The women's movement in the struggle against the occupation

Although Palestinian women have been a key actor in the history of the Palestinian liberation struggle for more than a century, as human rights defenders for their people on an informal and organised level and as part of the Palestinian National Liberation Movement, formally, we know little about them. However, before the Zionist colonisation of Palestine was set in motion in the 19th century, women's organisations existed. ³.

The first record we have of a spontaneous protest by women to resist the construction of one of the first Zionist settlements of the time is from 1893. The Palestine that the first Zionist settlers found was more or less like any other structured, productive and modern society of the time. Social and cultural life was concentrated in the cities, although the economy was based on production mainly in the agricultural sector, particularly intensive crops (mainly olives and oranges). Many of the products exported came from rural areas where women enjoyed considerable power and freedom.

It is not surprising that the first actions of women's organisations focused on the constitution of a specific committee to study the situation of the peasant population, agriculture, trade and industry, and ended up pushing for the creation of an agricultural bank in those years. The real threat of imminent foreign penetration of Palestine following the publication of the Balfour Declaration (1917) and the conquest of Jerusalem in the same year, legitimised by the League of Nations agreement to establish a Mandate (1920) over the entire territory of Palestine that was handed over to the British Empire (1922), were the main reasons for Palestinian women to organise politically.

Popular uprisings took place throughout the period of British rule over Palestine (1917-1947): in 1920-1921 and again in 1929, until a general strike was declared in 1936, which led to the well-known Arab revolt of 1936-1939. It was all these circumstances that led women to mobilise politically and to create the first women's organisation for strictly political purposes in 1921, the Palestinian Women's Union (PWU). But fundamentally, it was these circumstances that led to the organisation of a strictly political women's congress in 1929, the 1st Congress of Arab Women of Palestine, held in Jerusalem, with the aim of developing a common policy of action in the face of the imposed reality. The Palestinian Arab Women's Association (PAWA) was created in 1929 with the aim of creating a large, unified women's movement to fight Zionism.

The story of the Palestinian women from the village of Baqa Al-Gharbiyyah who liberated all the men arrested by British troops in 1936 has become a legend engraved in the minds of the younger generation. Palestinian women also fought against Zionist gangs during the Nakba and defended their towns and villages alongside the men. When two thirds of the Palestinian population were expelled in 1948 and became refugees, it was Palestinian women who helped the men to wake up from the shock. They helped the men overcome their feelings of frustration and hopelessness at being made refugees. Their traditional role as family caregivers forced them to refuse to be consumed by the trauma of the Nakba. Instead, they managed to rebuild a sense of home and refuge within the refugee camps while teaching their children how to love Palestine and continue to fight for their right to return to the lands from which they were expelled. Women were and remain the guardians of the memory and identity of an entire people.

The political activism of refugee women in Arab countries between 1948 and 1967 gained strength in exile. The women's movement would organise and structure itself mainly in Lebanon. Many Palestinian women, however, began to organise within the new state of Israel, joining the Communist Party and the National Liberation League, as well as in the universities. Nazareth women formed the Women's Renaissance Movement, which later, in 1952, joined with progressive Jewish women's groups to form the Democratic Women's Movement in 1973.

In the Committee for the Establishment of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) in 1964, out of 422 participants in the Palestinian National Council, 45 were women and 21 participated as delegates. Three of them were to serve on the Palestinian National Council and two on the Preparatory Committee. Once the PLO was created, the General Union of Palestinian Women (GUPW) was born in 1956, which mobilised women politically and opened the debate on their rights within the liberation struggle. It was during the first intifada 1987-1993 that women were seen as a fundamental part of the resistance to Israeli colonisation, in many cases leading the protests and organising the logistics of supplies and care for their people's uprising. Since the popular uprising itself, Palestinian women have been on the front line: they rebel, distribute weapons and clothing to Palestinian resisters and are on the front line throwing stones at Israeli tanks.

On 8 March 1978, the first women's committee, the Women's Working Committee (WWC), was established, focusing on the specific rights of Palestinian women workers. Through this movement, it sought to strengthen the idea that women could be key to national emancipation while confronting patriarchy in their societies.
It was the Oslo Accords, signed in 1993, which were opposed by Palestinian women's organisations, that deactivated the women's resistance movement and transformed it into government departments of the newly created Palestinian National Authority, as well as dozens of NGOs and entities which, while maintaining a firm stance against the occupation, paid more attention to the democratic construction of a future state, the Palestinian state, which would take into account their role in the struggle for the liberation and rights of women and girls. In 1994, Palestinian women drafted the Women's Charter, which sets out the civil, political, social and economic rights of Palestinian women. This charter was never implemented due to the occupation and the weak structures of a Palestinian National Authority that was more a local assistant to the Israeli colonial project than the seed of a new state.

In 2000, the General Union of Palestinian Women (GUPW) decided to appoint the Union of Palestinian Women's Committees (UPWC) as the leader of the administrative council of the GUPW which, from then on, will try to revive the work of the fundamental structure representing all Palestinian women within the PLO, succeeding in establishing structures with a specific ministry and signing the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) and other international conventions and protocols for the protection of women's rights, resulting in the first National Strategy to Eliminate Violence against Women from 2011 to 2019.

Since then, the women's movement has undergone many changes, but it has always been a key factor, both within and outside the various factions of the Palestinian liberation movement, in sustaining the struggle against the occupation and Zionism for decades. As a result, they, like their male colleagues, have faced detention, torture, spying, physical and sexual violence by the occupier, as well as the consequences of a patriarchal structure that prioritises the struggle for liberation and puts feminist demands on the back burner.