This posting has these items:
1) MEE: Murder of Palestinian women exposes Israeli divide over domestic violence, domestic violence against Palestinian women in Israel is seen as ‘cultural’ by the Israeli judicial system;
2) author: UN Women – United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women”, despite its title this report focuses on sexual crimes against Palestinian women and the lack of a judicial system for holding the men to account;
3) Media Line: Rates of Rape and Sexual Violence High in Middle East;
4) warwick.ac: Palestinian Women and the Right to Rights, published in 2009, this review is the most thought-provoking item in this package;

Hundreds gathered in Jaffa, Israel on 28 October 2016 to protest the domestic murders of two Palestinian women that occurred earlier in the week. Photo by Haim Schwarczneberg

Murder of Palestinian women exposes Israeli divide over domestic violence

Since January 2016, 8 Palestinians and 7 Israelis have been killed in domestic violence related murders in Israel

By Mary Pelletier, Middle East Eye (MEE)
November 22, 2016

JAFFA, Israel – “There is nothing romantic about murder!” The phrase rang out loudly across central Jaffa on Friday 28 October, as hundreds of demonstrators carrying signs in Arabic, Hebrew and English took to the streets just south of Tel Aviv with a message: violence against women needs to end.

Earlier in the week, the Palestinian community in Jaffa had been overwhelmed by the murders of two female residents, Hawida Shawa, 44, and Huda Abu Sarari, 37.

The deaths of Shawa and Sarari occurred three days apart, Shawa having been found beaten to death in a car in the northern West Bank, and Sarari stabbed to death in front of family members in Jaffa. Police suspect that relatives of the victims were involved in each of their murders, adding their names to a growing list of Palestinian women in Israel who have been killed in similar circumstances.

Since January 2016, 15 women – eight Palestinians and seven Israelis – have been killed in domestic violence related murders in Israel. These figures point to a disproportionate number of Palestinian victims, as they only make up around 20 percent of Israel’s population. In many of these murder cases, family members (brothers, husbands, ex-husbands or relatives) have been accused of the crimes or being involved in their commission.

Fighting for equality on two fronts

The violence had become so widespread that on 6 October, Joint List MK Aida Touma-Sliman, head of the Committee on the Status of Women and Gender Equality, spoke out against police inaction at an emergency Knesset session. Touma-Sliman told Middle East Eye that crimes against Palestinian women are not treated in the same way as crimes against Israeli women.

‘Crimes against Palestinian women are not treated in the same way as crimes against Israeli women’

“Gender crimes against women are a problem that exist within all societies,” Touma-Sliman said shortly after the march in Jaffa. “What makes it a terrible situation for the Arab women is the fact that there is no serious effort put in to stop these crimes and to stop the escalation that is happening.”

Touma-Sliman explained that when a gender crime occurs in Palestinian communities in Israel, they are often seen as insular and receive less investigative attention than crimes that occur in Israeli communities.

Touma-Silman explained: “When a Jewish-Israeli woman is killed, usually the immediate questions that are raised are: ‘Has she ever complained to the police about violence?’; ‘Do the police or welfare offices know about her situation?’; ‘Have they dealt with her and, if so, did they do everything they could to help her?

“So it is immediately the responsibility of the authorities. When an Arab woman is killed, the media asks ‘What is the Arab leadership doing about it?’ – as if it is an internal issue that should be solved inside the community, that it is a ‘cultural’ issue when it is Arabs killing their women. This is a way to escape responsibility to women who are citizens of the state,” she added.

Along with Touma-Sliman, Samah Samaile is trying to change the way crimes against Palestinian women are treated by police and the authorities. Samaile is the founder of Na’am, a Palestinian women’s centre in Lod, about 25 kilometres southeast of Tel Aviv. She says that women are fighting for equality within their own patriarchal community, and outside of it, they are also fighting for equal treatment as Palestinian citizens of Israel.

“When I talk to police officers who say this is your culture, this is your identity, this is your tradition, I say no, this is not our tradition,” Samaile said. “This is violent men who want to control females around them, and they use this ‘tradition’ in order to make them feel good about what they are doing. And you [the police] are cooperating with them.”

Samaile told Middle East Eye that Na’am deals with a range of domestic abuse issues resulting from inequality between men and women in the Palestinian community, including helping young girls who might be forced into early marriage, to helping women finish their education or find jobs. But these issues are often exacerbated by unchecked violence in mixed communities in the centre of Israel.

“Lod and Ramle are known to be very violent cities in Israel, so there is no wonder that Arab women in these areas fall into the circle of violence,” she said. “We are struggling in two places – in our battle inside our society, we are making much more progress than the struggle against the Israeli authorities.”

At an emergency Knesset session, Chief Investigative Officer Dudu Zamir spoke on behalf of the Israeli police. He denied claims made by Joint List MKs that police forces were not following through on investigations, and reported that 40 of the 50 domestic violence complaints made in Lod in the past year resulted in indictments. He also said that in many of these cases, despite having the intelligence to pinpoint perpetrators, there is too little evidence to support murder indictment.

‘Treat Women Kindly’ is the message activists and community members gave in Jaffa, Israel on 28 October 2016 to protest the murders of two Palestinian women that occurred earlier in week. Photo courtesy of Haim Schwarczneberg

‘There is no honour in any crime’

Both Samaile and Touma-Sliman have been instrumental in galvanising community support against gender violence, which has been growing rapidly since September. After the murder of Dua’a Abu Sharkh, a 32-year old mother from Lod, Samaile helped to organise one of the largest feminist marches in Israel’s recent history on 30 September.

Over 500 men and women turned out to protest continued violence and lack of intervention by police.

Sharkh was separated from her husband and was finishing a pre-arranged visit with their children, who reside with their father, when she was shot by a masked man. The Israeli police have reported that four men, three of whom are relatives of Sharkh, were arrested following the murder. After her death, Sharkh’s family said that she had suffered violent threats from her husband for years, and had reported her concerns to the police.

Between 2006 and 2016, there have been 15 murder cases in the Lod and Ramle area involving Palestinian women, only three of which, Touma-Sliman said, had resulted in perpetrators being arrested and brought to trial. Lawmakers and community members have begun to see a lack of investigative action and punishment, setting a dangerous precedent for those who may commit similar crimes in the future.

“In that situation, there is a feeling among everyone who is violent against women, who is endangering a woman’s life, that he can do it and still continue with his life,” Touma-Sliman said. “And we know very well that punishment is one of the components of preventing the next murder.”

For years, Israeli authorities and media have been treating these crimes as “honour killings,” or “crimes of passion,” terms typically used to describe the homicide of a female relative for suspected sexual impropriety. In 2010, Joint List MK Ahmad Tibi proposed a law that would prohibit the use of the term, which he said described murder in a positive way. The bill did not reach a vote, but in the years since, authorities have curbed their use of the term.

What we are saying is there is no excuse for murder – not honour, nothing else’

“There is no honour in any crime,” Touma-Sliman said. “This term is not only refused by us because it is used as an excuse for the lack of action by the authorities, but it is also refused because it gives a kind of legitimisation to the murder itself, as if the murder had happened for a more noble cause. And what we are saying is there is no excuse for murder – not honour, nothing else.”

Preventing the next murder

Na’am is one of the few organisations in Israel that is dedicated to protecting, educating, and helping Palestinian women who are suffering from any kind of abuse. Salaime advocates for a holistic approach to her social work, creating networks among extended families, neighbourhoods and communities to form a larger support system. She is also well aware that many Palestinian women can be hesitant to report abuse to Israeli authorities or social workers, who make up the majority of the welfare base.

“Our struggle is like that for any other women in the Middle East,” Salaime said. “The Arab women [in Israel] are trapped between their communities, and from the other side we have the Israeli authorities, and if we seek help from them, we will be like traitors. Because we are a Palestinian minority, we have to manage our things inside, and not go to the Israeli policeman. This a red line to cross, and usually women cross that line only when they are really, really in danger.”

Rawan Bisharat, a co-director at Jaffa’s Sadaka-Reut Palestinian-Israeli Youth Partnership, has helped to organise community members in the fight against gender crimes Photo by Mary Pelletier/MEE

Just days after the march in Jaffa, members of Sadaka-Reut, the city’s well-established Palestinian-Israeli youth partnership organisation, were already gearing up for their next public protest. Rawan Bisharat, a co-director at the organisation, had helped gather local activists together immediately after Sarari’s murder the week before. She told Middle East Eye that their goal is to continue active dialogue about violence in their community.

‘When we say no violence, we mean all kinds of violence, not only killing’

“When we say no violence, we mean all kinds of violence, not only killing,” Bisharat explained “There are a lot of women, maybe at the demonstration or in their houses, who are dealing with violence but they don’t talk. It’s not only killing, it’s all kind of violence. We want life for women. No violence means ‘the right to live’.”

Basharat works with Israeli and Palestinian teenagers through various workshops and leadership programmes to discuss problems within the Palestinian community, the Israeli community, and ways that they can work separately and together to bring about positive change. But the key, she says, is extending this openness across different community resources.

“Last week, what I saw here in Jaffa was that, for the first time, a lot of organisations and schools and also the Jewish people from the municipality all gathered together for one thing,” Basharat said. “They all want to do something, because this is not only our [Palestinian] issue, this is an issue for our entire society.”

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Facts and Figures: Ending Violence against Women

Palestine

• The Palestinian legislative framework falls under four different systems (Israeli, Jordanian, Egyptian and Palestinian) according to geographic location. For example, East Jerusalem is currently subject to Israeli civil legislative jurisdiction [1].
• The Palestinian Legislative Council (the Palestinian parliament) has been paralyzed since 2007 [2].
• There are no specific laws or provisions in the oPt that protect women against domestic violence and sexual violence. Passing new laws, notably to protect women against domestic violence, or the amendment of existing laws that are deemed discriminatory towards women and in contradiction to human rights, remains hampered by the paralysis of the Palestinian Legislative Council [3].
• Provisions of the Penal Code in force in both the West Bank and Gaza Strip contain discriminatory provisions for women in relation to rape, adultery, and sexual violence committed in marriage. For example, if women are not able to provide/show evidence of “force”, “threats” and/or “deception” to support rape claims, they risk being criminalized for “adultery” [4].

Violence against Women and Girls

• 29.9% of ever-married women in the West Bank and 51% in the Gaza Strip have been subjected to a form of violence within the household; with 48.8% of women in the West Bank and 76.4% in the Gaza Strip declaring having been psychologically abused; 17.4% in the West Bank and 34.8% in the Gaza Strip physically abused; and 10.2% in the West Bank and 14.9% in the Gaza Strip sexually abused [5].
• 3.3% of ever married women report being exposed to psychological violence at barriers and inspection points from soldiers; while 0.6% report exposure to physical violence, and 0.2% report sexual harassment [6].
• 65.3% of women who were exposed to violence by their husbands declared preferring to remain silent; while 30.2% said they had recourse to their family, and 0.7% opted to seek the assistance of an institution (women institution or centre) [7].
• According to the Independent Commission for Human Rights and women’s organizations, 28 women were killed in the name of so-called “honour” in 2013, which signals a worrying deterioration and/or increased reporting, since in 2012, the reported number was 12 and in 2011, it was 8.

Access to Security, Justice and Social Services

• At present, there are 10 specialized Family Protection Units (FPU) operating in 10 districts of the West Bank – Hebron, Ramallah, Bethlehem, Jenin, Nablus, Jericho, Salfeet, Tubas, Tulkarem and Qalqilya – with the specific mandate to protect families, specifically women and children, and ensure that the rule of law is upheld.
• There are currently 4 anti-violence centres/shelters in Palestine: Mehwar Centre in Bethlehem, functioning under the umbrella of the Ministry of Social Affairs, the Family Defense Society shelter in Nablus, the Women’s Centre for Legal Aid and Counselling emergency shelter in Jericho and Al-Hayat Centre in Gaza.

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Girls and women denounce abuse against women by jihadists from the radical Islamic State group, on September 13, 2014 in the southern city of Basra. Photo by Haaidar Mohammed Ali/AFP/Getty Images

Rates of Rape and Sexual Violence High in Middle East

By Katie Beiter, The Media Line
November 27, 2016

Connection between political unrest and violence against women

This weekend, countries around the world marked the United Nations (UN) International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women. The World Health Organization says that at least one in three women worldwide will fall victim to some type of violence due to her gender. In the Middle East, the rate of rape, sexual violence and other forms of violence against women is high.

While countries like Jordan are embarking on ways to change legislation regarding sexual violence and rape, cases of violence towards women have increased dramatically in war-torn regions like Syria and Iraq as various groups and leaders vie for control.

“Violence towards women has risen since the Arab Uprising (a region-wide movement, which began in 2011, calling for greater freedoms and democracy),” Dr. Nihaya Daoud, a researcher at Ben-Gurion University, told The Media Line. “When you have political violence, you also get domestic violence.”

In Iraq, analysts say that the rate of sexual violence and rape skyrocketed after the Islamic State (ISIS) took control over Mosul in 2014, as the terrorist group captured many minority women, like the Yazidi, as sex slaves.

According to Trude Falck, the Middle East and North Africa expert for the Norwegian People’s Aid (NPA), a human rights NGO, rape is often used as a weapon during war and has been used by ISIS and other power holders in the region as a means of control. Refugees, like those fleeing the almost six year conflict in Syria, and other vulnerable members of society, often fall victim to sexual abuse.

The law in Iraq stipulates that if a man rapes a woman and takes her as his wife he escapes any type of legal prosecution.

“The stigma and Iraqi society punishes women and not men, so women don’t talk about (rape or sexual violence),” Bahar Ali, the director of the Emma Organization for Human Development in Erbil, Iraq, told The Media Line. “Most women are raped by husbands, I am sure of that.”

According to Ali, there is a law that criminalizes domestic violence in Iraqi Kurdistan; however, “there are very few cases in the courthouses,” Ali told The Media Line.

Intimate Partner Violence, IPV, which is physical, psychological, social, economic, or even verbal violence between partners, is also an issue in Israel. According to a new study conducted by Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, 40% of Israeli and Arab women aged 16-48 report being the victim of some type of IPV.

“Israel thinks that it is an ideal society and doesn’t think that these things happen, but this study shows that we are like any other country,” Dr. Nihaya Daoud, one of the researchers for the study, told The Media Line.

In the study, which was the first of its kind in Israel, researchers looked at all different types of IPV as well as external effects which might cause or perpetuate IPV. For example, the study noticed trends between violence in a woman’s neighborhood and violence in her home along with how the lack of a good social network in the community, i.e. having people who would help those who are victims, could perpetuate violence.

Daoud and other researchers found that the rates of emotional and social or economic violence are higher than are the rates of physical or sexual violence (4.6%); however, emotional or verbal forms of abuse often lead to physical.

“Violence against women is an issue in Israel,” Daoud said. “If you look at other health issues that women face like diabetes or cancer, those rates are much lower than violence.”

Women who experience IPV have higher rates of depression and anxiety, the study found.

While the study shows that many women are victims of some type of violence in their personal relationships, Daoud believes that the numbers cited in the study are a gross underestimation.

“It’s very hard to get the numbers (of sexually assaulted women) because women do not wish to admit that they have been raped,” Falck of the NPA, told The Media Line. “(In some areas in the Middle East) the moment you are sexually abused, you are not anymore considered to be a decent person.”

While the rates of gender-based violence continue to remain high, many believe that both awareness and legislation are necessary to change the stigma and to prevent these types of violence from occurring.

In observance of the UN day to eliminate sexual violence, Jordan has embarked on a campaign known as the 16 days of activism against Gender-Based Violence. The over two week-long event in Jordan began on the International Day to Eliminate Violence against Women and is scheduled to end on International Human Rights Day, December 10, 2016.

A major issue propelling campaign in Jordan is Penal Code 308, which states, similarly to Iraq, that if a man rapes or sexually assaults a woman under 18, he can escape prosecution by marrying her and staying with her for three to five years. While the Jordanian parliament recently amended the law by criminalizing rape within marriage, it still allows those individuals who sexually assault women to escape punishment if it was “consensual.”

Activists led by the Sisterhood Is Global Institute (SIGI), an international think tank devoted to women’s advocacy, say this law and amendment, which the government says they did to protect those victims from their families, needs to change.

While there is a push for change, some analysts are skeptical.

“Nothing much is happening, actually,” Mohammed Hussainy, the director of the Identity Center in Jordan, told The Media Line. “(This campaign) is limited to civil society groups and international organizations and social media, but it is not that public.”

“I don’t think we will see changes in the law,” Hussainy said.

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Palestinian women being arrested by six soldiers outside Al Aqsa. Photo by Getty images

Palestinian Women and the Right to Rights pdf file

Militarization and Violence against Women in Conflict Zones in the Middle East: A Palestinian Case Study by Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, Cambridge University Press, 2009 ISBN 978-0-521-70879-1

Review  by Nicola Pratt,  Reader in International Politics of the Middle East, University of Warwick 

2009 

In this book, Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, a senior lecturer at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem Faculty of Law’s Institute of Criminology and a Palestinian Israeli citizen living in Jerusalem, presents a compelling account of the experiences of Palestinian women living under Israeli occupation and the various types of violence they encounter in their everyday lives, as well as the ways in which women transform their victimisation into agency to resist this violence.

Shalhoub-Kevorkian brings a wealth of direct experience to examining her subject. She has spent over 15 years working with women and children facing abuse, mothers of martyrs, female relatives of political prisoners, victims of house demolitions and other types of political violence. Through the voices of these women, the author makes an important contribution to our understanding of the complex and intersecting causes of violence against women, including the silencing of women’s voices through discourses of orientalism, colonialism, cultural authenticity, militarism and security, as well as identifying the failure of multiple actors, not least of all the international community to address this violence.

The author terms Palestinian women ‘frontliners’ in that they are both victims of violence and warriors resisting violence with all the means they have. Violence perpetrated by the Israeli occupation includes the imprisonment or killing of relatives, the destruction of homes, harassment at checkpoints, destruction of olive trees (a significant source of income and survival), the separation of Palestinians from one another and from their land, their schools, their workplaces, amongst many other examples, following the construction of the wall.

Joint List MK Aida Tuma-Sliman (fifth from right) stands alongside the family of Dua’a Abu Sharkh, who was murdered in front of her children in Lod on Friday 30 September 2016 (Photo courtesy of Haggai Mattar)

‘Occupying the material space of the frontline, these women must often carry the burdens of the outcome of the fighting. These women survive both the daily assaults against their quotidian activities and the psychological warfare that is endemic to a militarized zone. By bringing the voices of these frontliners to the forefront of my work, I hope to reveal the unseen and unrecognized agency of these women’.

This book is not the first to tell of the violence perpetrated against Palestinian women. For example, a 2005 report by Amnesty International provides documented evidence of the negative impact of Israel’s occupation and militarization of the conflict on Palestinian women, including women in labour being prevented passage through checkpoints to reach a hospital, women losing their agricultural work due to the confiscation of land, girls being prevented from attending school, ill-treatment of Palestinian women in Israeli detention centres, women losing their homes and their belongings due to house demolitions … as well as violence perpetrated by some Palestinian men, including domestic violence, discrimination and so-called honour killings.

However, Shalhoub- Kevorkian is the first to systematically identify the structural sources of this violence as well as documenting the agency of Palestinian women in resisting the multiple sources of violence. Moreover, she is attentive to the structural imbalances of power between occupier and occupied that play out in the space of gender relations. The stories that the author tells about the lives of the women she has met are not unusual. These are not stories of women going to demonstrations or involved in other types of political work. These are stories about mothers cooking dinner for their families, young women getting married, girls going to school, and other daily activities.

Yet, continuing to do these ordinary activities becomes politicized in a context of military occupation, where the boundaries between private and public are constantly blurred. Israeli soldiers force their way into homes, homes are demolished, land is confiscated, mobility is prevented, in the name of Israeli security. Shalhoub-Kevorkian compares the daily violation of human rights under Israeli occupation and the confinement of Palestinians to enclaves within the West Bank (as well as the blockaded Gaza Strip) to ‘an extended concentration camp, as being an instance of what Agamben has called homo sacer, or “bare life”’.

Shalhoub-Kevorkian is not the only person to build on Giorgio Agamben’s work to understand what is happening in Palestine. As Honaida Ghanim has argued, the Occupied Palestinian Territories is a ‘space of exception’ in contrast to the ‘normal space’ of Israel. ‘The Separation Wall has become a master signifier, marking the difference between the two opposite spaces […] Constructing these physical and symbolic boundaries demarcates boundaries between one kind of people, who, due to their culture and values, can expand their biological existence into a political and social existence, and another kind of people, who, by their very essence and due to the barbarian position they continue to inhabit, cannot be eligible for a political supplement that will include them in the polis, thus expanding their existence beyond the biological’.

Neve Gordon, theorising Israeli occupation since the second Intifada, similarly argues,

as it redeployed troops in the West Bank and Gaza and disabled the PA, Israel did not reinstate any disciplinary forms of control and refused to reassume the role of managing the population’s lives. Instead, Israel emphasized a series of controlling practices informed by a type of sovereign power, which have functioned less through the instatement of the law and more through the law’s suspension. Israel now operates primarily by destroying the most vital social securities and by reducing members of Palestinian society to homo sacer, people whose lives can be taken with impunity.

The Israeli assault on the Gaza Strip in early 2009 and the failure of the US and UK to hold Israel to account for the crimes it committed, is an extreme example of how Palestinian lives are taken with impunity. Yet, Kevorkian-Shalhoub’s book illustrates how this impunity occurs on a daily basis and its implications for people beyond the statistics of numbers of dead and wounded. Despite the abuses of human rights in the Occupied Territories, the author problematizes recourse to human rights language, which can just as often be a source of repression as a source of empowerment for Palestinians. ‘The asymmetries of power between and within states, nations, and groups become highlighted as we invoke the various arenas of women’s and human rights discourses’.

Nationalist discourses constitute the female body as a way to claim it for an imagined national body’

Drawing on the observations of post-colonial feminist lawyers, such as Sherene Razack, of the ability of Third World women to make human rights claims internationally, ShalhoubKevorkian argues, ‘it seems that it is only through the use of imperialistic and orientalist discourse that women outside the West are able to claim their rights. This approach results not only in the keeping of the exotic Orientalized woman at the margins, but more importantly in increasing their vulnerability—such as women living in conflict zones’. Universal human rights are held up as a panacea to the ills of Third World women, yet, by invoking ‘universality’, Shalhoub-Kevorkian asks whether the international community ignores history, contingency, and the context of women in conflict zones. The insecurities and abuses experienced by Palestinian women as women are related to ‘the way nationalist discourses constitute the female body as a way to claim it for an imagined national body’.

This renders women’s bodies vulnerable to ‘weaponisation’—a term used by several women interviewed by the author. The concept of the weaponization of Palestinian women’s bodies refers not to female suicide bombers but to ‘the ways in which patriarchal forces use women’s bodies as weapons in their wars or conflicts’.

Incidents of weaponisation include Israeli soldiers using Palestinian women as human shields and Israeli soldiers threatening Palestinian women with rape and harassment when passing through Israeli checkpoints. A brief examination of a practice called ‘isqat’, meaning ‘downfall’, illustrates how women’s bodies have been used as weapons against the Palestinian national struggle with implications not only for particular women victims but for gender relations within Palestinian society.

Isqat refers to the sexual abuse of Palestinian women to extract ‘security information’ for the Israeli military and secret service. As the author explains, isqat is clearly contrary to the human rights of those women who find themselves the victims of abuse and harassment. Yet, the meaning of the term goes beyond the experience of the individual concerned. It was ‘meant to show the way military powers used patriarchal perceptions of sexuality and honour to put down and ‘defeat’ individual women and their families personally, socially, and politically’.  Consequently, ‘women’s bodies served as a powerful weapon against themselves but also against Palestinian males who are always already positioned, by virtue of their struggle against occupation, to stand in for the nation. Thus, the use of Palestinian women to prevent the realization of a Palestinian “nation” positions gender, particularly in the figure of the gendered citizen, within the struggle for nationhood.  The weaponisation of women’s bodies, rather than helping to dismantle patriarchal views of gender relations, instead strengthens such views. In response to the practice of isqat, Shalhoub-Kevorkian relates how the Palestinian authorities have viewed sexual abuse (whoever the perpetrator) as a ‘national security’ issue, making it difficult for women to talk about cases of sexual abuse happening within Palestinian society. For, to speak up about such abuse appears to go against the national struggle and to become complicit with those outside forces that seek to destroy the Palestinian nation.

Between the violence of the occupier and the resistance of the occupied, a Palestinian woman’s body is no longer her own but is a symbol of cultural authenticity, of the Palestinian nation. Like other conflicts—from the civil war in the former Yugoslavia, to the genocide in Rwanda, to the war between the US military and Iraqi insurgent forces—women’s bodies are the battlefields. As symbols of the nation which must be protected from the occupiers, Palestinian women are tasked with safeguarding their ‘honour’—referring to their modesty but more generally to their compliance with patriarchy.

As the UN Special Rapporteur on violence against women said of Palestine: ‘This is [ ] where two systems of subordination—occupation and patriarchy—converge in the Occupied Palestinian Territories: women in confronting the former submit to the latter’.

This dialectical relation between resistance and accommodation is illustrated by the story of Khulood, a Palestinian mother of three (male) children, who told the author about her father: ‘What a life … we women – our honour, our biological reproductivity –became the only weapon for men to yitsalahou fiyu  [weaponize themselves with]… to protect themselves. So, the fact that I got married early, that I was honourable [she meant a virgin] when I got married, that I got pregnant right away … that I got him a grandson … is the only way to prove that he is a man. My father is all that we have left—for me and my sisters—in such hard conditions; I wish we could give him more’).

Shalhoub-Kevorkian’s writings, not only in this book but previously, reject the ‘culturalization’ of violence against women (that is, the explanation of violence as part of ‘Palestinian culture’) and situate it within the context of Israeli occupation, militarization, dispossession and poverty. She recognises that there has been a tendency amongst some Palestinian activists to diminish the importance of violence against women perpetrated by Palestinians in order not to ‘empower the Western imperialist discourse and further culturalize [Palestinian violence against women] …’.

However, the author sees Israeli occupation and Palestinian violence against Palestinian women as integrally linked. For example, the Israeli military occupation authorities allow Palestinian tribal heads to issue death certificates, which can be used to hide so-called honour crimes. Israeli military checkpoints cut off roads between Palestinian villages and towns, isolating women from friends and family and making them more vulnerable to patriarchal control. The Israeli military and occupation authorities routinely humiliate Palestinian men, making it difficult for Palestinian women to talk about their own experiences of violence.

Despite the depressing evidence of violence against women in Palestine, Shalhoub-Kevorkian emphasizes that Palestinian women are not only victims but that they are actively resisting violence through the construction of ‘counter-spaces’. This is the ability of Palestinian women to create agency within militarized spaces and, thereby, to break down the dichotomy of the dominant discourses that silence Palestinian women. For example, when women and girls are forced to wait at an Israeli checkpoint, prevented from reaching their schools, their places of work and their hospitals, and they get out their school books to study, breastfeed their children and talk back to the Israeli soldier, this is a type of resistance—for, the Israeli occupation seeks to constrain Palestinian education, prevent ‘normal’ social reproduction, silence the occupied.

Palestinian women’s location at the intersection of local patriarchy, militarized occupation and Western domination is not only a cause of their oppression but also a source of their agency and resistance. The author argues, ‘The analysis of women’s resistance and agency in this book leads us to the realization that both the dynamic and the expression of this resistance and agency can only be understood if we examine the ways in which women come to negotiate the various masculinities that enfold them both locally and globally. This negotiation is part of their ontological “betweenness”.’

In addition to presenting a vivid picture of the lives of Palestinian women living under occupation, the author intends that the voices of the women heard in this book constitute a process of knowledge production that provides a source for constructing new types of feminisms. As the author states, ‘ … focusing on the voices of Palestinian women reveals the ways in which their exilic status formed out of the betweenness that I have been describing does not address or partake of the “universalities” of women’s victimization. Instead, the voices of these women emphasize the particular victimization of Palestinian women and the neglected agency that arises out of the ashes of that victimization’. In so doing, this book challenges discourses of liberal empire, which seek to ‘save brown women from brown men’ (as the postcolonial critic Gayatri Spivak described colonialism) in the name of universal human rights, whilst simultaneously leaving intact structures of foreign occupation and militarized aggression that enable the daily abuse of human dignity.