Thursday, February 13, 2014

Women's Role in Peace Building


I was asked to prepare a presentation about the role of women in peace building , my role as a Palestinian activist, as a woman….
I was as usual taken into two poles, I found myself writing about myself as a Palestinian and about myself as a Moslem.
Even though I tried to put the role of the women in both sides, each time it made me more confused . maybe being a Palestinian and an Arab Moslem is confusing enough, but being a woman in the middle of these two concepts is far too complicated .
I realized later , that being a Palestinian by itself is too close to being a woman , the same struggle of us as a nation, is the same enduring life we live as women .
It is accompanied with pain, suppression and injustice,
We as Palestinians have always felt that we are simultaneously shapers and victims of history.. interchangeably the affliction and the cure. …Palestinians have always been excessively prone to tragedy and dark nights of the soul, never beyond a bit of mischief making .

Being a woman , by itself is a lifetime role, a role that starts with production, giving life, nourishing , raising and handing life to a whole existence.
In my society, a woman is caught up between her responsibilities and obligations, between her privileges and her commitments. Between preserving culture and moving towards modernization
Women can understand easily what it is like not to be free. they understand how it is possible to put on a brave face for the outside world when u are screaming for help inside.

Amid all this we find ourselves trapped inside a web of patriarchal scheme that managed to manipulate us in all aspects of life. It managed to make us submissive to its power even though we are convinced of its impotency .
However, Palestinian woman seemed to amaze me in her whole path of struggling towards her national cause .
But each time I surf inside this history, this life of ours as women, I come out with this short sentence,
This nation can never rise as long as its women are not liberated.
And women can never be liberated until they decide to liberate themselves.



Living in a liberated free society was a dream that was
nurtured up with us as we had our first gasp of air on this existence.

Living in the historical Palestine was what I sought to attain, and was what I wanted my children grow up in the future.

When the first Intifada ruptured, I was besieged with the determination of my people, for the resistance, for the supremacy of the confrontation , the power of the stone .
I was around 15 then, to my mother’s luck, what should have been the explosion of a teen nightmare, thinking of boys, turned into a nationalist cause.
I remember sensations of liberation of Palestine and ending the occupation through a spirit that was so expectant, prevailing, so genuine that we were ready to sacrifice our souls for that national cause.

For all my life I was longing to say to the world without being scared that I am Palestinian, that I am from a place called Palestine without having to explain what and where is Palestine ,and why I am holding a different temporarily travel document .
My dreams as a Palestinian youth were as uncomplicated as saying loud I BELONG TO THIS NATIONALITY . I am not Jordanian, not Israeli, not Egyptian, not Lebanese, I am a Palestinian .

But the simplest dream , was and is still so hard to achieve.
As those years of adolescence moved to adulthood, so was the trance of liberation.

As a grown-up, my utmost disenchantment was Oslo, even though ,I was proud that lastly my delusion of seeing my own flag in my country, even not in my own home in Jerusalem, but over there so close in Jericho, finally , I could say I am Palestinian and the world would comprehend .

But I was so petrified of those accords, Palestine for me wasn’t the green line borders, Palestine for me starts in Gaza and ends in the Galilee,.
I was so concerned with those agreements, those negotiations about the refugees and Jerusalem ,the settlements. about what to give up and what to keep .
I was always adage so as to ,encompassing a peace treaty is fine, to take something back is also good, to have Arafat inside Palestine was far beyond my best imaginings, but I didn’t want them to give up what the future generation may be able to take back . I sought that the next generation would be able to assert its rights if it determined to .

It wasn’t Arafat or anyone’s right to decide what to give up,to make a decision for what is Palestine, to decide for the refugees .
I wanted my children to be able to have a ground, a foundation , a cause just enough to claim back .
But things never go as we aspire.

As a teenager, all what I bear in mind were those days that we were implicated in dreaming of our liberation, it reflected our behaviors, actions, our clothes , our lifestyle,
Life inside the Palestinian life would start every day at 9 and ends at 1 noon. One could hear the clicks of the doors as they collectively open and close up at the same instance each day for years to come .
I had no idea if there was a life different from that of the intifada, whatever the older people recalled seemed to be a part of an Egyptian black and white movie.

When started ,the intifada brought together seemingly incompatible components of Palestinian society, charging them with creating an alternative social, political, and national order , free of deformations of the Israeli occupation.
There was the rise of this human spirit that rejects intimidation and defeat.
It was only when we refused dehumanization that we placed the occupiers on a course of recognition. We hoped that ultimately it would understand that its freedom lay in affording ours.

Despite the pain, the anguish, the breaking of bones, the beating , and the killing that was endured by the intifada, there was a sense of high spirits that charged the atmosphere. We relished our power the strength of our will, which drew us together .
The intifada,uprising, or a shaking off, as if all of a sudden one wakes up and shakes something off. This massive and spontaneous popular uprising released our hidden or suppressed resources and energies and transformed them.

Women reconverged from all directions, teenage girls , middle –aged women, middle class women, professional women , older white-haired, all formed a chain of resistance in one voice, each from her own place.

The woman proved to be a powerful component, and asset in resolving the conflict.
She proved to have the power, capability ,charisma, eloquence that once man only took charge of .

When the Palestinian Israeli dialogue was developed in 1988, when communication inside a dialogue was absent , when each side brought his insulating bubble to the meetings to make sure that their voices were garbled and that they never make any human contact ,it was a woman who by exercising her option for directness and honesty, bringing with her an aspect of innocence of the intifada, its willingness to confront ,to take the initiative ,to assert itself, and not to succumb to intimidation, but most of all, bringing to the encounter ,and subsequently to all others, that one essential component that was to become the most salient quality of Palestinian political discourse:the human dimension.

A woman was the creator and speaker of the new language of the Palestinians.

I was growing up walking on the same track my life in the intifada set me on .
I was completely intolerant about the other side, I hated the jews, I refused to acknowledge them , I thought they were only temporarily in our life. And our national struggle would take some time , but our cause is so just , we will win at the end .

Oslo, and the pna, normalized our realities,
Suddenly, the enemies of just yesterday, became our partners in the casino, Israelis were dining in ramallah, and Palestinian cars were driving in Israeli dominated cities, life was becoming in such a harmony that we were about to forget all those miseries we went through .

As I became a mother , and my children were starting to grow ,
I started looking back at my childhood, my sisters who were younger than me were experiencing different kind of adolescence I didn’t know it existed .
For me their behavior seemed too explicit, their clothes, their hang outs, everything was bizarre to what was normal to me .

I was seeing a whole life ahead of me , different from how I thought it was .
I was starting to raise up my children on the same intolerance I lived in , when I stopped suddenly at that angle where I faced myself with a new reality.
Those other non existing people are getting closer and closer to my life, how can I keep ignoring them, we go to the mall, we exchange business with them, my children were dealing with them in the swimming , that mother was talking to me, she was even agreeing with me on the oppression and inhuman acts against my people from hers. Many interactions that made me see things differently .

I couldn’t be a hypocrite, I couldn’t pretend they don’t exist and deal with them at the same time, it wasn’t just business anymore, it was humanistic . It was humane like those old times when I used to play with Tali and Sharon my father's friend daughters from Tel Aviv..

Anyway,
So many things passed by,
Dreams turned into nightmares by the realities we turned out to be living in .
After Oslo, and the break of the peace talks,, the presence of what they called the Palestinian authorities gave Israel all the reasons to do what it means to be occupying .
Massive destruction, closures, killing, severe blockade , separation, oppression, all came face to face to what it means to live under occupation . as they say, we saw the real face of occupation in the past seven years , with the start of the second intifada.
As with every concept used in this conflict, all those stunning words are so consumed that they get deprived from their attractive meaning , like the word peace , so is the word intifada.
The second intifada was a consumed concept . that no longer stood for the same exquisiteness .

As years passed by, and as I saw my children growing up, I was getting closer to understand my behaviors, my dysfunctionality as a mother .
Part of it is how much I want to save my children from facing the same life. I was thinking about how much motherhood is such a unruly and keen act of subjugation that it takes my breath away at times. Our fear for our children makes us brave, and daring .and their vulnerability is our cowardice. when they hurt we suffer beyond reason and their joy is our delight.

I wanted my children to live in a better place. I wanted to provide them with safety. And security couldn’t come with denial.



I suddenly saw things differently, I realized that the intifada wasn’t as good as it seemed to be then . the intifada stole away what was supposed to be the best years of our lives .
I look at myself as a mother of a teenager , and I really don’t know how to deal with her , and I really cant remember how I behaved as a teenager ,and the reason is simple, I was never a teenager .
The intifada created a gap between us and between what was happening out there in the whole universe . I have been moving around myself to come to what was occurring in the Palestinian streets some months ago .
In one single day the whole Palestinian struggle, cause, fight for liberation ,and ending occupation went to ashes , when fateh and hamas struggle came to a bloody shed.
For me it wasn’t about analyzing the the ys and wheres , it was about what happened, it was all beyond justification and explanation.
We are a nation who only lived under occupation . we already know the occupation schemes ,their plans to destroy us, it is part of their mission, it is their mission .
And it was obnoxious and intolerable to blame the occupation for what was happening .
It can never be justified that we kill each other in cold blood, that we use the same tools the occupation has been using against us for decades, to do all what we resent and bring the world to witness its brutality.
It is true that it could be a very expected act .
What would the world expect from imprisoning a whole nation, boycotting a whole government, closing borders, proscribing a whole economy .
And yet it is unjustifiable.

After the second intifada, women role was remarkably held back. And took its old role of being behind the shadow of the society .
The same resisting woman was home being submissive to a patriarchal system that starts with a husband and ends in a five year old boy .
The once strong woman who faced a bulldozer and an army was driven back home with absolute weakness.
Women on political level, were held back, the once leading politicians whose views and words were striking tv screens ,became another political echo of a once again patriarchal autonomy/
Even though more women voices and roles are taking more places ,but nevertheless their effectiveness is disappearing .like every other effect in the society.




As a Moslem I was raised up believing that Islam came up to the world with enlightenment after an entire era of darkness, jahiliyya. Islam supported women issues, saved women from being buried alive, and bestowed them respect whilst they were denounced and deprecated.
Our prophet PBUH was married to Khadija who was 20 years older than him. he respected her, loved her and she was his only wife until she died.
His next closest to his heart was Aysha who was blemished by him, and loved, who conceded after his death his Shari'a through the colossal hadith that she shifted and explained.
Islam mentioned many remarkable women who marked the birth of Islam ; such as;'that innitakeyn', Asma bin abi bakr, Fatima the daughter of the prophet.
We grew up memorizing how women were granted justice because of Islam,
The prophet mentioned the women three times in his last speech before he died asking the nation to take care of women.
Growing up in a patriarchal society was something I could not experience through my father, but I saw it through my uncle, through the words my mother stuck into our brains ever since we were children.
Male’s dominance everywhere, and the only way out of it was through education was my mother’s motto.
It is kind of a strange bewilderment, to grow up believing in certain things, it is like real brain washing. I grew up as a good Moslem the Koran is my book, Mohammad Is my prophet and Islam is my religion. The more I learnt about it the more I grew fonder of that beautiful religion. I read the Koran on daily basis for over twenty years of my life, even though I never made it in the Shari' law for the whole four years in my university studies except through the second make up exam, but yet Islamic and Shari’ law remained my much loved subject. I read all those books about Islam about the greatness of Islam, the virtues, the morals, how to be a good Moslem, and how to reach out to God and to your Islam.
In addition, the role of woman, was always preserved in its right sacred place that God gave.
I lived in acceptance the fact that the wife should obey her husband unconditionally, the saying that says that if the woman is to worship anything after god, it should be the husband,
I obeyed without hesitation. The role of woman according to me and my teaching starts from building a healthy family , Islam virtue the woman in making her stay home and raise up her children, she has been entitled to carry the future with each child she brings to this world.

The struggle of women seems to be endless, women in some parts of the world are still practicing customs which amounts to slavery for millions of women. where women are sold as children into prostitution or into marriage. Child brides are sent to their husbands when the girls are young as eleven, they are given no choice .they are simply handed over by their fathers to the fathers of their future husbands.
Most of these girls go on to lead the life of a slave. they provide sexual services which endanger their health and they bear children long before their bodies are ready . they work from morning to night to serve their men and the other elders of the communities and they become aged before their times.

Luckily, we are given many rights. We are given the right of education ,which helped us reach out to seek for other rights .
However ,when it comes to marriage, even when it is our sole right, the drags of society are into much different than those extreme examples. But women are still enslaved in their daily lives by the patriarchal systems that rules.
I cannot move to what women role in peace building ,when women still don’t have the freedom to behave as equal human beings. We are still granted whatever we receive and we should behave with gratitude towards our provider (man).
However , women manage to slip into their own freedom when time allows.

Women’s right are not a grant men give to us, they are natural rights, not a gift that is condescendingly bestowed by man .
Our nation needs to liberate itself from within, and liberating cannot start as long as women are enslaved, granted rights.

Internal reform is the key to real freedom .and we can never move towards any reform as long our homes are still occupied by patriarchal structures that incarcerate and serve as a prison guard to the women.
We must have the courage to free ourselves from within as we struggle to free ourselves from external oppression.
Real slavery comes not from colonialism but from our own attitudes and internal disunity and corruption.
And as long as women are not rising up towards what is their right by nature not by gratitude we can never liberate ourselves.

The struggle for peace is long and difficult.
And in order to build peace, what is needed is not that every single Israeli and Palestinian trust and recognize one another , but a mind set, a commitment, and a political will to take the necessary and painful decisions ,and to make the inevitable and critical compromise.

It is not a question of principle or dignity; it is more of a threatening indication of a pattern of behavior, which lead through time to a proof of stupidity of man and the cruelty of submissive women
We want to save lives ,not to be patronized into submission. We do not want to be pacified with a kind word; the hard truth would have been kinder.
Women do have the vision and courage to take the first step as well as the will and nerve to make a difference.
WE NEED TO LIBERATE WOMEN .

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