who started the Collectif 95 Maghreb-Egalité in order
to be represented at the fourth United Nations
World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995.
Consider also that the support for the Palestinian
intifada between 1987 and 1989 and since 2000, or
for the Iraqi people during the Gulf war of 1990–1
and since the beginning of the American occupa-
tion in 2003 have provided ideal opportunities for
feminists in the Maghrib to unite and minimize
their differences.
In all three countries, feminist demands regard-
ing women’s personal status provide a central argu-
ment and a powerful lever for mobilization to
Islamists and all kinds of conservatives who de-
nounce the collusion of feminists with the Western
world and with corrupt regimes as they conspire
against Islam. In Algeria, the support of some fem-
inists for repression of the Islamic movement has
given credence to these accusations. In Tunisia and
Morocco, especially since the 1990s, feminists have
also come up against the emergence of what can
only be called “Islamist feminism,” whose propo-
nents – some, if not all – have adopted most femi-
nist demands in terms of education, employment,
and participation in the political process, while still
calling for the enforcement of the Sharì≠a as it
applies to personal status. In countries where
Western models are discredited more than ever
before, the ability of Islamist feminists to reach
milieus that secularist feminism is unable to access
appears to be one of the key factors in the struggle
of women in the contemporary Maghrib.Translation from the French by Matthieu Dalle,
University of LouisvilleBibliography
Z. Daoud, Féminisme et politique au Maghreb, Casa-
blanca 1993.
G. Tillion, Le haram et les cousins, Paris 1966.Alain RoussillonPalestineOver the past century, Palestinian women’s polit-
ical protest has been anchored in nationalist re-
sponses to colonialism, dispossession, and military
occupation. Despite a tumultuous history marked
by serial crises, social fragmentation, and stateless-
ness, women’s forms and focuses of protest have
been remarkably enduring.
A defining moment in the history of women’s
organized protest was the 1929 gathering of 200
elite Muslim and Christian women in Jerusalem to642 political-social movements: protest movements
found the Arab Women’s Congress; resolutions
against Zionist colonization were delivered to the
British High Commissioner and a demonstration of
women in a honking car cavalcade wound around
Jerusalem. Resolutions and demonstrations repre-
sent two consistent features of Palestinian women’s
protest: the first, appeals to justice or, more pro-
saically, public relations, and the second, public
protest that both breaks and uses gender bound-
aries. The unveiling of women at the congress also
highlighted aspects of modernity that were to
become contested issues in Palestinian women’s
activism. Articles in the Arabic press (often by
women) during British rule (1917–47) contained
both a modernizing discourse of “women’s awak-
ening” and a more traditional call for women to
defend men, home, and family (Fleischmann 2003).
Both discourses resonate throughout the century.
Most Palestinian women, including the 70 per-
cent of peasant women living in villages, were not
represented at the congress. While elite-popular
divisions have characterized other women’s move-
ments in the Arab region, the Palestinian situation
is distinguished by the role of peasants, and partic-
ularly peasant women, as national signifiers, and by
the sustained and multiple roles of peasant women
in maintaining resistance whether in the 1936–39
Great Revolt, in exile in refugee camps, or under
Israeli military occupation. Peasant women’s reper-
toire of protest has included aid to militants, inter-
vention in arrests, silence and misidentification of
militants, manipulating their “inferior” status to
smuggle weapons (Swedenburg 1995, 180), com-
fort to the injured and families of the martyrs, as
well as casting responsibilities of care and social-
ization in terms of nationalist resistance. Older and
married women have served as expressive voices for
the community: cursing soldiers, praising courage,
and mourning the dead. More organized protest
activities have centered on prisoners, including sit-
ins and demonstrations, sometimes bringing women
together across socioeconomic divides. Elite and
later middle-class women have made varied efforts
to link with rural and poor refugee women, most
successfully in the first Palestinian intifada (1987–
93). Student activism has also been a bridge be-
tween classes and social groups, particularly with
the sharp rise in female education commencing in
the 1960s, when many young women and men were
the first in their families to enter secondary or post-
secondary education.
In the wake of mass dispossession and the frag-
mentation of Palestinian society in 1948, elite
women turned largely to charitable or service activ-
ities to meet the needs of the refugee population as