Edited by Nahla Abdo, and Ronit Lentin
"This is a brave and fractured book that bears the marks (and wounds) of conflictual histories and contemporary confrontations in Palestine/Israel....This unique book opens up new [meaning] of what Zionism and Israel have meant for Jews and Palestinians." -- Lila Abu-Lughod, Columbia University
"History and biography converge in this stunning collection of personal narratives. _Women and the Politics of Military Confrontation_ is testament to the urgency of dialogue between Palestinian and Israeli women. These essays probe the searing pain of life under Israeli military occupation and the complex sorrow of dislocation and exile. They push us to examine the limits of nationalisms, the moral scaffolding of the state of Israel, and the legacy of the Sho'ah. I know of no other work that so deftly expresses the tenacity of surviving, the daring of resistance, and the will to forge a just peace." -- R. Ruth Linden, University of California, San Francisco
"...powerful, moving, and revealing....This book is a must for anyone who is interested in the Israeli/Palestinian conflict and in issues of national and gender construction. The journeys and experiences of the contributors represent not only their own personal experiences as either Palestinian or Jewish women but also their respective national experiences." -- Tamar Mayer, Professor of Geography, Middlebury College, editor of _Women and the Israeli Occupation: the Politics of Change_ and _Gender Ironies of Nationalism: Sexing the Nation_
As the crisis in Israel does not show any signs of abating, this remarkable collection, edited by an Israeli and a Palestinian scholar and with contributions by Palestinian and Israeli women, offers a vivid and harrowing picture of the conflict and of its impact on daily life, especially as it affects women's experiences that differ significantly from those of men.
The (auto)biographical narratives in this volume focus on some of the most disturbing effects of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: a sense of dislocation that goes well beyond the geographical meaning of the word; it involves social, cultural, national and gender dislocation, including alienation from one's own home, family, community, and society. The accounts become even more poignant if seen against the backdrop of the roots of the conflict, the real or imaginary construct of a state to save and shelter particularly European Jews from the horrors of Nazism in parallel to the other side of the coin: Israel as a settler-colonial state responsible for the displacement of the Palestinian nation.
Contents: Introduction: Writing Dislocation, Writing the Self: Bringing Back the Political into Gendered Israeli-Palestinian Dialoguing -- Palestinian Women: Exile in Lebanon -- Home as Exile -- Life under Occupation -- Israeli Jewish Women: Exile as Home -- Exile as an Oppositional Locus -- Existential States of Exile
About the editors: Nahla Abdo is Professor of Sociology at Carleton University, Ottawa. She has published extensively on women and the state in the Middle East with special focus on Palestinian women. Among the publications is _Sociological Thought: Beyond Eurocentric Theory_ (1996). She contributed to the establishment of the Women's Studies Institute at Birzeit University and has found the Gender Research Unit at the Women's Empowerment Project/Gaza Community Mental Health Program in Gaza. Ronit Lentin was born in Haifa prior to the establishment of the State of Israel and has lived in Ireland since 1969. She is a well known writer of fiction and non-fiction books and is course coordinator of the MPhil in Ethnic Studies at the Department of Sociology, Trinity College Dublin. She has published extensively on the gendered link between Israel and the Shoah, feminist research methodologies, Israeli and Palestinian women's peace activism, gender and racism in Ireland.
2002. 336 pages, bibliog., index ISBN 1-57181-498-2 hardback $75.00/£50.00 ISBN 1-57181-459-0 paperback $25.00/£17.00
<http://www.berghahnbooks.com/titles/Abdo.htm> *****
Cf. Nahla Abdo, Ph.D., <http://www.carleton.ca/socanth/Faculty/NahlaAbdo.htm>; and Ronit Lentin, <http://www.tcd.ie/Sociology/staff.htm#lentin>
***** Maintaining Gendered Dialogues Across Conflictual National Identities Ronit Lentin June 2002
In 1999 I had the idea of compiling a book about the experiences of dislocation of Palestinian and Israeli women because of my interest in how diaspora and occupation experiences impact on women as gendered beings. I felt that the voices of feminists who have been affected by diasporicity of any kind, is one form of counter-narrative to the masculinist, nationalist narration of nation. My own work on the gendered relations between Israel and the Shoah [Holocaust], which I wrote about in Israel and the Daughters of the Shoah: Reoccupying the Territories of Silence (2000), centres on Zionism as a masculine construction, which, in the process of creating itself, silenced and feminised not only the Palestinians, but also the (Jewish) diaspora, and the Shoah and its survivors.
Very soon after I sent out a call for papers, I was told by Rosemary Sayigh, one of the contributors, that editing such a book without a Palestinian co-editor was tantamount to a re-colonisation of the lives of Palestinian women. With my anti-Zionist, feminist, anti-racist politics, I was embarrassed that I had to be told, and invited Nahla Abdo to co-edit the book. With her, it understandably became a different book.
Taking an anti-racist stance, realising that Zionism -- and this was not easy to say, even though I am an avowed anti-Zionist Israeli -- is racist, means that in the dialogue between us there could be no real equality. Because, despite the fact that some of the contributors, myself included, have a family history as Jewish refugees in Nazi occupied Europe, in Israel-Palestine we are the occupiers and the Palestinians the occupied. Zionism and the existence of the state of Israel as a Jewish state have different meanings for Nahla and for me. The challenge was almost too daunting. But in order for it not to paralyse us, we felt we must not fall into positions of moral superiority (of the occupied) or guilt (of the occupiers), but address them as honestly as we can, despite the pain involved.
In the resulting book, _Women and the Politics of Military Confrontation: Palestinian and Israeli Narratives of Dislocation_, I, an Israeli woman born in Haifa, Palestine, and living and working in Ireland for the past 30 years, and Nahla, a Palestinian born in Nazareth, Israel, and living and working in Canada, engage in a dialogue across conflicting national identities, questioning gender, feminism, nationalism and power, all the time aware of the power differentials between us, due, above all else, to the ongoing Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands.
The book is backgrounded by migration and occupation experiences as affecting gendered hierarchies not between women and men, but rather between Israeli and Palestinian women, both in 'the land' and in exile.
Throughout the process, we have attempted to keep bridges open despite the ongoing political conflict -- in particular the al Aqsa Intifada and the ensuing self-silencing of many Israeli feminists and other intellectuals, paralysed by what they see as the Palestinian 'betrayal' of the Israeli Left. The book, and particularly the introduction, written dialogically as a series of emails Nahla and I wrote to each other for about two years, keeps open conflictual dialogical possibilities between feminists even as our political priorities in relation to gender politics shift with the ebbs and flows of the larger political picture.
Challenging the occupation and its results for Palestinians, is, for me, the central point in making sense of women's experiences of exile, migration, dispossession and diasporicity. But challenging nationalisms and the question of whether feminism and nationalism are compatible highlighted our differences. Attempting to privilege gender divisions has not been easy: national agendas keep surfacing in complex ways through the debate as to the possibility of feminist and nationalist peaceful 'co-existence'.
For me there is a conceptual chasm between nationalism -- an exclusivist ideology - and radical feminism, hopefully an inclusive, transformatory ideology. As a feminist, I view nationalism as conceived by and for men, without taking into account either the experiences of women, or their active participation in national liberation struggles. I wonder to what extent Palestinian feminists, as Souad Dajani, another of our contributors, has proposed, can combine the gender and the national agendas. Or must this pose a split in these feminists' subjectivities, between their feminist selves and their national selves? Perhaps understandably, many Palestinian feminists do not want to relinquish the national agenda even as they struggle for gender equality in Palestinian society.
Nahla and I debate this in the introduction, as Nahla makes a distinction between Israeli nationalism, which she regards as suppressing and subjugating the very existence and identity of the Palestinians, and Palestinian nationalism, which she regards -- tentatively -- as still largely popular and non official and therefore as a possible/potential force for gender liberation.
We have been working on the book since late 1999, but at the beginning of the Al Aqsa Intifada, although we continued to talk, our dialogue changed as we deliberated the way forward. We asked the contributors to amend their chapters in light of the Intifada. Some Israeli contributors decided to drop out; others responded by saying they could not revise. Some Palestinian contributors never responded, others decided not to contribute in light of the objection to cooperation with Israelis; others wrote their chapters only after the Intifada broke out, and others again updated their chapters. Nahla and I continued our dialogue, but a major theme now was our disgust, if not surprise, at the self-silencing of so many Israeli feminists, who -- together with other Israeli intellectuals -- lined up with Barak's government. But we decided to continue with the dialogue, writing from the depth of our multiple diasporic positions, yet, hopefully, without constructing an ideal homeland, as exiles are often given to.
The resulting book is a fascinating, if disturbing, collection of women's stories of dislocation, but also of resistance. Essays by refugees and daughters of refugees intertwine with essays by leading peace activists, Israeli and Palestinian feminists who continue the struggle but also the dialogue in a climate of a near total support for the Israeli government's policies.
The Palestinian contributors, who are all united around the catastrophic impact al-Nakba has engraved on their lived memory, include Rosemary Sayigh, wife and mother of Palestinians, who has been living with and advocating the rights of Palestinian camp refugees in Lebanon, Souad Dajani and Samia Costandi, who have gone through the culture of dislocation in Beirut all speak of Israeli atrocities during the invasion of Lebanon in 1982 the horrors experienced by Palestinians during the massacres in Sabra and Shatila. Isis Nusair, Nabila Espanioly, Badea Warwar, and Nahla Abdo write of the experiences of women whose parents were internally dislocated and moved from one city or village to another within the state of Israel after its establishment, revealing the delicate struggle of Palestinian identity in Israel between maintaining their cultural and national identity, and their struggle to achieve social, civil, economic and political equality as citizens of the state. Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, originally a Palestinian citizen of Israel, has lived and worked in the West Bank for most of her adult life, while Mona El Farra and Hala Mannaa live in Gaza city - all three detail the destruction of homes, including refugee homes, uprooting of trees, destruction of roads and other infrastructural foundations, restriction of movement and death.
The Israeli contributors include veteran feminist activist Alice Shalvi, a former refugee from Nazi Germany. Rela Mazali, who tells the story of her mother's dislocation and her own multiple childhood experiences of strangerhood, and Gila Svirsky are both central activists in the Israeli feminist peace camp.
Academics Nira Yuval-Davis - who has chosen to live in Britain after a lifetime of anti-Zionist activism, and Ella Habiba Shohat - who critiques Zionism from the point of view of its (Arab) Jewish victims. Finally, Esther Fuchs and Ronit Lentin write about their life and work in light of their experiences as daughters of families of Shoah survivors.
Writing this piece in June 2002, as Israeli tanks are again positioned in West Bank towns, aware that Nahla's relatives in Ramallah were locked up in their houses without water or electricity, their children terrorised by the military presence, and that my relatives and friends in Haifa, Jerusalem and elsewhere, although they do have running water and electricity, were also terrified to leave their homes, Nahla and I continue to dialogue despite our deepening despair.
Ronit Lentin's book include _Conversations with Palestinian Women_ (1981), _Israel and the Daughters of the Shoah_ (2002), and _Racism and Antiracism in Ireland_ (with Robbie McVeigh, 2002). _Women and the Politics of Military Confrontation_ is published by Berghahn Books (order via their website: www.berghahnbooks.com).
<http://www.between-lines.org/archives/2002/jun/Ronit_Lentin.htm> ***** -- Yoshie
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