in future phases of the struggle for national libera-
tion: politicization of women’s domestic roles; the
influence of kin relations; exploitation of the adver-
sary’s gender prejudices; and the impact of political
work on women’s empowerment.
When it was located in Lebanon the secularly
based resistance involved women’s broad, and
active, participation. It motivated a degree of struc-
tural and ideological transformation in gender-based
social relations, and women leaders consciously
sought to exploit the malleability of social structures
and values that can accompany war (Peteet 1991).
Some women were mobilized via extensions of
their domestic roles, while others challenged gender
boundaries even further by fighting. During this
period when nationalist values and valor were pri-
oritized, in many cases activism was tolerated and
encouraged by women’s families and the society.
The nationalist inspiration of domestic activities
was also central to the first intifada (uprising) in
the Occupied Territories (1987–93). Not only did
women shelter activists hiding from occupation
authorities, they also actively confronted Israeli
soldiers. A typical image from that period was that
of a Palestinian woman, wielding a pot threaten-
ingly in one hand while wrenching some young
man free of the grips of an Israeli soldier trying to
arrest him. “All the boys are my sons,” became a
saying which, calling on traditional kinship rela-
tions, both explained and justified such courageous
acts.
Through the promotion of national products and
the local economy, women’s popular committees,
active since the 1980s, likewise extended women’s
traditional domestic activities into forms that
helped sustain the first intifada. The committees’
members, recruited from all social strata, encour-
aged home gardening and ran sewing or canning
cooperatives as part of a strategy of “steadfast-
ness,” thus enabling women to help support their
families during a time of economic hardship when
many male bread-winners were imprisoned or
otherwise unable to work (Hiltermann 1991).
Although the committees were designed to raise
both national and gender consciousness through
widening women’s participation in the economic
and political spheres, societal expectations that
women would prioritize the demands of raising
families sometimes superseded their political com-
mitments, curtailing women’s involvement after
marriage.
Women’s political and militant activities have
often been facilitated by Israeli gender biases. Dur-
ing the first intifada, the Israeli military did not shut
down offices of the women’s committees with the656 political-social movements: revolutionary
same frequency as they did other political offices.
Women did not, however, escape imprisonment,
beatings, and other reprisals, punishments which
are often sexualized. Israeli interrogators use rape,
sexual threats, and threats against children as forms
of intimidation and torture against female prison-
ers. Some have asserted that withstanding such sex-
ual harassment was transformed into a nationalist
badge of courage, and that men sought women who
had been political prisoners as marriage partners in
order to defy the Occupation authorities (Thornhill
1992). Despite their brave and sustained participa-
tion and sacrifices for the sake of the nation, how-
ever, women’s activism has not yielded a revolution
in their social and political position. Not every fam-
ily has accepted their daughters’ political participa-
tion, and former female prisoners are not always
seen as being desirable wives.
Another example of the exploitation of Israeli
gender prejudice appeared during the second inti-
fada, which began in 2000, when female suicide
bombers slipped past Israeli security because they
did not fit the typical profile of the male religious
devotee. The wave of female suicide bombers
attracted shocked curiosity in a Western press used
to characterizing the perpetrators of such acts as
young, fanatical men seduced into jihad by the
promise of doe-eyed virgins in heaven. Women’s
involvement in what many Palestinians refer to as
“martyrdom operations” served first, to counter
orientalist stereotypes of the lascivious and reli-
giously fanatical male “Arab terrorist,” and sec-
ond, to reassert the political message of these acts:
that Palestinian women, men, and children are suf-
fering from Israeli occupation.
The more militarized and less popular nature of
the second intifada has created a starker distinction
between the battlefront and home front, minimiz-
ing both men’s and women’s roles in direct resist-
ance to the occupation. Women’s participation has
been largely confined to support roles, hiding and
supplying food to fighters, for example. Mothers of
martyrs continue to be a primary symbol of resist-
ance, thereby heightening the significance of women
as bearers of fighters (Johnson and Kuttab 2001,
31). While combat and imprisonment are not ex-
clusively men’s experiences, they are more central
to the construction of male gender ideals. Beatings
and detention have been described as rites of pas-
sage that transform young men into resistant sub-
jects endowed with social prestige (Peteet 1994, 31).
The growth of the Islamist movement began to
cause a restrictive conflation of women with
national honor during the first intifada, when a
campaign was waged in Gaza to impose the ™ijàb