Women’s Political Activism in Palestine: Peacebuilding, Resistance, and Survival

Abstract

Women’s Political Activism in Palestine is a timely intervention. In 2021 a new generation of Palestinian activists came into the global spotlight. Young influencers turned away from more established political avenues, using social media to broadcast the damaging effects of Israel’smilitary rule on everyday life in Palestine. Their narratives drew global attention to the injustices of Israel’s occupation, framing the Palestinian struggle alongside growing movements against racism and dispossession worldwide. As 2021 demonstrated, and as Sophie Richter-Devroe writes in her introduction, “the need to refocus and rethink what ‘doing politics’ really means in Palestine seems even more urgent today” (2). Her analysis of Palestinian women’s activism since the second intifada provides valuable historical and theoretical context to the shifting landscape of grassroots struggle across Palestine. Richter-Devroe joins many scholars who have retheorized Palestinian politics since the failure of the Oslo Accords, the intensification of Israel’s military rule, and the disintegration of Palestiniannational leadership (Hammami2006;Hasso2005;Kanaaneh2009; Peteet 2018; Shalhoub-Kevorkia 2015).By focusingonPalestinianwomen in theWestBank and East Jerusalem, Richter-Devroe clarifies how women continue the struggle for Palestinian liberation in ways that exceed the frameworks of secular nationalism or Islamism. Drawing on postcolonial and feminist critiques (Abu-Lughod 2000; Fraser 1992) of classic political theory (Habermas 1984, 1989), Richter-Devroe demonstrates howwomen engage in an “informal politics” enacted in quotidian contexts and through improvised, often private, practices (2): from anti-wall protests or commuting past checkpoints to sharing food with neighbors as settlers encroach on one’s land. In this way, Richter-Devroe’s method is ethnographic. Her data, based on fieldwork in theWest Bank and East Jerusalem between 2007and2009,derive fromscores of interviews, focusgroups, andparticipantobservations of political events with women from diverse crosscuts of Palestinian society.