INTRODUCTION

The occupation affects women and girls differently, as in any other conflict, accentuating the vulnerabilities suffered by women and girls. Palestinian women suffer, in their case, a double discrimination: as women in a system of patriarchal domination and as Palestinians in a system of colonial domination, apartheid racial segregation and Israeli occupation. The occupation exacerbates the former and is also the main obstacle to women’s emancipation and the protection and promotion of their human rights.

While boys and men face higher levels of physical violence by Israel, girls and women face greater difficulty in accessing education and health services, as well as ongoing gender-based violence and other specific situations such as limitations on inheritance and property rights or forced marriage of girls.

Boys and men are often victims of humiliation, torture, loss of livelihoods as a result of Israeli occupation practices and other practices that result in a loss of control or prestige that translate into anger, aggression or anxiety, all of which contribute to increasing and fuelling the cycle of violence that women suffer in their homes at the hands of their partners or family members.

However, women have not only been the emotional and economic support of families, but have also led the resistance to the occupation with non-violent strategies, through the transmission of values, memory and traditional knowledge despite the onslaught of Judaisation and Palestinian ethnic and cultural cleansing promoted by the Zionist Israeli state.

The different strategies of resistance led by women show us innovative practices of nonviolent resistance that we have documented through these narratives that seek, above all, to break Islamophobic stereotypes about Arab women and to make visible the reality of those who are active agents of change in an effervescent society committed to its historical legacy and to a future in struggle for their freedom and their rights as Palestinians and as women.