Version imprimableThinking about Palestine today
For more than a century, Palestine – the land and its people – has endured a colonial, imperialist, and genocidal project established and sustained by world powers and regimes. This process began with the first Zionist settlements on Palestinian soil in the late 19th century, continued with the British Empire’s Balfour Declaration of 1917 – which ignored the rights of the indigenous Palestinian population in favour of the colonial ambitions of European settlers – and with the Nakba of 1948. Currently, this is being consummated with the intensification of the genocide in Gaza and the escalation of Zionist colonial violence throughout Palestine, especially in the West Bank.
What began in the 19th century and has continued to this day is a permanent Nakba: a persistent project of displacement, land theft, erasure of Palestinian identity, and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people, with the aim of eliminating Palestinians from existence and building an imperial and colonial entity on the ruins of their homes and their bodies.
Israel must be understood as a Zionist and colonial regime framed within the structures of racial capitalism. Capitalism is inherently racialised. Its existence is intrinsically linked to racial hierarchies that result in the systematic oppression and exploitation of racialised people, non-white people, and communities in the Global South. This is an economic system that cannot be sustained without the continued subjugation of these communities and their exploitation at all levels, something which highlights its essentially unjust and unequal structure.
Apartheid, for its part, is another manifestation of the violence inherent in settler colonialism and cannot be addressed without considering the deeply rooted dynamics of racial oppression and exploitation. In Palestine, from its inception, there has never been settler colonialism detached from capitalism, nor capitalism without its racialising dimension.
Therefore, from an analytical standpoint, I believe that the framework of apartheid and human rights from a liberal perspective must be profoundly and radically questioned. Apartheid as an end in itself is limiting, as it is part of a much broader and deeper system of structural violence. It describes a legal situation of segregation, but does not explain the colonial project on which it is based. It refers to a regime of legal and institutionalised separation and oppression, like the one that existed in South Africa, but in the case of Palestine, Israel not only segregates and discriminates, but also displaces, eliminates, and replaces the native population. This is known as settler colonialism, in which the goal is to erase the indigenous population and replace it. Apartheid organises discrimination within the system, while settler colonialism aims to eliminate the native population as the foundation of the system.
Legal language fails to capture the full scope of the Palestinian experience, as it all converges on the colonial settlement regime that culminated in the Nakba. As Rabea Eghbariah states:
The Nakba must be understood as a crime and given recognition within the international legal framework (...) Palestine can only be accurately understood through the concept of the permanent Nakba, a flagrant crime against humanity that is intertwined with the crimes of apartheid, genocide and indefinite occupation, but which at the same time constitutes an indelible tragedy with its own foundations, structures and purposes. For the Palestinian question to be truly resolved, the international community must confront the reality of the ongoing Nakba. Recognising the Nakba as a universal concept—recognised and prohibited by international law—is therefore the first step toward a just and lasting solution in Palestine. (Rabea Eghbariah, 2024).
The feminist movement in Palestine
Feminism is not a Western invention: authenticity versus tradition, imported feminisms versus local feminisms
In the Palestinian context, the feminist struggle has always been a key element of the anticolonial liberation struggle: one has not existed without the other. Therefore, one cannot reflect on a local and situated Palestinian feminist movement without considering the context of the anticolonial struggle in which it has always been embedded. Thus, there is an interrelation or dialectical tension between national struggle and social struggle (Kandiyoti, 1991; Sayigh, 1981).
The national liberation movement has in certain contexts represented an obstacle for feminist organisations when the struggle for national freedom has been prioritised over the social and gender agenda. Furthermore, the persistence of a traditional and patriarchal conception of gender has also been present in mixed struggle spaces, where women activists, despite playing a fundamental role in the organisation of resistance, have been relegated to tasks associated with care or domestic work, responsibilities that guaranteed both the reproduction of life and the continuity of the movement (Giacaman, cited in Sabbagh, 1996; Hasso, 2005; Jad, 2018; Kuttab, 1989; Taraki, 2006).
Faced with this reality, from 1978 onwards Palestinian women promoted non-mixed spaces in order to articulate their own feminist agenda linked – but not subordinated – to the struggle for national liberation. The most emblematic example was the creation of the Palestinian Federation of Women’s Action Committees, which operated within a secular and left-wing Marxist framework and which would come to have representation in the four main ideological and political currents of the PLO (Jad, 2018), the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) , the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP), the Communist Party and Fatah, each of which had its own women’s committee and non-mixed spaces (Kuttab, 1993: 73).
This framework of resistance opened spaces for political self-organisation that fostered the emergence of a feminist consciousness among activists, marking a turning point with respect to the forms the feminist movement had previously taken. This earlier movement, spanning from 1903 to 1948, had a distinctly welfare-oriented character, with charitable associations comprised of urban, upper-middle-class women who provided support to refugee families and prisoners.
In contrast, the feminist consciousness that developed in the late 1970s was articulated from a perspective that addressed issues of class, gender, and nation in a simultaneous and interconnected way, and which has endured to this day (Giacaman, 1996; Jad 2018; Kuttab, 2010). This feminist consciousness reached its peak during the First Intifada, when the Palestinian women’s movement played a crucial role in both political resistance and the construction of social alternatives. Through popular committees and grassroots organisations, especially those linked to the left, women not only assumed key responsibilities in coordinating the struggle, but also created networks of mutual support and self-sufficiency, particularly in rural areas affected by curfews. These initiatives include alternative education, sexual and reproductive health, support for the families of martyrs and prisoners, community gardens, and boycotts of Israeli products. Within this framework, empowerment was not conceptualised from an abstract or liberal theory, but rather practiced collectively and on a daily basis, placing at its core the right to autonomy, freedom of movement, and public participation for women. The feminist strategy adopted an intersectional and interconnected perspective that simultaneously addressed the dimensions of class, gender, and colonial occupation, involving urban, rural, and refugee women in a shared emancipatory project.
This process of collective empowerment – of an ascending, transformative and anti-colonial nature – had as its simultaneous objective the liberation of the land and the transformation of social and gender relations. Through women’s participation in production cooperatives, literacy programs, and vocational training, the movement challenged patriarchal hierarchies in both the public and private spheres.
Thus, despite tensions with the dominant national agenda, which often subordinated feminist demands, women seized the space opened up by the mobilisation to introduce a gender consciousness. This radically contextual feminism, constructed and shaped by the material conditions of the occupation, redefined the very concept of empowerment as a collective and dialectical process of personal and political liberation. It sought popular and mass mobilisation in the struggle. Ultimately, as Peteet (1991) points out, women’s political participation not only modified the relations between men and women, but also profoundly transformed the relations among women themselves.
In those revolutionary years, the feminist social agenda was not debated in theoretical terms, but rather practiced. For example, the demand for women’s right to movement. We stayed out until midnight or one in the morning walking through the streets; there were women in the demonstrations. We travelled from one place to another. There was a real practice of our feminist demands. (interview with Soraida Hussein)
On the other hand, Palestinian scholars have extensively theorised as to how Israeli structures of oppression have hindered the relationship of Palestinian society to women and sexual and gender dissidents, who constitute a discriminated group and bear the heaviest burdens (Hammami, 1995). This stems from a system of dual oppression: on the one hand, the violence and displacement imposed by occupation and settler colonialism, and on the other, the patriarchy within society itself. For example, several studies have shown that during periods of intense Israeli control (such as road closures, mass arrests, or the imposition of curfews and collective punishments), rates of patriarchal violence were higher. Furthermore, some authors argue that the occupation expands or lays the groundwork for reinforcing the subordination of women to traditional gender roles, due to the increased persecution of politically active women by Israel.
In this context, sexual harassment, threats, and imprisonment became common practices of the Israeli army to obstruct popular resistance (extensively researched by Abdo, 2014; Hawari, 2019). At the same time, feminist epistemology and activism are acutely aware of the global framework of Islamophobia that was consolidated in the war on terror. Orientalism and its legacy have been widely criticised because they served to reinforce the old colonial mantra that establishes the superiority of the West and legitimises forms of European domination. The dogmas of orientalism—backwardness, harem, exoticism, tradition, conservatism, religion—not only place the West in a position of moral superiority over the East, but have also justified military control, colonialism, hegemony, and military interventions, the consequences of which for people’s material lives endure to this day.
Arab feminists, and in this case those from Palestine, have examined how the construction of otherness, which is explained by orientalism, is achieved through the bodies and agency of Arab and Muslim women and LGBTQI+ subjects. Thus, they have worked from the academic field and activism to break the myth of "the Arab woman as a passive victim of her culture and religion", showing the multiple forms of agency of Arab women and questioning liberal notions from a critical and decolonial perspective. Furthermore, feminist epistemology and activism have demonstrated that liberation from oppression and empowerment have different meanings in Palestine. What does it mean to be oppressed? What does it mean to be empowered? Who defines the concept of political agency? What agenda does it serve? How do these categories change when taken out of the context in which they were created?
Are emancipation, equality, and rights part of a universal language? Could there be other desires that are more meaningful to different groups of people, such as living without war or violence? (Lughod, 5: 2006)
Beyond orientalist binaries and the Western culturalist view that presupposes a lack of feminist emancipation due to supposed conservative culture and Islam, postcolonial feminists introduce other fields of analysis to understand the oppression of women, such as authoritarianism, patriarchy, the State, military interventions, imperialism, and the need to engage with culture critically. Feminisms navigate by challenging the rigid categories of modern versus traditional, seeking their own feminism through radical criticism of neoliberal and neoconservative agendas and policies. This feminism critically analyses gender as a marker of the geopolitical battlefield, pointing out that inequalities must be understood within the contexts of colonisation and military interventions. To understand how the feminist movement in Palestine has evolved from the First Intifada and the structures of agency and emancipation established there to the present day, one must examine the Oslo Peace Accords.
The neoliberal paradigm of peace, the rise of Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs), the Palestinian Authority and Oslo, or how history repeats itself
The Oslo Accords, signed in 1993 between the PLO and the State of Israel, were presented as a peace process, but in reality, they constituted a new, covert colonial strategy aimed at neutralising Palestinian resistance, consolidating Zionist colonial structures, and intensifying control and violence over Palestinian territory. They marked the definitive end of the First Intifada, laying the groundwork for even deeper Zionist colonisation—a process that has been interpreted as a determining factor in the outbreak of the Second Intifada.
Oslo thus represented the gateway to the dominance of the neoliberal paradigm, in which the Israeli colonial regime instrumentalises the discourse of neoliberal peace, through which the number of NGOs increases dramatically in response to the notion that the conflict had ended, that we were in the post-conflict era and, therefore, it was necessary to focus on reconciliation.
Thus, the process shifted from a framework of revolutionary struggle for the liberation of the indigenous Palestinian people to the normalisation of relations with Israel and, de facto, its recognition. In this sense, Oslo represented what Tabar describes as war by other means. And, ultimately, a process without peace, without rights, without justice, and without decolonisation.
The Oslo Accords and their impact on the feminist movement
Oslo had a negative impact on activism and the feminist movement, which was reconfigured around NGOs. It led to a significant demobilisation of feminist and grassroots movements due to professionalisation—referred to as NGO-isation—linked to the so-called development industry and the donor regime, in order to preserve and sustain the newly created Palestinian Authority (PA).
What we understand by NGO-isation implies not only the adoption of neoliberal trends in discourse and demands, but also the control of priorities and the political agenda considered most important. It distances itself from the autonomous structures of feminist and grassroots mobilisation generated during the First Intifada to apply a mercantilist and capitalist approach with the mantra of dividing projects between what is considered political and what is considered technical.
Thus, we move from a notion of popular and collective empowerment, of popular mobilisation, rooted and situated in its own context (the case of the First Intifada), to an individual dimension characteristic of capitalist neoliberalism.
At that time it was said:
Leave politics to the politicians and focus on your experience as professionals. We have to empower women through the law, through education. Improve women’s capabilities, but let’s not talk about Zionist colonialism, racism or patriarchy. Let’s only talk about male violence. (Samia Butmeh, 2023)
Main current trends and errors in approach in gender projects: how the hypervisibility of male violence displaces colonial violence
It seems that some of these institutions have a misconception of what women’s liberation means, since they base everything on the idea of political participation. I think it’s time they learned from the feminists in Gaza, in Arab countries, in Muslim countries, what we understand by feminism. For us, feminism means justice, it means the liberation of our territories, because I cannot imagine how to develop my rights if I cannot travel more than two kilometres in my own country. (interview with Raya Ziadah, 2023)
The requirements of empowerment established by multilateral organisations have shortcomings. The concept itself, although born in the 1970s with very radical ideas linked to feminist movements, has shifted towards individualism, both economically and politically. According to the Arab Human Development Report on Gender, three vectors must be promoted to achieve the empowerment of Arab women: incorporation into the labour market, education, and individual rights.
But are we talking about quality public education? When we refer to work, are we talking about salaried employment or the informal and underground economy? The defence of individual rights overlooks the mutual support networks of family systems which, in contexts like Palestine, where there are no state or public services, are essential for collective and community life.
The problem is not the vectors themselves, but that when these programmes are applied in another context, they are not created and designed by the women of the communities themselves, but are based on preconceived notions of what political agency is, one that is developed in a European context and then universalised and intended for application in any context, without taking into account its specificities.
For example, the issue of agency in Palestine does not lie with women. The problem lies in the structures that surround and marginalise women, regardless of their skills. Even if all Palestinian women had doctorates, they would not enter the job market because there is no job market to enter, as Samia Buthmeh argues. Furthermore, the notion that access to the labour market is inherently emancipatory is problematic because it is based on a model of the middle-class European woman who finds personal fulfillment in her work and has a decent wage that makes her independent. But work is not emancipatory in itself; to be so, it must be accompanied by labour rights (Tabar, 2005 and Abu Lughod, 2013).
Another important trend is understanding gender equality as formal and institutional political participation. Therefore, projects have incorporated training for women in political advocacy. The fact is that, despite being aware of their rights, the possibilities for structural transformation are limited due to the context of settler colonialism in which they find themselves and because the Palestinian Authority (PA), in its alliance with Zionism, uses sexual and gender violence as a weapon of political deterrence.
On the other hand, there is a noticeable increase in the visibility of gender-based violence. Thus, in recent years, there has been a trend among Palestinian NGOs, academia, and international donors to prioritise the fight against gender-based violence over other issues, focusing primarily on reforming the so-called "Family Status Law" and Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW.) However, the excessive reliance on the legal framework has had the pernicious effect of confining, delimiting, and limiting Palestinian political struggle and imagination. An illustrative example is “how the dispossession of Palestinians is defined as a violation of human rights and not as part of the colonial project” (Lena Meari Al Assad, 2022).
If we delve a little deeper, the hyper-visibility of the human rights discourse focused on the fight against sexual and gender violence is an approach that simplifies and flattens the perceptual fields through which misogynistic violence becomes visible.
What were once marginal feminist concerns about the severity of various forms of gender-based violence and the silence surrounding these harms now occupy a central place in the powerful global networks of institutions and practices that have redefined governance, human rights, development, and humanitarianism, in line with post-9/11 global security reasoning. Therefore, there is a direct relationship between the increasing securitisation of global societies and the loss of freedoms at the geopolitical level after 9/11, known as the War on Terror, and the hypervisibility of the human rights discourse focused on the fight against sexual and gender violence (Kevorkian, Hammami, Abu Lughod, 2023).
Gender-based violence (GBV) has become a powerful agenda within international governance and law. It has become increasingly integrated into state sovereignty and global security practices. However, there are a number of claims to deeper truths about race, gender, and violence. Today, gender violence and its perpetrators are located in remote, wild, and racialised places; the victims suffer the unique violence of bodily violation, and the liberal West (including its invading troops and peacekeeping forces) is the chosen agent for their protection and rescue (Abu Lughod, Hammami, Kevorkian, 2023).
The regulatory/biopolitical project of gender-based violence against women (GBVAW), which has evolved over the last twenty years, reproduces ontological divisions. Now it is not only “white women saving brown women from brown men” (Spivak) who organise the agenda, but a vast apparatus that includes an army of UN bureaucrats, international NGOs, humanitarian workers, private security firms, military specialists, UN peacekeeping missions, human rights lawyers and high-level governance experts (Abu Lughod, Hammami, Kevorkian, 2023). Ultimately, gender violence conceals the established complicity, directly or indirectly, with imperialism in the production of the very violence that feminist activists try to prevent, mitigate, or eradicate (Abu Lughod, Hammami, Kevorkian, 2023).
Recommendations for improvement that gender projects in Palestine should take into account
We need to take into account material reality, conduct a thorough analysis of power, and not remain within the premise of neoliberal feminism that states that "the greater the entry into the labour market and the greater the professional preparation (skills), the greater the gender emancipation" (Butmeh, 2023; Assad, 2023; Tabar, 2023). As has been shown, mere penetration into the labour market and training in political advocacy does not address the structural roots of the violence detailed here, which are an obstacle to the agency of Palestinian women.
Tangible changes are being observed in the sense that women from the Global South are no longer represented as passive victims thanks to the struggles of Global South feminisms and transnational feminism (Talpade Mohanty, 2003). Increasing attention is being paid to women’s capacity to make decisions and choices based on circumstances. However, this shift can become trapped in a narrow emphasis on agency if it fails to challenge the racial and capitalist hierarchies inherent in development: it ends up managing survival within an oppressive system, rather than transforming the structures that produce violence.
Therefore, it is imperative to understand agency differently: as operating and rooted collectively rather than in neoliberal individual meritocracy. For this reason, it is essential to foster the generation of movements that oppose the neoliberal model, demand the redistribution of resources, question the functioning of markets, and confront the violence of the neoliberal democratic state (Wilson, 2017).
In this context, accountability must be incorporated as a tool for decolonisation or the transformation of development (Linda Tabar, 2017), and we must begin to talk about reparation and compensation policies.
Likewise, empowerment projects that are alienated from the local context must be eliminated, and priority must be given to those that strengthen collective learning and knowledge, survival strategies, mutual support and politicisation, taking up the experience of the self-managed cooperatives of the First Intifada: as a unique form and key practice of anti-colonial emancipation of land liberation and gender emancipation movements. Thus, the creation of their own economy should not be conceived in purely economic terms of investment/profit, but rather as a form of self-management and sovereignty in order to boycott Israeli products and produce their own as an alternative to the Israeli market. Furthermore, they need to become a network of economic and community support within an anti-capitalist framework. Reclaiming the model of the First Intifada in this way is a unique form of anti-colonial agency and struggle.
Therefore, it is key to recover established and collective indigenous knowledge, which conceives of women’s empowerment as a lever to challenge existing structures, rather than a simple rise within established hierarchies. Recovering indigenous forms of feminist struggle in which the feminist movement prioritises the cause of prisoners, martyrs, the union struggle, rural-urban articulation, the creation of mutual support networks for the reconstruction of houses demolished by Zionism, alternative education, the defense of the territory and the sustained and widespread grassroots popular mobilisation is key.
We must stop considering Palestinian women and sexual and gender dissidents as subjects claiming rights and understand them as a political agent inscribed in a larger cause of liberation of the territory, the body and the class. We need to support a local, established, and radical emancipatory feminism that addresses power in an intersectional and systemic way. Especially in a context where international law, as Fayrouz Sharqawi points out, “operates in an elitist way, distant from the people, and is designed for a white audience— with Europe being Israel’s great accomplice.” Therefore, feminist and gender-sensitive projects must place the defence of land at the heart of their interventions: strengthening the resilience of those who sustain Palestinian agriculture and supporting them in the face of the multiple forms of violence stemming from the Israeli occupation. Furthermore, it is essential to support the systems of solidarity and indigenous resistance that developed in agrarian communities and are still practiced today. As Samia Butmeh states, “Land is at the heart of the struggle; the conflict is about land; if you don’t protect it, you lose it. It’s a political issue.”
Therefore, it is imperative to dismantle these oppressive systems and build structures of global reciprocity from a decolonial and anti-racist praxis, assuming that what is occurring in Palestine exemplifies the colonial, authoritarian, security-driven, and fascist drift that runs through the Western world. It is essential to promote a critical understanding and collective action committed to the decolonisation and liberation of Palestine and all the peoples of the Global South subjected today to the violence of colonialism, racism and racial capitalism. At this historical moment, anti-colonial decolonisation requires the complete dismantling of the Zionist and colonialist apparatus, as well as the Palestinian Authority and its neoliberal regime, and guaranteeing the repatriation of the land (Tabar, 2017: 11). And, above all, it requires respecting the claims, the narrative, and the struggle of the Palestinian people for their freedom.
As Samia Butmeh states, Palestinian women “must resist colonialism not because we want peace but because we want liberation and freedom – through armed and unarmed struggle and boycotts.” It is imperative that allies respect this approach.
Translated by David Fagan for International Viewpoint from Vientosur Number 200, March 2026 / Translated from Catalan by Loles Oliván Hijós for Vientosur.
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