well as continuing in appeals to the international
community. Women in refugee camps engaged in
scattered protests, participating in demonstrations,
sometimes against the United Nations Relief and
Works Agency (UNRWA), the agency in charge of
Palestinian refugees, sometimes against the state
regime. Statelessness, where any “rights” granted
by prevailing powers were both difficult to acquire
and could be withdrawn arbitrarily, also increased
women’s role as mediators and strategists for the
travel documents, food rations, and security ap-
proval needed for family and individual survival
and mobility, a role that turned easily to protest.
Older women might use their status to defy officials
whether by simply jumping queues or by haran-
guing a soldier to see a detained son. Although
Palestinian female students joined in the widespread
Nasserist protests of the day in Jordan and Leba-
non, there were not substantial numbers of female
prisoners until the period of Israeli occupation.
The June 1967 war and the founding of the
Palestinian resistance opened up new arenas and
possibilities for women’s protest, and at the same
time the military occupation of the West Bank and
Gaza imposed new restrictions. In the latter con-
text, practices of daily life became reinterpreted
as ßumùd (steadfastness) and often acts of resist-
ance. Tilling the land, picking wild thyme, contact-
ing a relative in Lebanon, or even going to school,
could be illegal acts. In Jordan and Lebanon, the
armed resistance brought women into its ranks (to
some extent) and made refugee camps sites of
mobilization where new roles of women as militant
cadre (usually the young and unmarried) joined
the more familiar informal roles of women assist-
ing fighters and undertaking neighborhood-based
actions when their camps were under siege (Peteet
1991). These activities continued even after the
departure of the organized Palestinian resistance: in
the wake of the 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacre in
Lebanon, women spontaneously organized a com-
memorative march despite the high risk (Sayigh
1991).
The widespread and visible participation of
Palestinian women in the intifada that erupted in
the West Bank and Gaza in December 1987 against
Israeli military occupation took place in the con-
text of the earlier rise of mass-based women’s,
students’, and community voluntary work associa-
tions (Taraki 1990). From 1978, women’s commit-
tees, led by former student activists, were linked
to clandestine political movements, but had con-
siderable independence of action. Their leadership
consciously broke from the charitable mode of
women’s activism and aimed to link with rural and
palestine 643refugee camp women. Although formal member-
ship in these committees was limited, they provided
a framework at the local level for women’s protest
where even informal activities, like visiting families
of the martyred, injured, or detained, were charged
with an “organized” aspect. The first year of the
intifada saw weekly women’s marches from churches
and mosques and women were particularly active
in the educational committees that taught children
(illegally) when schools were closed by military
order (Jad 1999). A series of emblematic Women’s
Day’s demonstrations on 8 March 1988 showed
the women’s movement at full force, with partici-
pation across classes and locales. A leaflet issued by
“the Palestinian women’s movement” proclaimed a
dominant theme: “Let each women consider the
wounded and imprisoned her own children.”
Women’s extension of their mothering and domes-
tic roles to include the community (Giacaman and
Johnson 1988, Peteet 1997) was a noted feature of
the first intifada. A remarkable level of women’s
participation was confirmed in a 1995 survey of
6,024 married women where nearly half the
women had protected someone, usually a young
man, from arrest by the Israeli army, over a third
had marched in a demonstration, and over a quar-
ter had thrown stones. On average, women had
engaged in these activities at least ten times
(Huntington et al. 2001, 10). Another significant
feature of the intifada period was growing links
with Israeli and international women’s peace groups.
While some analysts saw women’s public partic-
ipation as drawing them away from the isolation
and repression of domestic life (Strum 1992) others
identified the home and family as sites of protest
and transformation, whether women were defend-
ing their home against invasion, mobilizing family
and kin networks for protest, or mothers were
using narrative strategies and social support to con-
stitute the heroic self of an imprisoned son (Jean-
Klein 2000). Women’s protest also encountered
backlash in the form of a campaign to impose the
™ijàb(headscarf) on women in Gaza. Coupled with
the male political hierarchy failing to recognize
women’s leadership in the intifada, social and gen-
der issues (the terms were often conflated) became
a new focus of women’s protest, particularly in the
interim period of nascent state-building (1996–
2000). Women’s protest had a dual focus in the
interim period: first, for equality as “citizens” in
legislation and governance under the Palestinian
Authority and second, against continued Israeli
occupation, with a particular emphasis on prison-
ers, land and Israeli settlements, and Israel’s closure
of the Palestinian territory.