"Palestinian feminist organizing beyond the nation-state."

• In Event: Vulnerable Targets: Statelessness and Solidarity from the Americas to Palestine

Abstract

Since the 2020s, the slogan “No free homeland without free women” has united Palestinian feminists all the way from the homeland to the Far Diaspora. The statement, however, is not a new concept, as it had been first articulated by Palestinian women a full century earlier. A look back at Palestinian women’s organizing since the days of the British Mandate over Palestine shows an understanding of, and engagement with, a multifaceted struggle. Palestinian women knew of Britain’s imperial plans for Palestine, as expressed in the 1917 Balfour Declaration promising Zionist Europeans a “national home for Jews” in Palestine. They viewed Britain as “the greatest enemy of the Arabs.” They felt a need and a duty to oppose Britain’s imperial plans, and had full confidence in their agency and responsibility to do so, and in the need to transgress traditional gender roles in their struggle for national liberation. Palestinian women’s activism continued throughout the Mandate as well as under Israel’s settler colonialism. Today, as empires and imperial ideologies are crumbling, Palestinian feminists both in the homeland and in the Far Diaspora are joining in struggle with other anticolonial feminists globally to achieve liberation beyond the nation-state, from Palestine to Turtle Island.

Author

• Nada Elia