This presentation has two key objectives.  It explores (a) how the so-called “peace process” with its supporting donor community depoliticized the Palestinian women’s movement, uprooting it from the national reality, and (b) how a liberal feminist agenda suspended Palestinian women’s social achievements, especially in relation to decolonization.  The data derives from a secondary analysis of a study around the politics of NGOization in Palestine (Shehada 2010).  The analysis shared in this presentation will delineate how the Oslo project of 1993 led to the overthrowing of Palestinian women’s political participation with particular reference to their role in the anti-occupation movement.  Since the Palestinian Catastrophe in 1948, women were active in grassroots organising to provide health and education services to the groups most affected by the Israeli occupation.  The political participation of women in the first Intifada epitomized their social consciousness.  In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Palestinian women’s active political participation allowed them to challenge gendered social conventions and generate national debates on critical and socially sensitive issues related to their social and political rights.  After the Oslo Accord, things changed because Palestinian civil society organisations in general, and women’s organisations in particular, were not able to articulate an independent national and social agenda that challenged the Oslo Accord project.  During the second Intifada, Palestinian women’s organisations were completely absent from the popular scene.  With the realities of funding and the attached conditions of the Accords, and the priorities they created, women’s organisations in Palestine became agents for a pre-defined feminist agenda that did not recognise the impossibility of separating national and political aspirations from the social in the Palestinian context.  Consequently, Palestinian women’s organisations lost their chances as agents of change for women’s realities.  The paper concludes with recommendations for how Palestinian women’s organisations could be brought back more in alignment with on the ground realities of Palestinian women. 

References:

Shehada, Fidaa. 2010,  Strategic organizational responses to environmental pressures:  The case of three Palestinian non-governmental organizations.  Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Rutgers University, USA.