New School for Social Research

Notes on the Politics of Knowledge in the Israeli Feminist Anti-Occupation Movement

Abstract

This paper analyses the types of actions that the Israeli feminist anti-occupation movement has engaged in during the first and second intifadas: localized actions (based in the local context), sharing actions (where women share experiences non-hierarchically), divided solidarity actions (where women act in solidarity without real cooperation), and coalitional solidarity actions (involving substantial, substantive interaction between Israelis and Palestinians). These actions create different sorts of knowledges of both the occupation and Palestinians, for both the activists who participate in them and those who observe them, including knowledge that consists of information, knowledge that is created through recontextualizing daily life, and knowledge that is developed cooperatively between women. Between the first and second intifada, there was a shift from types of actions that create knowledge through exchanges between women, and towards actions that focus more on the structures of the occupation itself. I argue that these shifts are not disheartening, but show new possible directions for the movement to take.

 
Knowledge is produced within political structures. When knowledge is created and disseminated, it follows the lines and patterns of power present in society. At the same time, knowledge can be created in resistance to what is socially powerful, in an attempt to change those power structures. Even this knowledge, however, is created around and through power structures, and establishes particular political relations between the knower, the known, and the knowledge itself.

In this paper, I will examine the way knowledge is developed and used in the Israeli feminist anti-occupation movement [1], which began in 1988 and continues to this day. Organized in solidarity with Palestinians, the movement aimed to end the occupation and bring about a just solution to the conflict. The feminist anti-occupation movement has been prominent both in broader anti-occupation movements within Israel, and in feminist antimilitarist movements internationally. During the first intifada [2] (1987-1994), the feminist anti-occupation movement mobilized in favor of negotiations with the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) for a solution to the conflict. In the second or al-Aqsa intifada (2001-present), a just solution would mean returning to negotiations and allowing an autonomous Palestinian state to develop (although a significant minority within the movement believes in creating a single state for all Jews and Palestinians within Israel/Palestine). The feminist anti-occupation movement in both intifadas cared deeply about the way Palestinians, especially Palestinian women, were treated by the occupation, and mobilized specifically in opposition to policies such as political detention, house demolition, the construction of the security wall [3] and violations of human rights by the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF, Israel’s military).

Any political or social movement develops multiple knowledges through its actions. When examining the feminist anti-occupation movement in Israel, two types of knowledge appear to be particularly important to understanding the structure of the movement as a whole. The first is knowledge of Palestinians. Most Israelis know Palestinians only from hierarchical contexts that position Palestinians as below Israelis: time serving in the IDF [4] in the Occupied Territories, seeing Palestinians as day laborers in Israeli cities, or participating in social interactions that mark Palestinian Israelis as disenfranchised and stigmatized. Developing other knowledges about Palestinians, which help to contextualize them as equals, is a crucial desire of the feminist anti-occupation movement.

The other sort of knowledge which interests me is knowledge of the occupation. The occupation is a large and complicated structure that is not visible to all Israelis at all times, and is invisible to many. Making the daily occupation visible is a first step towards greater knowledge; another is to provide new information about the occupation, so as to complicate and enrich the understanding of the occupation that Israelis can have.

There are also two types of actors who can gain knowledge from an action taken by a social movement. The first is participants. What knowledge do the activists who actually take part in an action derive from it? How is that knowledge formed? The second actors are observers, who can witness an action in person (where they walk by a demonstration on a street, are handed a leaflet, or read a petition in the newspaper), or learn about it second-hand (through media reports, the internet, or even from academic research). Is their knowledge of Palestinians/the occupation changed? How is their knowledge (re)formed by passively experiencing this action?

The feminist anti-occupation movement links knowledge specifically to social change goals—specifically, ending the occupation and creating a just and peaceful relationship between Israelis and Palestinians. Their goal is to create knowledge that can lead directly to the realization of these goals. As feminists, they are also interested in knowledge that is non-hierarchical, privileges the experiences of women, and can be freely shared.

I will begin this paper by laying out a typology of action of the feminist anti-occupation movement, giving specific examples of the different types for each of the intifadas. I will then discuss the political process through which knowledge is created in each sort of action, both for actors and observers. Next, I will reflect on the changes in the frequency of types of actions from the first to the second intifadas, and the consequences of this for knowledge in the movement. In conclusion, I will attempt to evaluate these changes, and see whether feminists concerned about the politics of knowledge should be encouraged or discouraged when looking at the changes in the feminist anti-occupation movement.

The Politics of My Knowledge: Where I’m Coming From

It would seem disingenuous to write an essay like this one, in a volume dedicated to feminist knowledge, without beginning by situating my own politics of knowledge, ie. how did I research this paper and position myself vis-à-vis its subjects? The research from which this essay draws began as an undergraduate thesis, and follows four years of research into the feminist anti-occupation and anti-war movements in Israel, Palestine, and elsewhere. In the spirit of feminist participatory research, I joined the International Network of the Women in Black, a group of autonomous feminist antimilitarists begun by Israeli women during the first intifada. I have attended two of their biennial international meetings, the first in August 2003 in Italy, and the second in August 2005 in Jerusalem. Between these meetings, I participated in the movement in various ways at various points in time—through a vigil in New York City, working on the communications infrastructure of the network as webmistress, translator, and committee member, and as a member of email and discussion lists. In my research, I do not limit myself to only the Women in Black; in fact, few in the movement would feel there to be strict boundaries between the Women in Black and other similar organizations.  [5] However, I begin from my position as a participant in these larger feminist anti-militarist organizations.

Throughout this essay, I will position myself as next to, or alongside Israeli feminist anti-occupation activists, regarding Palestinians both within and outside movements.  I do not do this unselfconsciously, or out of any particular personal affinity.  I am not Jewish; I have no family or personal connections to Israel; I studied Arabic, not Hebrew; my broader academic interests rest in the Arab Middle East, not the Jewish diaspora.  Yet I find positioning myself with Israeli women to be both more familiar, and to reflect certain political truths about my position within my research.

The structural relationship between women of various nationalities within the Women in Black network, my primary research location, ties me more closely to Israeli activists. There are no Palestinian Women in Black, because the idea of the Women in Black movement is tied up with the idea of solidarity. The movement began as a way for Israeli women to show their solidarity for Palestinians, women and men, who were participating in the tumultuous first months of the intifada. Similarly, in the Balkans, where the second major Women in Black movement arose, it was a movement against ethnic cleansing lead by Serbian women. When (primarily American and European) women enter into the Women in Black movement, they do so by connecting to women who are protesting in solidarity with others; therefore, they stand at a second level of solidarity with Palestinian women. When I stand in a Women in Black vigil at 41^st Street and Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, I stand metaphorically next to Israeli women standing at Paris Square in Jerusalem. And even when international women form connections with Palestinian women directly, and are able to stand in direct solidarity with them, they still stand parallel to Israeli women, not away from them.

There are more personal/political reasons as well.  As a white woman, I recognize a strong structural similarity between whiteness in the United States and Israeliness in Israel/Palestine.  Both accord a certain group social and political power, which has historically (and is contemporarily) used to oppress those without it and discipline those who deviate from it.  So white anti-racists and Israeli anti-racist and anti-occupation activists position themselves to dispute their privilege and the systems of oppression built on it, and to be in solidarity with those who have been oppressed.  This location is familiar to me from my own context, which provides me with a way to understand how the Israeli feminist anti-occupation both is similar to and different from the struggles of a different location.

Being an American also positions me alongside Israelis.  This goes deeper than an understanding of US government support for Israel since the 1960s, including US involvement in the various failed peace processes and the alliance between the two states in regional and international politics.  It also goes deeper than recognizing the shared cultural heritage that Ashkenazi Israelis and I share, a heritage that originates in Europe. What I share with Israeli feminist anti-occupation activists is an ambivalence toward my citizenship, that is, my membership in a political community. This ambivalence combines an attachment to the terrain on which we live, were born, and will continue to live, and a near-total rejection of the policies of the state that governs that terrain. Americans, with our long history as a state, must confront colonial genocide, slavery, annexation and soft imperialism, and the war in Iraq. Israelis face the nakba [6] and the occupation. My relationship with America, and Israeli feminist anti-occupation activists’ relationship with Israel, shares this need to change the relationship between a place to which I am connected and a state by which I find abhorrent. This commonality again allows me to enter more fully into dialogue with Israeli activists, and to identify with them.

By self-consciously locating myself next to, but not as one of, the members of the Israeli feminist anti-occupation movement, I hope to be able to better explain their relationship to and knowledge of Palestinians in a way that will bring clarity to my analysis. I will use not only anecdotes and discussions reported to me by others, but my own experiences as someone positioned next to these activists to demonstrate how these knowledges are politically constructed.

Types of actions in the Israeli feminist anti-occupation movement

In my research on the feminist anti-occupation movement (Wills 2004), I identified four types of actions that have been carried out during both intifadas, although with varying frequency. These are localized actions, which focus on the local context for actions; sharing actions, which are structured around non-hierarchical exchange between women across identity categories; divided solidarity actions, where Israeli and Palestinian women are virtually connected through a protest; and coalitional solidarity actions, which involve substantial, substantive interaction between Palestinian and Israeli women.

Understanding these types of actions is important for building a theory of knowledge in the feminist anti-occupation movement. Actions are simultaneously produced by and producers of the knowledges of activists and the general public. Any action can only be taken with certain knowledge as a beginning point, and that knowledge will shape how the action is structured. However, the knowledge that is gained from the action might go in any direction, either reaffirming the original knowledge-base, refuting it, or transforming it. Getting a sense of the structures of various sorts of actions, and a good typology for describing them, makes it possible to see the sorts of knowledge which produce actions, and which are produced by them.

Changing times: the first and second intifadas

Like any social movement, the Israeli feminist anti-occupation movement has had to shift its tactics over time to respond to shifting social and political conditions. In my previous work (Wills 2004: 18-49), I have argued that the political circumstances of the first (1987-1994) and the second (2001-present) intifadas were vastly different for the feminist anti-occupation movement. The failure of the Oslo process and its legacy were damaging, but I argue that the major changes had to do with a shifting balance of power between the domestic and international spheres and a changing politics of identity.

During the first intifada, international support for anti-occupation movements was slow to gather and never strong, while there were powerful domestic movements that supported negotiations with Palestinians. Activism focused on the domestic level, with international actors mainly supporting Israeli and Palestinian anti-occupation movements with funding. However, the Oslo Accords made international actors key to the power politics of the conflict, and the growth of international anti-occupation movements, including feminist ones like the Women in Black, created a situation where, in the second intifada, international actors had real political power.

The politics of identity became more charged in the second intifada for Israeli women, given the weakness of domestic anti-occupation movements and the sharp increase in Israeli civilian casualties. Many found interacting with Palestinian women, who were often increasingly angry about the lack of progress being made by the movement, too emotionally painful and threatening to their identity as (however ambivalently) Israelis.

The results of these changes appear as a shift away from actions that involve more contact with Palestinian women, and towards actions that involve less contact or less substantive interaction. In practice, in this period we see the rise of the divided solidarity protest as the hallmark of the movement, and the near-total extinction of the sharing action. For instance, the 2005 International Meeting of the Women in Black could have been a perfect sharing action, since it was a place for women to come together and talk about their work, both in small groups and in large plenary sessions. However, the schedule was structured around a series of divided solidarity actions: a regular Women in Black vigil, the demonstration at Qalandiya checkpoint, and the all-day visit to the West Bank. Localized actions continued, and coalitional solidarity actions remained few in number, though high profile.

What do these shifts mean for the knowledge politics of the feminist anti-occupation movement? If we frame this as a shift from sharing to divided solidarity actions, then we see a move away from knowledge that arises from a personal shared engagement with the conflict and with Palestinians. Divided solidarity actions and localized actions do not build an experiential knowledge of Palestinians, since there is no room for substantive exchange with Palestinians, whether or not they are involved. Divided solidarity actions can create experiential knowledge of the occupation in action (as it did for me at Qalandiya), but not of Palestinians. However, this knowledge of the occupation is substantially shallower than that derived from coalitional solidarity, where long-term confrontation with the occupation’s structures builds a growing base of knowledge over time. This means that more of the information that Israelis will have about Palestinians and the occupation is derived from learning facts and information, rather than from developing a knowledge base through exchange and interaction.

Problems in the knowledge structure?

How should we, as feminists concerned with the ways in which knowledge is constructed, particularly in feminist contexts, evaluate these shifts? On first glance, it seems as it something normatively valuable has been lost. Sharing actions developed a kind of knowledge that resonates with feminists, in that it is built on equal exchanges between women and building bonds between them. With a move away from developing knowledge dialogically between women, and a move towards receiving knowledge through mediated sources (group leaders, emails, reports), the specifically feminist quality of the knowledge seems diminished.

Although there is a real loss here, I am not pessimistic about knowledge production in the feminist anti-occupation movement. While the nature of the knowledge being currently developed about Palestinians is changing, there are other reasons to welcome a shift away from sharing actions in particular. Sharing actions build from a problematic understanding of relations between women. In setting up Israeli and Palestinian women as perfectly parallel to each other, sharing actions “[do] not challenge the presumed symmetry between Israelis and Palestinians” (Sharoni 1995: 143). One of the key dynamics to cooperative organizing in the Israeli-Palestinian case is the fundamental inequality between Israelis and Palestinians, an inequality that is based upon the difference between citizens of a democratic occupying state and residents of an occasionally-functional non-state in a state of variable occupation. [12] Sharing actions assume equality between Palestinian and Israeli women, based on an idea of sisterhood or shared suffering as women or as victims of the conflict.

There are similarities here to the problems with consciousness raising groups, women-only spaces as ‘safe’ spaces, and other discourses around sisterhood in feminism in the United States. The critiques posted by women of color parallel closely the critiques of sharing actions by Palestinian women. In the American feminist context, bell hooks said “the idea of ‘common oppression’ [is] a false and corrupt platform disguising and mystifying the true nature of women’s varied and complex social reality...Sustained woman-bonding can occur only when these divisions are confronted and the necessary steps are taken to eliminate them” ⁽hooks 396). At the same time, Rita Giacaman, a prominent Palestinian feminist, argued that “many [peace conferences] have been ‘imposed on Palestinian and Israeli-Jewish women by outsiders who had money from their governments and wanted to have a conference.’ She argues there is no need for more conferences, tea parties, or dialogue groups” (cited in Sharoni 1995: 144-145). These parallel critiques show how these two movements were transformed by the limitations understood and articulated by the less powerful women who participated in them.

Giacaman alludes to another problem with sharing actions: they were generally politically inert with regards to the larger state-based politics of the occupation. Their goal—to transform the participants’ understanding of Palestinian (and Israeli) women and to build a new understanding of the occupation—does not actually aim to change or end the occupation directly. Its purpose is instrumental; women who have gained this new knowledge will then be able to mobilize it to take action in ways that can affect state actors to actually end the occupation. [13] While creating feminist knowledge of this sort may be crucial for action at a later point in time, it cannot replace actions more directly targeted towards the state. Feminist movements cannot neglect engagement with the state if their targets involve state action in any way: without a theory and practice of state transformation, we will be left outside of and impotent towards the power structures that we wish to alter.

The change may not be as total as it looks from the change in the patterns of action. Although I have constructed a sharp distinction between the feminist anti-occupation movements of the first and second intifadas, many of the women who were active and leaders in the first are also active and leaders in the second. Less than twenty years separate the beginning of the first intifada and this writing. Just as many women from the second wave of American feminism are still prominent in feminist discourse today, women like Gila Svirsky, Yvonne Deutsch and Hannah Safran are still major figures in the feminist anti-occupation movement. The beneficial knowledge developed through sharing actions (as well as an appreciation for their faults) is most likely still at work within the movement, in the persons of these women who carried it from one generation to the next.

Perhaps it is best to see this as a transformation in knowledge, as opposed to a loss of knowledge. While the knowledge of Palestinians that women in the feminist anti-occupation movement can build is very different now, and relies more on mediated accounts, their knowledge of the occupation as a system that governs the lives of Palestinians—and Israelis—is much greater. Through repeated focus on how the occupation works, in localized and divided solidarity actions, activists build a practical knowledge base about the occupation itself. We might identify a parallel in American feminist thought in the difference between knowledge about women, as exemplified by the consciousness raising groups of second-wave feminism, and knowledge about gender, as developed through analysis of roles and structures that shape the lives of women and men.

In any case, the Israeli feminist anti-occupation movement continues to build knowledge about both Palestinians and the occupation through its actions. If it hopes to achieve its goal of ending the occupation and creating a just resolution to the conflict, it must work to create a real change in the knowledge structures of all of Israeli society, not just those women who participate in it. This will mean expanding their production of knowledge to reach more people, and to change the power structures of knowledge reinforced by the Israeli state. For nearly two decades, the movement has been developing new sorts of knowledge. In the end, their success will rest on how that knowledge can be put to work.

Notes

The research for this paper, including travel to the tenth International Conference of the Women in Black, was made possible through the support of the William Patterson Prize in Political Science, the Edward Norton Trust, and the Trumbull College Richter Fund, all at Yale University. The author would like to thank Vron Ware, Ellen Lust-Okar, Hala Nassar, Bassam Frangieh, Jesús A. Chapa-Malacara, and Katherine Rapoport for their comments and support.

Works Cited

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Chazan, Naomi. (1993). “Israeli Women and Peace Activism”. In Swirski, Barbara and Safir, Marilyn P. (Eds.). Calling the Equality Bluff: Women in Israel. New York: Teacher’s College Press. 152-161.

Deutsch, Yvonne. (1994). “Israeli Women Against the Occupation: Political Growth and the Persistence of Ideology”. In Mayer, Tamar (Ed.). Women and the Israeli Occupation: The Politics of Change (88-105). London: Routledge.

Deutsch, Yvonne. (1992). “Israeli Women: from Protest to a Culture of Peace.” In Hurwitz, Deena (Ed.). Walking the Red Line: Israelis in Search of Justice for Palestine. Philadelphia, PA : New Society Publishers, 46-55.

Espanioly, Nabila. (1993). “Palestinian Women in Israel Respond to the Intifada.” In Swirski, Barbara and Safir, Marilyn P. (Eds.). Calling the Equality Bluff: Women in Israel. New York: Teacher’s College Press, 147-151.

hooks, bell. (1984). “Sisterhood: Political Solidarity Between Women.” In McClintock, Anne, Mufti, Aamir, and Shohat, Ella, (1997) Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nation, & Post-Colonial Perspectives. Minneapolis: U Minnesota Press.

Kadmon, Sima. (2003). “Many Mothers.” Circulated by email, office@pepeace.org. Received 9 December 2003.

Kaminer, Reuven. (1996). The Politics of Protest: The Israeli Peace Movement and the Palestinian Intifada. Brighton, UK: Sussex Academic Press.

Sharoni, Simona. (1995). Gender and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: The Politics of Women’s Resistance. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse UP.

Svirsky, Gila. (2002). “Feminist Peace Activism during the al-Aqsa Intifada.” in Abdo, Nahla and Lentin, Ronit (Eds.). Women and the Politics of Military Confrontation : Palestinian and Israeli gendered narratives of dislocation. New York : Berghahn Books.

Wills, Emily Regan. (2004). Power, Identity, and the Transnational: The Feminist Anti-Occupation Movement in Israel/Palestine, 1987-1990, 2000-2004. Unpublished Senior Essay, Yale University.

1. From here on in, when I say “feminist anti-occupation movement,” I mean the Israeli one, unless I specify another movement (the Palestinian or the international, for instance). There are many different feminist anti-occupation movements; in this paper I focus on the Israeli one, which has a different context than others, and should not be confused with them.

2. Arabic for uprising; refers to organized Palestinian resistance to the occupation. Both intifadas have contained a mixture of non-violent and violent actions.

3. This is a barrier used to separate “Palestinian” space from “Israeli” space, which does not follow the Green Line, or international armistice line between Israel and the Palestinian Territories. Many Palestinians and some Israelis believe it is an attempt by Israel to unilaterally set its boundaries and to claim significant portions of Palestinian territory.

4. Military service is compulsory in Israel, except for Christian and Muslim Palestinians with Israeli citizenship (Palestinian Israelis) and haredi (ultra-Orthodox) Jews.

5. Such as, in the US, CodePINK or the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, the two largest and most organized feminist antimilitarist organizations; United for Peace and Justice or ANSWER, the two major anti-war organizations formed post September 11, 2001; human rights groups like Amnesty International, where their work touches on issues of gender or conflict; or feminist groups like NOW or the Feminist Majority. For instance, Women in Black have organized collective participation at anti-war rallies in Washington, DC, and also at the 2003 March for Women’s Lives.

6. Nakba means ‘disaster’ in Arabic, and is used by Palestinians, other Arabs, and many anti-occupation activists in Israel and elsewhere to refer to the mass dislocation and killing of Palestinians during 1948 (the creation of the state of Israel and the 1948 war).

7. http://www.coalitionofwomen4peace.org/pastevents/20021227/telaviv20021217.htm

8. These so closely resembled actual negotiations that Hanan Ashrawi, a major Palestinian negotiator and who was active in the Palestinian feminist anti-occupation movement, remarked that, after her participation in the conference, she felt as if the Oslo process "seemed like a glorified replay in slow motion" of the negotiated meetings the feminist anti-occupation movement had been having for years (Ashrawi 1995: 62).

9. Svirsky 2002: 243

10. This is one of the instances where, when Israelis and Palestinians participate in joint actions, the Palestinians are left to suffer the concrete consequences of the action. Rantis was closed using larger trenches, making it even more impossible for Palestinians to leave their town. This raised the question among the Israelis of how to ensure that their protests does not have adverse effects for Palestinians: "We'll also be thinking about how to continue to subvert the oppression without jeopardizing the Palestinians themselves. It won't be easy or simple but, as Israelis, we've got to figure out a way to stop co-operating with evil" (Svirsky 2002: 243).

11. Qalandiya is on the Palestinian side of the Green Line. However, Israel has claimed that all of Jerusalem, both West (Israeli) and East (Palestinian), and has placed checkpoints around the borders of the city, not at the Green Line, which cuts through the city.

12. Two groups fall out of this binary: Palestinian Israelis citizens who have (some of) the political rights of Israelis while still feeling like an occupied people, and Palestinians outside of historic Palestine, in refugee camps or out of them, who are not under direct Israeli occupation but are maintained as stateless refugees by the conflict.

13. A number of localized actions also take this format—the General Kibushetsky action, for instance.