It is our belief that Palestine is a feminist issue....

So long as antiwar activists denounce the U.S. occupation of Iraq, but not Israel’s occupation of Palestine, I will keep drawing the parallels.  So long as Western feminists denounce the oppression of Arab women as a result of Islamic fundamentalism, but not as a result of Israeli occupation, I will raise my voice.  I will explain that Palestinian women are without any doubt more oppressed by Israel and Zionism than they are by their fellow Palestinian men, that a Palestinian woman’s freedom of movement, her right to an education, her right to vote, her right to work, her right to live where she wants, her right to sufficient food, clean water, and medical treatment in her own homeland are denied to her not by her fellow Palestinians but by the illegal occupying power, Israel.(1)

It is time for a similar statement regarding Palestine and the movement for boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS)(4) which, since it was called for in 2003 by some 170 Palestinian civil society organizations—including virtually every Palestinian women’s organization—has proliferated globally.  It is our belief that the Palestinian struggle and the campaign for boycott, divestment and sanctions is a feminist issue.  It may be, indeed, above all a feminist issue.  Yet, despite the increasingly broad appeal of this non-violent and rights-based movement, its implications for both global feminist solidarity work and for feminist social and political analysis have not become generally appreciated.  While a number of academic associations, in the United States and elsewhere, have endorsed an academic boycott, they have largely done so in the name of anti-racist or anti-colonial solidarity.  To date, apparently, no major Western women’s or feminist organization has declared its solidarity with the Palestinian struggle.  Where this is not symptomatic of explicitly Zionist sympathies on the part of some feminists,(5)  the lack of open feminist solidarity with Palestine may be in large part a consequence of the success of state-driven Israeli messaging that Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian here describes, which depicts Israel as a liberal, democratic society that is exceptional in the Middle East for its openness to women’s emancipation and full participation in social and political spheres.  What is in effect a propaganda or hasbara campaign of “feminist-washing”, akin to the “pink-washing” campaigns whose contradictions Brenna Bhandar discusses in her contribution, is shadowed by its implicit Islamophobia: it always implies the essential incompatibility of Arab and Muslim societies with women’s emancipation, as it argues their incapacity for democracy, while occluding the deeply heteropatriarchal and homonational elements basic to Israeli state formation.  Furthermore, as Shalhoub-Kevorkian argues, the Orientalist assumptions about Arab society that underlie both forms of normalization of Israel actually endorse and exacerbate patriarchal elements within Palestinian society.

To some degree, such attitudes may also still inform some Western feminists’ lack of explicit engagement with the Palestinian struggle, compounded by the long and vexed history of nationalist movements’ frequent marginalization of women as agents and of feminist issues as subsidiary to the national struggle.  Ironically, however, if feminists are leery of giving support to a Palestinian liberation movement often defined in nationalist terms, their reluctance to do so tacitly lends their support to another and more powerful nationalism, that of Zionism.  But to consider Palestine simply in the light of older decolonizing movements is to miss the significance of the new conjuncture within a longer history of colonialism and of heteropatriarchal modes of social control that Israel’s system of domination represents.  As a settler colony, Israel depends on and deploys strategies of domination that, as Rana Sharif and Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian show, are deeply structured by the gendered relations of power typical of colonial societies. These modes of domination present a peculiarly urgent field of theorization and of practical reconsideration for feminism, representing as they do a reconfiguration of modes of biopower that draws into the core of the neo-liberal state the colonial operations of processes that both Sharif and Shalhoub-Kevorkian here invoke under the name of necropolitics.  And, much as it has functioned as a laboratory for technologies of militarized repression and surveillance that have found increasingly widespread application in population control and policing from the US border to Brazilian favelas, Israel also offers a telling body of insight into emerging modes of biopolitical practice and necropolitical regimes that intervene in what I would term the expanded sphere of reproduction.(6)

In his indispensable work, Israel’s Occupation, Neve Gordon argues that in the wake of the Second Intifada that broke out in September 2000, Israel’s control over the West Bank shifted “from the principle of colonization to the principle of separation.”(7)  This entailed equally “a radical de-emphasis of disciplinary power and the accentuation of a particular kind of sovereign power, which in many respects disregards the law”:(8) as he puts it, “In place of the politics of life that had characterized the OT (Occupied Territories) until the second intifada, a politics of death slowly emerged.”(9)  Gordon does not examine in any depth, however, the quite exceptional degree to which this shift from the biopolitical mode, in which Israel as a colonizing power still regarded itself as responsible (as under the Geneva Conventions it is in fact obliged to be) for the continuing welfare of the occupied population, to the necropolitical exercise of the sovereign power to take life, which targets the most fundamental forms of reproduction of Palestinian life.

What is implied here, drawing on the work of Marxist theorists like Louis Althusser and materialist feminists like Leopoldina Fortunati, is an expanded conception of reproduction that includes not only the biological reproduction of life—birth, nurture, and the maintenance of health—or of mere labour power, but the reproduction of social and cultural relations of every kind. Althusser refers to this in limited fashion as “the reproduction of the conditions of production”, that is, not only of the “forces of production” (labour power), but also of  “the existing [social] relations of production”.(10) Fortunati in turn points out that this separation of production from reproduction is the foundation of “the sexual division of labor”, within which the work of reproduction performed overwhelmingly by women appears as the “natural force of social labor”.(11)  Insofar as the reproduction of labor takes place through the family, it draws into it the affective as well as the purely economic relations among individuals, those relations in which “nature” takes on the form of the social and the cultural.(12) The conception of reproduction in this expanded sense transforms the sphere of reproduction from a function and space marginal to capital into one of primary contradictions and therefore of struggle.  In the colonial sphere, I would argue, an expanded conception of reproduction designates the whole domain of the social, the cultural and the affective as principal sites of struggle insofar as they bring into play not only the productive capacities of the colonized—those capacities that, as Gordon demonstrates, the Israeli state in the mode of discipline and biopower sought to exploit in the form of Palestinian labor—but their very survival as a “form of living”, precisely that which is targeted by the “sovereign power” of the new Israeli mode of domination.  This is, no less than the capitalist sphere of reproduction, a mode of domination in which—as Shalhoub-Kevorkian here shows in painful detail—those who bear the brunt of its violence and the burden of survival are women.

The transition from a biopolitical state to one of sovereign power, as Gordon describes it, is not an historical accident contingent on an unfolding “conflict”, but is, rather, symptomatic of the fundamental contradictions of Israel’s settler colonial regime, as Bhandar describes it in her contribution.  Even before the institution of the state of Israel in 1948, which entailed the expulsion of three-quarters of a million Palestinians, Zionists had considered the existing Palestinian population a demographic threat to the exclusively Jewish character of the state they imagined.  As David Ben-Gurion saw it, a state that had more than 20% Arab population would be unviable.(13)  Even without the intifadas, Israeli dependence on the exploitation and reproduction of Palestinian labor power would ultimately have been in unsustainable contradiction to the Zionist project precisely because—as the intifadas demonstrated—the Israeli effort to assimilate Palestinians within a colonial state through the normalization of the occupation had failed.(14)  The evident capacity of the Palestinians to reproduce their culture and society—their samoud, or persistence—as a form of living distinct from and oppositional to the Zionist state and society would require their erasure rather than their adjustment to a normalized occupation. 

But the corresponding shift from a biopolitical to a necropolitical state was by no means a radical departure, but rather the intensification of a process that had been continuous, as Shalhoub-Kevorkian maintains, since Israel’s inception in the varying forms of ethnic cleansing (or “transfer”), separation and containment through the fragmentation of Palestinian territory, denial of freedom of movement, including access to basic resources like farmland or schooling, denial of access to fundamental services, from healthcare to adequate housing or water supplies, denial of the right to family unification or to return freely to one’s place of origin, denial on an arbitrary basis of permits of all kinds, including the right to travel or to access healthcare or schooling to which one is formally entitled.  Indeed, as Rana Sharif points out,(15) it is frequently the right of access to fundamental services that are theoretically granted by Israel—and which it holds out as indices of the benevolence of its regime—that is withheld.  As one of her seriously ill interviewees relates of his attempt to obtain routine treatment:

The Palestinian [office] handed the application over to the Israeli [HDCA]. Upon reporting to the Palestinian [office] on the second day, my wife was told that the Israeli side was still examining the issue from a security perspective. Therefore, I lost my appointment. Because an alternative treatment is not available in the West Bank hospitals, my health condition has deteriorated.

Angela Davis has written eloquently of the ways in which the formations both of slavery and of the era of supposed emancipation impacted the social and cultural structures of African American life in ways that had peculiar effect on black women, precisely to the extent to which “unfreedom” shaped the affective and institutional sphere of reproduction or “family-support systems”.(16)  By the same token, the Israeli assault on Palestinian life, on its capacity for reproduction, although it affects every Palestinian regardless of gender or sexuality, falls with particular weight upon women.  Of course, the Israeli regime, predicated as it is on the essentially exclusionary preservation and promotion of the “Jewish character of the state”, is gendered and racialized at every level in ways that do not target Palestinians alone.  Immigration law is profoundly discriminatory not only against Palestinians, but also against migrants whose labor has increasingly displaced that of Palestinian workers since the Second Intifada.  Notoriously, black migrants from North and East Africa have been repelled or interned as “infiltrators”, under the recently amended Prevention of Infiltration Act of 1954,(17) a law originally directed at Palestinians, and that continues to be applied, for example, both to Bedouins in the Naqab or to Palestinians from Gaza who seek to continue their studies in West Bank universities. On the other hand, immigrant workers from, for instance, the Philippines, usually concentrated in health and domestic care, are permitted to come on short term visas, and normally only if they are single and do not have children.  Those who become pregnant while in the country may be expelled, for fear that their non-Jewish children would be able to claim the right of citizenship and “flood the foundation of the Zionist state."(18) At the same time, Palestinian workers are permitted to enter Israel or its illegal settlements on the West Bank only on condition of being a married father over the age of 35.(19)  Palestinians who are citizens of Israel have, as Bhandar notes, been deprived of the right to family unification under the Citizenship and Entry into Israel Law of 2003, which bans Palestinians from outside Israel from gaining residency through marriage to an Israeli (a law comparable to one that even the South African Supreme Court balked at accepting). Meanwhile Filipinas who marry Israeli men may become citizens if they convert to Judaism.  A complex network of differential and differentiating laws thus governs the various populations of Israel and its occupied territories.(20)

The effect of Israel’s “low-intensity warfare” against the persisting Palestinian communities in areas targeted for Israeli expansion or for “Judaization” falls, however, with especial weight on women.  Its manifestations range from the very literal destruction of the domestic space through demolition or eviction, usually under discriminatory legal pretexts and even including the demolition of entire villages and areas defined as “unrecognized villages” in the Naqab, to the brutal denial of access to essential and often urgently needed care.(21)  Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian documents in often painful detail the impact on Palestinian women of Israel’s will to contain and reduce the Palestinian population in East Jerusalem in particular (an area currently targeted with particular intensity for settlement expansion, given Israel’s determination to appropriate this historically Palestinian city as part of its “eternal capital”).  Its impact ranges from the extremist “price tag” campaign that targets all Palestinians with vindictive violence,(22) to the eviction of families from homes they have occupied for decades, with deeply traumatic effects on children. As Saree Makdisi explains, citing Amnesty International, “the deliberate demolition of Palestinian homes is a long-standing Israeli policy” and one that is “not justified by military necessity.”(23) These assaults on Palestinian daily and domestic life, which extend to the often fatal denial of essential treatment to pregnant women, as if in an effort to target the literal biological reproduction of Palestinian life, have shaped, Shalhoub-Kevorkian argues, a “death zone” for Palestinians that has peculiar impact on women even if it is one part of a larger, ongoing process of dispossession that Bhandar here sees as continuous with settler colonialism practices elsewhere.(24)  This death zone, the material instance of what Sharif, citing Achille Mbembe,(25) calls the “necropolitical state”, is the space where the biological, material and cultural reproduction of Palestinian social life is put at daily and intimate risk.

Israel’s war against the continuance of Palestinian life targets women in every sphere.  Certainly it targets women as potential or actual agents of the reproduction of life itself, as mothers and as caretakers, but it also targets women as reproducers of social and cultural life, as if the targeting of women—as so often in colonial regimes—were understood to be the royal road to the destruction of indigenous social and political life.(26) Living under Israeli occupation or within the borders of its racial state has been devastating for all Palestinians, but is especially destructive for Palestinian women as the essays collected here all demonstrate. If, as Shalhoub-Kevorkian argues, the analysis of the larger “physics of power” that organizes the settler colonial project of Zionism is essential to any feminist understanding of the condition of Palestinian women and of the nature of their struggle, it is no less the case that the same structures of domination must be analyzed and contested from a feminist standpoint.  This is, in Bhandar’s words, a fundamental task of any “anti-colonial, feminist politics of solidarity”.(27)  Feminism, according to Shalhoub-Kevorkian, “entails understanding the nature and significance of solidarity with the dispossessed, something that global feminism, international law, and Israeli feminism have so far failed to do” in the case of Palestinian women.(28)

Palestinian women’s and feminist groups, including the General Union of Palestinian Women (GUPW) and Palestinian Federation of Women’s Action Committees (PFWAC), have been an integral element of the Palestinian call for BDS against Israel since its inception.  This non-violent and human rights-based campaign makes three basic demands of Israel, calling for broad boycotts and divestment initiatives against Israel until it meets its obligations under international law by:

1. Ending its occupation and colonization of all Arab lands and dismantling the Separation or Apartheid Wall;
2. Recognizing the fundamental rights of the Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel to full equality;
3. Respecting, protecting and promoting the rights of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and properties as stipulated in UN Resolution 194.(29)

The guidelines for the implementation of BDS measures are deliberately flexible and context-sensitive, allowing for local solidarity organizations to determine the most effective measures to pursue in any given situation.  Actions have ranged from consumer boycotts of agricultural products grown in settlements on the West Bank, to campaigns against companies like Veolia, which runs transport systems in Occupied East Jerusalem and bus routes and waste disposal facilities in the settlements; from divestment campaigns by churches or universities that target corporations who profit from the occupation, like Caterpillar, Elbit Systems, or Hewlett-Packard, to demands for the suspension of contracts with firms like global security company G4S that runs Israeli political prisons and engages in the torture of prisoners.(30)  One cornerstone of the BDS campaign in recent years has been the boycott of Israeli academic institutions,(31) a specific campaign that has been endorsed by an increasing number of academic associations, from the Teachers’ Union of Ireland(32) to the US American Studies Association,(33) or supported by more specific measures, like the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA)’s passage of a motion urging the International Union of Architects to suspend the Israeli Association of United Architects (IAUA) from the world body of architects, the International Union of Architects (UIA).(34)

Much as the sports and cultural boycott of South Africa had an impact on the apartheid regime out of all proportion to any economic impact it could have, the academic boycott is of particular significance in targeting a core element of Israel’s efforts to normalize its regime of occupation and apartheid by projecting the image of its liberal and democratic institutions and by integrating its intellectual and research agendas with academic institutions in the United States and Europe.  Critics of the academic boycott campaign frequently argue that targeting universities and academics threatens to isolate one principal space where dialogue and the critique of Israeli state practices take place.  They ignore the fact that the boycott does not target individual academics, but specifically academic institutions, which, far from being sites of liberal critique, are deeply complicit in maintaining the technical and research infrastructure of the occupation.(35) Their assertion that the academic boycott undermines the possibility of dialogue is strikingly belied by the fact that in the wake of recent endorsements by academic associations in the United States, public debate on Palestine and Israel has opened up to an unprecedented degree in virtually every medium, from the blogosphere to mainstream media, despite vigorous efforts on the part of the Israeli lobby to censor and stifle debate.(36)  This outcome has been a singular and important effect of BDS, a civil society movement necessitated by the exceptional closure of the public and political spheres in the US and Europe to any critical discussion, let alone sanction of, Israel’s ongoing breaches of international law and human rights conventions.  This is a movement that has begun to correct what Shalhoub-Kevorkian here refers to as the long-standing practice of “invisibilizing Palestine”, evicting it from the public sphere.

It is significant that the first US academic association to endorse the academic boycott was the Association for Asian American Studies, and that those that followed included the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association and the American Studies Association.  All are associations whose members have a long history of analysis and critique of imperialism, settler colonialism and the racial state.  All voted to endorse the boycott as an act of solidarity, recognizing that what they were doing was not singling Israel out, as some argue—a misconception that Bhandar here critiques—but rather recognizing that Israel’s colonial project is continuous with and a crucial model for the ongoing racial domination that characterizes the era of neo-liberalism.  Their solidarity with Palestine did not eclipse their concern with racial oppression in their own colonial or racial-state contexts, but enhanced their analysis and linked their concerns to the global network of power, accumulation by dispossession, hetero-patriarchal and racial domination, and technologies of control within which Israel is a crucial node.  Indeed, many proponents of the boycott at these associations saw in both the debates it occasioned and in the engagement of scholarship with political solidarity a moment of renewal of their faith in intellectual work.(37) The argument made by the participants in this forum is that feminist movements, and feminist scholars within the academy internationally, likewise stand to gain from a commitment to solidarity with the Palestinian struggle.