Shahada and Gendered Spaces

For the Palestinian people, martyring themselves in an attempt to attack their Israeli “occupiers” has become a sign of honor, not only for men but also women. At a recent convention one Professor of Language and Cultural Studies explored the “gendered space[s]” of Palestinian women’s resistance against Israel in the context of the First Intifada.

The First Intifada, from December 1987 through September 2000, claimed the lives of 186 Israelis and 1,491 Palestinians within the “occupied territories,” according to the B’Tselem Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories. (The tables given did not provide the number of Israeli or Palestinians deaths within the Israel state as a whole; “green line” numbers were also provided).

At the 2009 Modern Language Association (MLA) convention, tenure-track Trinity College Professor Kifah Hanna lectured on Bab Assaha, or, The Plaza Gate, a novel by Palestinian feminist author Sahar Khalifeh.

“The Intifada broke out in January 1987,” writes Khalifeh in a Spring 2002 article for Al Jadid Magazine. “A few weeks later, I left America for the West Bank to witness something hair-raising: women and children out on the streets hitting and being hit without blinking; young and old men languishing in jails, wilderness, or mountain caves; live bullets whizzing all around; tear gas and tanks; mosques stormed with cleavers and bombs; chants broadcast from cassette players everywhere,” writes Khalifeh, continuing

“…These were days like dreams, and the tales of sacrifices and heroism were like what we read in fiction or history books. Woman proved to the whole world that she was not a nonentity, but the heart, the mind, the feeling, and the living conscience of the revolution. Out of that dream, that momentum, that rapid rhythm and hot pulse was born ‘The Plaza Gate’” (emphasis added).

The Emory University English Department website explains that in her book Wild Thorns, “…Khalifeh illustrates the varying responses to Israeli occupation sustained by Palestinians: ‘surviving’ complacently under colonial constraints is contrasted to and informs the insistence on militancy as a necessary venue of resistance” (italics added).

The Palestinian struggle against “occupation” has had distinct effects on gender roles and the physical spaces which these women occupy, argued Prof. Hanna during her lecture. “Today I’m going to talk about the three representations of public and the private spaces in the Palestinian occupied territories during the second half of the 20th century where domestic boundaries underwent a spacial transformation that affected gender roles,” she said. “That allowed Palestinian women to participate in the actual fight and transcend their social and political roles and go beyond limited traditional boundaries of their private spheres, that is, the home.”

In The Plaza Gate, Khalifeh characterizes women’s participation in the armed struggle as reflecting a sense of inferiority when compared to the actions of their male counterparts, argued Prof. Hanna. Thus, “In this sense, again to support this kind of argument, Khalifeh’s female characters react more instinctively, unaware of their status, she said. “… The fact that Khalifeh used these four women from within their private space of the house of ill repute and they are trying to transcend, to go beyond, to turn the corner and participate in the fight from that house using kitchen utensils is quite powerful at the end of the novel since she’s trying to just show how desperate they are to literally cross the borders, cross the boundaries between the private and the public.”

However, patriarchal dominance is “incompletely challenged” by the women and “the transformation of women’s roles in the name of community survival is exceptional and temporary,” Prof. Hanna argued.

Throughout the lecture she implicitly supported only the perspective of the Palestinian resistance against Israelis, using words like “community survival” and “national crisis” to describe the First Intifada; Prof. Hanna, a native Arabic speaker who received her B.A. from the Syrian Al-Baath University, did not reflect on the First Intifada’s death toll nor the continuing culture of death promoted by Palestinian leaders under both Fatah and Hamas.

An audience member did speak to the latter during the question and answer session, albeit favorably. She contended that there would be no times of peace as long as Palestine is occupied, said women had become heads of the house in men’s absence, and described how Palestinian girls receive similar martyrdom honors to that of boys, with posters of them and shops and babies named after the dead girl.

Unfortunately, the indoctrination of Palestinian children to prefer martyrdom, or shahada, in the service of Allah, continues to this day.

As Itamar Marcus and Barbara Crook write for Palestinian Media Watch on January 25 of this year, “A Hamas TV program for children is once again promoting Shahada—Martyrdom for Allah—as a positive goal for kids.”

“In the most recent episode of the show Tomorrow’s Pioneers, the child host asks a 10-year-old girl who phones into the program whether she had been afraid of dying during the 2009 Gaza War,” they write.

As Daniel Pipes described back in 2001, during the Second Intifada, “[Palestinian Authority] PA television harps constantly on this message [promoting suicide bombing].” He continues, “On the Children’s Club (a Sesame Street-like children’s program), a young boy sings: ‘When I wander into Jerusalem, I will become a suicide bomber’” (emphasis in original).

“A repeatedly shown television clip calls on children to ‘Drop your toys. Pick up rocks.’ In another, the words to a children’s song go: ‘How pleasant is the smell of martyrs, how pleasant the smell of land, the land enriched by the blood, the blood pouring out of a fresh body.’”

Apparently the urge for “martyrdom” has expanded age boundaries as well.

Bethany Stotts is a staff writer at Accuracy in Academia.