeting, the binational group decided on three principles: (1) Israel needed to deal with the actual representatives of the Palestinian people, (2) resolution to the conflict would only come from negotiations, and (3) there must be mutual recognition of peace and self-determination. In other words, these women embraced the two-state solution before any official representative of the Israelis, Palestinians, or Americans (Sela and Ma’oz 1997, 215).
Palestinian and Israeli women also fought to alleviate the social, economic, and political problems that Arab and Jewish women suffered as a direct result of the decades-long Arab-Israeli conflict. In the 1970s, Palestinian women’s organizations once again flourished as a result of increased Palestinian economic, social, and political pressure against the government of Israel. Educated women who had been born after the establishment of Israel or who grew up in areas under Israeli occupation formed the Women’s Work Committee (WWC) in 1978. The WWC first worked to identify the needs of Palestinian women under occupation, including educational resources and social services such as providing help against abusive spouses. Initially, the WWC was not affiliated with any Palestinian national movement, such as the PLO. When, however, some leaders of the WWC voted to join a rival PLO faction, the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the WWC fractured as the women decided to join up with other groups of varying political platforms (Sharoni 1995, 66).
During the Intifada, Palestinian women, such as the novelist Sahar Khalifeh, established Women’s Centers to help teach and train Palestinian women to read, write, and become involved in women’s issues that transcended the violence of the Arab-Israeli conflict. After the Intifada, Palestinian women continued to develop new organizations to meet the needs of the vast majority of Palestinian women who were in need of basic education and social services; however, those organizations split over disagreements of political ideology (Sharoni 1995, 83). In other words, the Arab-Israeli conflict transcended most Palestinian women’s efforts to maintain a unified Palestinian women’s organization.
Three young women from the suicide bomber unit of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade, Gaza Strip, 2004.
Jewish women who were disappointed at being assigned what were considered "traditional" womanly roles in the developing social, political, and economic strategies of Jewish communities in Palestine founded the Women’s Workers’ Movement (WWM) in 1911. These women emphasized their equality with Jewish men and called for men to recognize their important roles in developing their new society (Sharoni 1995, 91-92). Gender took a backseat to nationalism, and in 1930, the WWM became the Organization of Working Mothers; it brought legitimacy to gendered roles in society (Sharoni 1995, 93).
Between the establishment of Israel in 1948 and the 1967 War, the state limited Israeli women’s groups to serving the needs of an increasingly militarized, nationalized, and Zionist program. In other words, women’s goals, ideas, and pursuits were subjected to official government interference through which Israeli women’s roles in society were limited to what the state believed to be their natural or traditional roles, such as raising children, cooking, and cleaning (Sharoni 1995, 96). After the 1967 War, Israeli women’s groups typically embraced ideas and positions that were already widespread or popular among the Jewish population, for example, a Jewish women’s group called the Women of the First Circle protested in the 1970s against Israeli withdraw from the territories occupied as a result of the 1967 War. Israel’s first woman prime minister, Golda Meir, despised feminism. She referred to feminists as "those crazy women who burn their bras and go around all disheveled and hate men" (Sharoni 1995, 98-99).
Arab and Jewish women have also worked to bring peace to the region. Israeli women founded the Women’s Party in 1977 as both a political entity and as a mechanism to shed light on the plight of Israeli women and to link the problems that women in Israel faced to the larger Arab-Israeli conflict (Sharoni 1995, 104). Women against the Invasion of Lebanon and Parents against Silence were formed against the backdrop of the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon. Both groups articulated a political message and sought the immediate end of the Israeli occupation of Lebanon. Although these and other Jewish women’s groups disbanded after the Israeli army officially began its withdrawal from Lebanon in 1985, the Israeli invasion of Lebanon spurred the creation of new, permanent, and more militant Jewish women’s groups that continue to oppose the Arab-Israeli conflict and women’s traditional roles in Israeli society (Sharoni 1995, 108).
