PALESTINIAN nationalism, like other nationalisms, is influenced in its philosophy by Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment Romantic thought. Enlightenment philosophy underlies a variety of nationalisms in Europe and, through European colonialism, many parts of the world.(1) In the European political arena, nationalism is expressed through gendered narratives. Although anti-colonial nationalist agency defines itself in opposition to European nationalism, it does not escape implication in the same narrative.(2) The metaphor of the nation as a mother- or fatherland, the practice of defending and administering it with homosocial institutions like the military and the bureaucracy, and the gendered strategies of reproducing not only the nation and its nationalist agents but also the very national culture defining it, were all constitutive of nationalist discourse.(3) Kumari Jayawardena identifies the gender objectives of nationalist reformers across Asia as two-fold:
... to establish in their countries a system of stable, monogamous nuclear families with educated and employable women such as was associated with capitalist development and bourgeois ideology; and yet to ensure that women would retain a position of traditional subordination within the family.(4)
In putting this project into effect, the nationalists’ combining of European and existing gender norms does not result in cultural syncretism; rather, it is a process whereby European norms sublate traditional ones. The new gender norms are modern inventions dressed up in traditional garb to satisfy nationalism’s claim of a national culture for which it stands. These new ideals are not so much traditional as they are traditionalized.(5)
In the Arab East, as in the rest of Asia,(6) national identity and nationalist agency were the sites of negotiating not only East and West as conceptual anchoring categories, but also, as importantly, the foundational ruse of gendered citizenship. The respective responsibilities of men and women to the nation emerged as epistemic cornerstones of nation-building. Arguing that masculinity was always the identitarian pole of European nationalist thought, I will examine how Palestinian nationalism conceives (of) the masculine in defining Palestinian nationalist agency. In so doing, the category of masculinity will be shown to have certain attributes as it is embedded within a temporal schema--that of post-Enlightenment modernity; a class schema--that of bourgeois entrepreneurs; and a geocultural schema--that of European colonial culture as a paradigm through which tradition is (re)interpreted. My objective here is not so much to describe the unfolding of a masculine-based nationalism, but, rather, to show the process through which masculinity itself is lived within the modality of nationalism-indeed, how masculinity is nationalized. I maintain that the mobilizing metaphors of nationalist movements are not only metaphors. They also reflect the fundamental assumptions of nationalist thought, which establishes the future gender constitution and gender roles of nationalist agents. History shows that other revolutions have foundered on a “nation first, women after” strategy; it is not too soon to ask this question of Palestinian nationalism and its vision of a post-colonial future.
For a decade following the establishment of the state of Israel, in May 1948, and the subsequent expulsion of close to a million Palestinians, the Palestinian people remained without a national leadership. As a result, the majority of the Palestinians looked to Arab governments in the region to help them retrieve Palestine from the Zionists and return them to their homes. When no such development occurred, guerrilla groups began emerging in the late fifties in the refugee camps and among Palestinian university students. This development threatened Arab regimes, which by then had reached a modus vivendi with the decade-old Israeli state.
As a response to this rising tide of Palestinian nationalist agitation, and in an attempt to control and restrict it, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) was created, in 1964, by a number of Arab governments.(7) In the wake of the 1967 Israeli occupation of the remainder of Palestine (and the expulsion of hundreds of thousands more Palestinians), Palestinian guerrilla groups intensified their military attacks on Israel and their ideological attacks on Arab governments. This situation culminated in a coup d’etat, in 1969, when Ahmad Shuqayri was ousted from his position as head of the PLO and replaced by Yasir Arafat. Arafat, who had been the leader of the independent Palestinian Liberation Movement (Fateh), along with the leaders of other major guerrilla groups became members of the executive committee of the PLO.
This development coincided with other changes in the social and economic fortunes of the Palestinian bourgeoisie in the diaspora. In Lebanon, an alliance of the different elements of the Lebanese bourgeoisie against the rising fortunes of bourgeois Palestinians manifested itself in the 1965 successful attempt to break the Palestinian-owned Intra Bank, the largest Arab-owned bank in the Middle East at the time.(8) By the late 1960s, Persian/Arab Gulf countries that had opened their borders earlier to the Palestinian intelligentsia and Palestinian entrepreneurs were now restricting their entry to forestall future competition between Palestinians and the increasingly better-educated national populations.(9) In 1970, civil war broke out in Jordan between the Jordanian army and PLO guerrillas, culminating in the PLO’s expulsion from Jordan a year later, after the Jordanian army’s slaughter of thousands of Palestinian guerrillas.(10) These developments help explain the sudden nationalist fervor emanating from the diaspora Palestinian bourgeoisie who, until the 1960s, had been quiescent.(11) By 1974, the Palestinian bourgeoisie, backing Arafat’s liberal Fateh, was successful in enlisting the support of the Arab League to recognize the PLO as the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people. That same year, Arafat addressed the United Nations (UN) General Assembly on behalf of the Palestinian people, a development eliciting worldwide recognition (the United States and Israel excepted) of the Palestinian struggle.(12)
In the Palestinian case, as with all nationalist movements, the project of gendering inevitably starts with the establishment of a nationalist movement. In their pioneering collection Nationalisms and Sexualities, Andrew Parker et al. argue that in “the same way that ‘man’ and ‘woman’ define themselves reciprocally (though never symmetrically), national identity is determined not on the basis of its own intrinsic properties but as a function of what it (presumably) is not."(13) Thus, the important task for anti-colonial nationalists is not only to define gender roles in relation to each other (female-male), but also to define both in relation to the nationalist project, and, in so doing, to dissociate national identity from any colonial contamination.
TERRITORY VERSUS PATERNITY DETERMINING PALESTINIAN IDENTITY
The first two documents issued by the PLO were the Palestinian National Charter (Al-Mithaq al-Watani al-Filastini) and the Palestinian Nationalist Charter (Al-Mithaq al-Qawmi al-Filastini). These Charters functioned as a sort of constitution, defining Palestinian political goals, Palestinian rights, indeed “Palestinianness” itself. They were the founding documents of the new generation of Palestinian nationalists. An analysis of these texts gives us some indication of how post-1948 Palestinian nationalism was articulated by its architects.
In the introduction to the Palestinian Nationalist Charter, the Zionist conquest of Palestine is presented as a rape of the land.(14) It views Palestinians as the children of Palestine, portrayed as a mother. The Zionist enemy is clearly seen as masculine, and the wrong committed by this enemy against Palestinians is considered metaphorically to be of a violent sexual nature.(15)
This view is in full concert with early Zionist discourse that viewed the role of Zionists as fertilizing the virgin land. For Zionists, Palestine was both the mother-land, to which Jews needed to return, and the virgin-land, which the Zionists needed to fertilize and fecundate. As Ella Shohat has shown, the Zionist view was in turn borrowed from European colonial discourse, especially in relation to the “New World."(16) The Israeli Sabra, like the American Adam--but unlike the “feminine” diaspora Jew(17)--was a new masculine pioneer impregnating the virgin/motherland with new life. This pregnancy was to result in the birth of the “new Jew."(18) Zionism’s gendered discourse echoes Orientalist discourse--Orientalists described the Orient “as feminine, its riches as fertile, its main symbols the sensual woman, the harem, and the despotic--but curiously attractive--ruler."(19)
These masculine-centric discursive axioms constituted European nationalism from its inception. Both Benedict Anderson and George Mosse argue that nationalism favors a distinctly homosocial form of male bonding. Mosse argues that "[European] nationalism had a special affinity for male society and together with the concept of respectability legitimized the dominance of men over women."(20) For Anderson, the “nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship. Ultimately, it is this fraternity that makes it possible, over the past two centuries, for so many millions of people, not so much to kill, as willingly to die for such limited imaginings."(21) In Imagined Communities, Anderson observes that “in the modern world everyone can, should, will ‘have’ a nationality, as he or she ‘has’ a gender."(22) This development is part and parcel of the advent of modernity and the specifically modern ways of classifying people. This naturalization of national identity, however, like the naturalization of gender and sexual identities that are synchronous with it, has a history that I will try to chart in the Palestinian case.
Article 4 of the Palestinian National Charter defines Palestinian identity as “a genuine, inherent and eternal trait and is transmitted from fathers to sons."(23) Article 5 states that “Palestinians are those Arab citizens who used to reside ... in Palestine until 1947, ... and everyone who is born of an Arab Palestinian father after this date--whether inside Palestine or outside it--is a Palestinian."(24) What is interesting in this definition is that Palestinian identity is defined differently depending on the historical period. While until 1947, that is until the “rape” (which is viewed as having been legitimated by the 1947 UN Partition Plan), Palestinians were defined as those who lived in Palestine, i.e., those who lived in the motherland; after 1947, this is no longer the case. In the post-1947 period, Palestinians, whether still in historic Palestine or living outside its borders, no longer fit the earlier definition. This spatial-temporal prerequisite for “Palestinianness,” and its metaphorical stress on maternity, become directly linked, after the “rape,” to the issue of reproducing the nation. In nationalist discourse, this is to be carried out through physiological and metaphorical paternity. It is being born to a Palestinian father that now functions as the prerequisite for Palestinianness, a father, it is important to note, whose very Palestinianness is established through his residence in the motherland before the “rape.” Revealing the importance of eugenics in nationalist logic, this definition carries itself to future generations, whereby it is the sons of these fathers who will continue the reproduction of the Palestinian people. In sum, while the land as mother was responsible for the reproduction of Palestinians until 1947, the rape disqualified her from this role. It is now fathers who reproduce the nation. Territory was replaced by paternity.
The disqualification of the land as mother in her national reproductive role, in the Charter, does not deny that the land, as mother, can produce children, but rather that, since the rape, it can no longer be relied upon to reproduce legitimate Palestinian children. Within this metaphoric schema, women clearly cannot be agents of nationality. Their role, thus, becomes secondary and supportive in the narrative of nationalism.(25)
In his 1974 address to the UN General Assembly, PLO chairman Yasir Arafat again uses metaphors of sexual violence to describe the Zionists’ use of colonial methods to “rape the Palestinian homeland and to exploit and disperse its people."(26) Arafat stresses that Israel’s international alliance with the colonial powers and the United States, against Third World liberation and independence, gives a clearer picture of the enemy “who raped our country,” and illustrates the “honor” of the struggle launched against it.(27) The rape image is invoked again in the November 1988 Political Communique issued by the Palestine National Council. Reasserting the continuing perception of the Zionist occupation as sexual in its symbology, it said that “Israel showed its real self to be a fascist, racist, colonial-settler country that exists through raping/usurping Palestinian land and through exterminating the Palestinian people."(28) Thus, liberation is staged as a transaction between men over the honor of a woman-mother whose ownership passes through paternity.
This discourse has its own momentum. Explaining the refusal of the Palestinian people to accept the UN partition plan of 1947, wherein the United Nations “partitioned what it had no right to divide--the land of the indivisible homeland,” Arafat, in his 1974 UN address, compares the Palestinian people to the natural/true mother in the King Solomon story: “when we rejected that decision, our position corresponded to that of the true mother who refused Solomon’s division of her child when another woman claimed it."(29) This reversal of roles is interesting to note, for, in the Palestinian case, it is Palestine’s true children, both men and women living there, who refused the UN division of their mother. This indicates how Palestinian men and women were engaged in the defense of their mother against what was later referred to as “the rape.” Note how the mother’s agency in Solomon’s story is transferred to the children by Arafat, with Palestine, as mother, retaining only the position of victim. For Arafat, Palestinian nationalist agency, in 1947, was characterized by the children’s defense. But, unlike the mother in Solomon’s story, whose stance convinced Solomon to give her back her child, the defense of their mother by Palestine’s true children failed. The rape took place.
CONCEIVING AND MOTHERING THE MASCULINE
Twenty years after the Israeli occupation of the West Bank (including East Jerusalem) and the Gaza Strip, Palestinians revolted against colonialism for the second time in half a century. More intense than the revolt which lasted from 1936 to 1939, the Palestinian Intifada (uprising), which erupted in 1987, has continued into the present. The Intifada led to the emergence of a new Palestinian leadership that began organizing demonstrations, strikes, and other acts of resistance to the occupation. The Unified National Leadership of the Uprising (UNLU) was later joined by the diaspora-headquartered PLO in providing leadership and financial support to the resisting population. Key in mobilizing the population were the UNLU- and PLO-issued communiques and the Palestinian Declaration of Independence, issued by the PLO in November 1988 from its Tunis headquarters.
In his 1974 UN speech, Yasir Arafat had described the Palestinian people as the “trustworthy guardian” of the holy places of their homeland.(30) The November 1988 Declaration of Independence, in addition to bestowing the adjective “courageous” on the Palestinian woman, describes her as being “the guardian of our survival and our lives, the guardian of our perennial flame."(31) The way Palestinian women are perceived to guard Palestinian survival and lives is to be found in the communiques of the UNLU.(32)
Communique No. 29, entitled “The Call of the Wedding of the Palestinian Independent State,” which celebrates the Declaration of Independence, congratulates women in their role as mothers. The communique salutes “the mother of the martyr and her celebratory ululations, for she has ululated twice, the day her son went to fight and was martyred, and the day the state was declared."(33)
Communique No. 5 describes Palestinian mothers, sisters, and daughters as “manabit,"(34) or the soil on which “manhood, respect and dignity” grow. Women are referred to here in biologically- and socially-relational terms to men. The communique calls on women to “work together side by side with their husbands, sons and brothers....” Whereas mothers, sisters, and daughters are described as the soil producing manhood, respect, and dignity, a later communique describes the Palestinian people, conceived in the masculine, as the “makers of glory, respect and dignity."(35) The discrepancy is central to the concept of Palestinian nationalist agents as masculine. While men actively create glory, respect, and dignity, women are merely the soil on which these attributes, along with manhood, grow. It is as soil that they are the “guardians” of Palestinian lives and survival.(36)
The UNLU, which issued the Intifada communiques, seems at times ambivalent, while at others, fully complicit in continuing the earlier tradition of conceiving the masculine. In some communiques,(37) women are listed with occupational groups such as merchants, peasants, students, and workers. This gives the impression that these occupational groups include men only, or that “women,” unlike “men,” constitute a separate occupational group, taking for granted women’s roles as housewives and denying this role the dignity of an occupation. In other communiques,(38) women are mentioned together with vulnerable sectors of the population,(39) mainly children and old people. Women are listed with men only in the context of resistance and struggle, thus recognizing men’s agency as their only defining attribute, while women (who are not mothers) possess limited agency.(40)
The specificity of Palestinian women’s bodies is significant in these texts only when reproduction is considered. This conception of the body defines the Palestinian that the UNLU has in mind when it declares that the Intifada consists of “the children and young men of the stones and Molotov cocktails; it is the thousands of women who miscarried as a result of poison gas and tear gas grenades, and those women whose sons and husbands were thrown in the Nazi prisons."(41) Palestinian women are mentioned in their reproductive capacities--when they miscarry-- or in their social roles as mothers--when their sons are imprisoned.
Women’s reproductive roles appear everywhere in the communiques of the first year of the Intifada. Women’s suffering at the hands of the occupier is exemplified in miscarriages--their failure to produce more nationalist agents.(42) Yet, they are commended as mothers throughout. It is in recognition of their reproductive capacity that the UNLU sends women its love,(43) salutes them,(44) addresses them as the mothers of “the martyrs, the detainees and the wounded [all males],"(45) congratulates them on the martyrdom of their sons,(46) and sympathizes with them as “wailing widows and thakala” (mothers who lost their sons).(47)
Women, in those communiques, are also viewed outside the context of their reproductive roles. They are saluted as detainees of the occupation authorities,(48) and mourned when they, along with children and old people, are killed by Israelis.(49) When women, as daughters, are described as martyrs, they are listed with sons.(50) They are also referred to, along with children and young and old people, as the “makers of the Intifada,"(51) and are singled out to perform activities that the UNLU views as their responsibility.(52) These “responsibilities” include the commemoration of 8 March as International Women’s Day, with demonstrations against the occupation. Women are praised for subordinating gender issues to national ones, and are asked implicitly to transfer the legitimacy of their cause against sexual oppression to the national struggle.(53) The Women’s Committees (which are attached to the different branches of the national movement) have not articulated a clear gender agenda, although their 8 March communique addresses more directly the different facets of women’s activities during the Intifada. Women’s activities in the Women’s Committees “remained an extension of [women’s] traditional roles in such fields as education and social services."(54)
In 1989, in contrast to the tone of previous communiques, the UNLU saluted the Palestinian woman and declared its “admiration for her heroism in the national struggle."(55) In 1990, the UNLU named its 8 March communique “The Woman’s Call,” in which a special section was devoted to women who were presented again in relational terms to men.
Progressive nations celebrate International Women’s Day on 8 March as a day of struggle for the world’s women’s masses. While celebrating this great day, in the name of all the sons of our people, we congratulate the world’s women’s masses and the masses of the Palestinian women’s movement and its vanguard organizations, hailing every working woman, woman struggler, and housewife, and especially our imprisoned strugglers. We also pay tribute to the struggling role of the Palestinian uprising’s women’s movement, to every mother who has lost a son, daughter, husband, or brother, and to every woman who meets with a struggling daughter or a heroic son from behind the Bastille of the Zionist enemy.(56)
The communique proceeds to praise the Palestinian people for making history “through the blood of their sons.” The UNLU communiques implicitly analogize the Intifada to a pregnancy. While the Intifada is referred to as entering its eighth, ninth, or twelfth month,(57) the enemy’s attempt to repress it is constantly referred to as the enemy’s attempt to abort it.(58) Palestinian independence is clearly seen as the ultimate birth of the Intifada’s pregnancy (see the Declaration). The Intifada is also viewed as “the Palestinian wedding,” the apogee of heterosexual love.(59) It seems that the outcome of the Intifada’s pregnancy is both a birth and a wedding, in the sense that weddings inaugurate a new reproductive cycle--the reproduction of the next generation. This places the heterosexual reproduction of the family at the center of the nationalist project. The parties to the wedding seem to be none other than the Palestinians as nationalist agents, who are always already masculine, and Palestine, the mother/woman/land. Once independence takes place, however, it is not clear whether Palestine the mother would be trusted again to conceive/reproduce the Palestinian people. In the meantime, it is the Palestinian man who is the conceiver/reproducer of the nation. In this vein, Yasir Arafat himself (who on some occasions is referred to as a “brother”) is described as the “symbolic father” of the nation.(60)
MAPPING OUT PALESTINIAN MASCULINITY
Establishing a new model of anti-colonial masculinity was a much more complicated endeavor than its colonial counterpart. In European nationalist discourses, as Chandra Mohanty argues, it was always European white masculinity that defined nationalist agency at home. In the colonies, it was that same white colonial masculinity, made normative through European colonialism, which reigned supreme in dealing with the natives.(61) In adapting European nationalist thought to local conditions, anti-colonial nationalists were faced with the task of defining not only the roles of men and women in the nationalist project, but also what a non-European nationalist masculinity would look like, and what kind of performances would guarantee it. In this vein, Palestinian nationalism, like other anti-colonial nationalisms, set itself similar tasks.
Article 7 of the Palestinian National Charter refers to the Palestinian “individual,” and is thus less gender-specific than the rest of the Charter.
Article 7 says that it is a Palestinian “national duty” to raise this “individual in an Arab and revolutionary way and ... all means of education and consciousness-raising [will be used] to acquaint the Palestinian with his homeland."(62) The article also describes the national duty of the Palestinian individual who, after being raised according to the recommendations of Article 7, is rendered “qualified [to launch] armed struggle” as the “sacrific[ing] of his life and his money in the interest of retrieving his homeland until liberation."(63) This appeal to Palestinians includes not only the masculine ability to launch armed struggle, but also to have a bourgeois economic status. The appeal is made in the context of the Palestinian diaspora, where most of the Palestinian bourgeoisie now lives.
The trajectory of the metaphors of this discourse serves to produce a gendered mindset of agency with its own momentum. Speaking in 1974 at the United Nations about Palestinians in the diaspora, Arafat stated that Palestinian sons, educated in the diaspora, where they worked and contributed to the construction and development of neighboring countries, earned income which they used to help their younger and older relatives who could not leave the refugee camps. He emphasized that “the brother paid for the education of his brother and sister, and took care of his parents and raised his children, but continued to dream in his heart of returning to Palestine. He remained Palestinian, attached to his homeland with unrelenting loyalty, unweakened will, and untempered enthusiasm."(64) Like all other political ideologies, nationalism is derived from its own social construction. In this vein, it is important to note the performative aspect of nationalist agency in Arafat’s text, whereby it is the brother’s paying for the education of his brother and sister, taking care of “his” parents, raising “his” children, and dreaming in “his” heart of returning to Palestine that characterize the agency of the Palestinian nationalist agent. Following Judith Butler, it is clear that the substantive effect of nationalist agency, like sexual and gender identities, is performatively produced and compelled by the regulatory practices of the coherence of the category of nationalist agency itself.(65) Given that nationalism, like all political positions, is perforce performative, nationalist agency proves to be performatively constituted by the very expressions that are said to be its results.
Clearly, when referring to Palestinians, a slippage occurs in the text of Arafat’s speech. “Palestinians” at times means both men and women; at others, “Palestinians” slips into men. What is important here is the context of this slippage. It is in defining the Palestinian nationalist agent and this agent’s commitment to Palestine that this agent slips from the ostensibly ungendered universal into the clearly masculine realm. This is not an uncharacteristic slip. Rather, as I show below, it is a reflection of how the masculine and the feminine are conceived within Palestinian nationalist thought.
While the Charter’s call on bourgeois Palestinians to sacrifice their money is made in the mid-1960s, Arafat’s portrait of the Palestinian nationalist agent is informed by the economic improvement in the lives of many Palestinians, inside the occupied territories and in the diaspora, over the next decade. Arafat’s Palestinian nationalist agent is working hard and obtaining money to support “his” family and educate “his” brothers and sisters. “He” is able to do this as a result of the economic opportunities that have opened up in the Gulf. These economic developments provide the context in which to portray the Palestinian nationalist agent, not only as masculine, but also as bourgeois-in-the-making, In this regard, it is important to note that, while the future national status of the second brother is secured through his following in the footsteps of (performing like) the first older brother who educated him, the future national status of the sister, for whose education the Palestinian nationalist agent pays, is uncontemplated by Arafat. In her autobiography, Layla Khalid, one of the better-known Palestinian guerrilla fighters of the 1960s and 1970s, agrees with Arafat on one count. Like him, she expects Palestinian men to follow a certain code of behavior. When the money that her revolutionary brother Muhammad promised to send for her tuition at the American University of Beirut was late in reaching her, she did not doubt her brother. He, “like all good Arab men, honoured his promises."(66) Like a “good” Arab woman herself, Khalid accepts her dependence on her brother.
In confronting the occupation in the context of the Intifada, the nationalist agent’s body becomes the crucial instrument. One communique, for example, speaks to (male) students as follows: “You are the stronger body, you are the continuously pulsating artery among our people."(67) The comparative adjective “stronger” implicitly contrasts the Palestinian nationalist agent’s body with the body of its male enemy. It is the nationalist agent’s arm/hand, however, that is constantly invoked when describing the agent’s body. Women, for example, are supposed to stand side by side with men, “in one line, and with one hand."(68) The UNLU states that “your [a masculine pronoun] strong arms which shake the foundations of the Zionist occupation are the same arms which will build the independent Palestinian state."(69) “Gaza’s sons” in their thousands, the UNLU states, “went out of their den confronting with their bodies the occupier’s machines [of destruction]."(70)
The UNLU, however, conceives (of) the Palestinian people as one body, a man’s body. It describes the Palestinian people’s body as being a “giant [which] has erected itself and will not bow."(71) Calls for the Palestinian people to rise up in a unified way are expressed in the UNLU’s call to “rise as one man” in the face of siege,(72) to defend the right of the people to struggle.(73) In this context, the battles against the enemy in which Palestinian children are killed are nothing but the “battles of honor, heroism, and sacrifice."(74) The Palestinian nationalist agent, in addition to being masculine and bourgeois-in-the-making, is young and able-bodied--free from the physical vulnerabilities of old age. “He” conceives (of) himself in terms of a group identity unifying him with the shabiba (male youth), with whom he struggles against the occupation. The self-masking of many Palestinian young men (and women), when confronting their occupiers (for fear of being identified and punished by the Israelis), contributes to the erasure of their individual identities and the emergence of a strong collective one. The mask itself is usually the Palestinian hatta (the male head scarf or kufiyya), the symbol of Palestinian identity. Thus, struggling against the Israeli occupiers and colonizers is not only an affirmation of Palestinian nationalist agency, it is also a masculinizing act enabling the concrete pairing of nationalist agency and masculinity (the two being always already paired conceptually) and their logical inseparability within the discourse of nationalism. Resisting occupation therefore can be used to stage masculine acts as it performs nationalist ones. Through this national anti-colonial resistance, a new figuration of masculine bodies is mapped out on the terrain of the national struggle, one that becomes the model for Palestinian nationalist agency itself.(75)
TOWARD A “POST-COLONIAL” FUTURE(76)
Having examined the gender underpinnings of Palestinian nationalist thought, the following will look at how these impact the recent experience of Palestinian women in the Intifada, and women’s prospects for liberation in a Palestinian independent state-to-be.
In the more recent past, Palestinian women’s freedom of movement, dress, and behavior became highly restricted in Gaza as a result of the collaboration between the secular and religious strands of Palestinian nationalism. The secular nationalists assured women that this was a temporary arrangement, and that after liberation, women, too, would be free. This was not a tactical mistake that the secular leadership later declaredly regretted.(77) Rather, it was a political move that compromised very little nationalist ideology. It, in fact, followed directly from the way nationalist thought had always conceived the feminine and the masculine. It is within this context of nationalist thought, as always already gendered, that Ann McClintock underscores that “if nationalism is not deeply informed by an analysis of gender power, the nation-state will remain a repository of male hopes, male aspirations, and male privilege."(78)
Given the recent experience of Palestinian women in the Intifada, this view is shared by many a Palestinian woman activist and intellectual.(79) One activist with the Union of Palestinian Working Women’s Committees (UPWWC) stated that “men are still making the decisions.... [I]t will take a long time of struggle [to achieve equality], and we won’t automatically get our rights as women when we get our state."(80) Another activist emphasized that "[w]e realize that if we don’t raise issues now, we won’t be able to push them later on, and we’ll be abused by the national movement. We are struggling for independence, but we don’t want to compromise our role as women. The issue has come up now because we have realized through our work in the Intifada how important our role really is. This has given us confidence."(81) The Intifada has created a new discursive space in which Palestinian women can challenge the dominant conception of Palestinian nationalist agency. Unfortunately, however, the strength and resilience of the masculinist axioms buttressing Palestinian nationalist thought are yet to be dented in any major way.(82)
Despite the masculinist logic of Palestinian nationalist thought, Palestinian feminist Hanan ‘Ashrawi expresses, with some skepticism, a belief that Palestinian women will be able to free themselves within the framework of Palestinian nationalism.(83) She implies this by asserting that Palestinian feminists are “on the right track."(84) Hoping to avoid replicating the defeat of Algerian women after their revolution. ‘Ashrawi observes that Palestinian feminists “are trying to create a place for ourselves, to take part in the decision-making process,"(85) ,eventuality, given the discursive axioms of Palestinian nationalism, that is far from assured. The Intifada has raised the consciousness of many women with regard to the gender agenda, as demonstrated in women’s publications during the Intifada. ‘Ashrawi’s claim, however, that “the grassroots work and organizational significance of the women’s committees in the social and economic transformation of society ... has bestowed on the women’s movement credibility and legitimacy which have made the articulation of feminist theory not only acceptable, but also desirable,"(86) is exaggerated. Whereas she is correct in claiming that women’s contributions to the Intifada have facilitated and led to the articulation of feminist issues by many Palestinian women, her claim that this contribution made the articulation of feminist theory “desirable,” ostensibly by the nationalist movement and/or Palestinian society, is not persuasive.(87)
The Intifada has, indeed, increased women’s awareness of their position within nationalist thought and the nationalist movement. ‘Ashrawi, for example, responds to the male nationalist rhetoric that conceives of women as “hatcheries” by stating that the “male definition of self-value is based on their own progeny--ego about ‘the male line.’ ... [K]eeping a woman pregnant and at home keeps her in a position of subservience, in a role which is biologically determined, according to men."(88) Nevertheless, as ‘Ashrawi herself asserts, in the context of the Intifada, in which Palestinian men are interested in increasing the Palestinian population, and the Israeli occupiers are interested in limiting it, women’s bodies are the site of the battle with little control left to them over their own bodies. It is in this context of the Israeli tear- and poison-gas-induced miscarriages that Palestinian women are fighting to sustain a pregnancy, a right which the male leadership is supporting based on its own agenda.
In contrast to earlier conceptions of enemy-raped Palestinian women, the Intifada brought about some conceptual changes with regard to Palestinian women raped by Israeli Jews. ‘Ashrawi notes that:
[W]omen who were in prison before [the Intifada] were not “marriageable commodities” because they’re “damaged goods.” With the Intifada there was a sudden change: released women prisoners became desirable because this was a source of honor--that you went to jail, that you had struggled--and the mythological questions of virginity or damaged goods were no longer questions. This was especially true because of support at the feminist level, from the women’s committees, and eventually from the general community.(89)
It remains to be seen, however, whether this progressive change heralds more radical changes that could lead to the questioning of the masculine basis of Palestinian nationalist agency. In fact, ‘Ashrawi notes that this change was accompanied by a backlash: “families started trying to protect their daughters by bringing them back into the family unit through marriage, and sometimes early marriage."(90)
Although the Palestinian women’s movement, and women’s active participation in the Intifada, pressured the secular leadership into changing part of its conceptual framework, the masculine still reigns supreme in Palestinian nationalist thought.(91) The Palestinian anti-colonial struggle, since its beginnings, has transformed and continues to transform Palestinian women’s lives and perceptions of their societal roles. These transformations, however, have not significantly changed the way Palestinian nationalist thought conceives (of) Palestinian women. They are still considered subordinate members of the nation. Palestinian nationalist thought has changed its conceptions over the decades regarding women’s roles and duties to the nation, but these changes have always been made in response to changes in the Palestinian nationalist conception of men’s roles in the national struggle, and to the exigencies of the national struggle itself. As such, the gap between men’s and women’s roles, and women’s subordinate status, are maintained despite changes in the specificities of these roles in relation to the national struggle.(92)
Palestinian women may have more say in Palestinian politics in the near future, but given their discursive construction in nationalist thought, they will be able to do so not as Palestinian women struggling for Palestinian women’s rights, but as Palestinian women struggling for discursively constituted Palestinian rights, where Palestinian is always already conceived in the masculine. The recent performance of the Palestinian National Authority (PNA) demonstrates the Palestinian leadership’s commitment to the same masculine-supremacist path.(93) In the language of national liberation, one might add that no nation is free with half of its members being secondary and subservient. That this might be considered a specious argument is itself part of the symptom. If the Palestinian struggle does not develop this persistent auto-critique at its most embattled hour, the neglected lessons of history will make a possible victory pyrrhic.
[Footnotes:]
1. In an embattled situation, the colonized view European Enlightenment thought as the only available discourse (under the time constraints of anti-colonial resistance) for mobilizing people against colonial onslaughts. This extension of nationalist thought to the colonial world, however, was an enterprise fraught with contradictions. One of the most obvious underpinnings of anti-colonial nationalisms is the combining of modernization and tradition. While one of anti-colonial nationalism’s dual goals is the achievement of technological modernization in the Western sense, its other goal is the assertion of a traditional national culture.
2. In responding to a Western colonial discourse that negates the possibility of nationalist agency in the colonies, anti-colonial nationalists had to deal with the way Western modernization fit into their identitarian project. The nationalist project that is predicated upon the creation of a national identity posits this very identity as the locus of negotiating the relation of the traditional to the modern. See Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse (London: Zed Press, 1986).
3. Nationalist agency refers to the abilities and the will to perform a set of acts and practices aimed at achieving nationalist goals as those (the abilities, the acts, the practices, and the goals) are defined by nationalist discourse. The nationalist agent is someone who identifies as, and is identified by nationalist discourse as, part of the nation, and one whom nationalist discourse considers to be a possessor of the aforementioned abilities and will, based on criteria set by nationalist discourse.
4. Kumari Jayawardena, Feminism and Nationalism in the Third World (London: Zed Press, 1986), p. 15.
5. On traditionalization, see Abdullah Laroui, The Crisis of the Arab Intellectual: Traditionalism or Historicism? (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976).
6. African anti-colonial nationalism had to confront a European colonial discourse different from its Asian counterpart. While Orientalism constructed the idea of an Orient in need of Occidental civilization, colonial discourse constructed Africa in the European imagination as the “dark continent” in need of European colonial Enlightenment.
7. On the history of the PLO, see Alain Gresh, The PLO: The Struggle Within, Towards an Independent Palestinian State (London: Zed Press, 1985); and Helena Cobban, The Palestinian Liberation Organization: People, Power and Politics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984).
8. On Palestinians in Lebanon and on the Intra Bank debacle, see Tabitha Petran, The Struggle Over Lebanon (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1987).
9. On Palestinians in the Gulf, see Laurie Brand, The Palestinians in the Arab World: Institution Building and the Search for a State (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988).
10. On the events in Jordan, see David Hirst, The Gun and the Olive Branch: The Roots of Conflict in the Middle East (London: Faber and Faber, 1984).
11. On the Palestinian bourgeoisie in the diaspora, see Pamela Ann Smith, Palestine and the Palestinians, 1876-1983 (London: Croom Helm, 1984).
12. On representations of the Palestinians in the West, see Edward Said’s classic, The Question of Palestine (New York: Vintage Books, 1979).
13. Andrew Parker, Mary Russo, Doris Sommer, and Patricia Yaeger, eds., Nationalisms and Sexualities (New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 5.
14. The Palestine Liberation Organization, “Al-Mithaq al-Qawmi al-Filastini” (Palestinian Nationalist Charter), reproduced in Faysal Hurani, Al-Fikr al-Siyasi al-Filastini, 1964-1974, Dirasat lil-Mawathiq al-Ra’isiyya li-Munazzamat al-Tahrir al-Filastiniyya (Palestinian Political Thought, 1964-1974, A Study of the Principal Documents of the Palestinian Liberation Organization) (Beirut: Markaz al-Abhath, Munazzamat al-Tahrir al-Filastiniyya, 1980), p. 228.
15. Such views are common to most anti-colonial nationalisms. Frantz Fanon, for example, spoke of the “Western penetration of native space,” while Aim Cesaire spoke of the “stripping” and “raping” of Africa. Palestinian nationalism articulates itself within the same masculinist discourses. See Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1965), p. 42; and Aime Cesaire’s, “Introduction,” in Victor Schoelcher, Esclavage et Colonisation (Slavery and Colonization) (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1948), p. 7.
16. On Zionism’s gendered agency in/and relation to Palestine, see Ella Shohat, “Eurocentrism, Exile and Zionist Discourse” (Paper presented at the Middle East Studies Association Annual Conference, Washington, DC, 1991); and Shohat, Israeli Cinema: East/West and the Politics of Representations (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1989).
17. On the image of a feminine diaspora Jew, see Paul Breines, Tough Jews, Political Fantasies and the Moral Dilemma of American Jewry (New York: Basic Books, 1991); and Sander Gilman, The Jew’s Body (New York: Routledge, 1991).
18. On the importance of the masculinization of diaspora Jewish men upon arrival in Palestine/Israel, see Joseph Massad, “The ‘Post-Colonial’ Colony: Time, Space and Bodies in Palestine/Israel,” in Fawzia Afzal-Khan and Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks, eds., Dimensions of Post-Colonial Studies (Durham: Duke University Press, forthcoming, 1996). Also, see Simona Sharoni, “Militarized Masculinity in Context: Cultural Politics and Social Constructions of Gender in Israel” (Paper presented at the Middle East Studies Association Annual Conference, Portland, OR, 1992).
19. Edward Said, “Orientalism Reconsidered,” Cultural Critique 1 (Fall 1985), p. 103.
20. George Mosse, Nationalism and Sexuality, Respectability and Abnormal Sexuality in Modern Europe (New York: Howard Fertig, 1985), p. 67.
21. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 1991), p. 7 (emphasis added).
22. Ibid., p. 5.
23. The Palestine Liberation Organization, “Al-Mithaq al-Watani al-Filastini” (Palestinian National Charter), in Hurani, Al-Fikr, p. 236 (emphasis added).
24. Ibid. (emphasis added). In 1947, Palestine was partitioned by the United Nations-a decision that was made without consulting the Palestinian people. Immediately thereafter (as early as December 1947), Zionist forces began expelling the Palestinian population.
25. As anti-colonial nationalism is derived from the European Enlightenment, so are the laws demarcating nationhood in the now-independent former colonies derived from the laws of European nations. The PLO Charter is hardly an exception in this regard. The establishment of paternity as the source of nationhood has been enshrined in British nationality laws since the nineteenth century. In the exemplary case of Britain, as Francesca Klug demonstrates, “women were only allowed to reproduce the British nation on behalf of their husbands. They could not pass their nationality to their children in their own right.” In fact, British women who married outside the nation lost their British nationality, as did their children. On the other hand, the children of British men and non-British wives would be automatically British, as would the non-British wives. Some of these laws were changed in 1981 and 1985, whereby British women won the right to transfer their citizenship to their own children born abroad. Francesca Klug, “‘Oh to be in England': The British Case Study,” in Nira Yuval-Davis and Floya Anthias, eds., Woman-Nation-State (London: Macmillan, 1989). p. 21. It is this British model which was transported to the colonies. It should be noted here that all children born inside the British Empire since 1971 are considered British, regardless of parentage.
26. Yasir Arafat, “Al-Harb Tandali’ min Filastin, wa al-Silm Yabda’ min Filastin” (Arafat’s UN Address to the General Assembly), p. 8. The original Arabic text is in Shu’un Filastiniyya (Palestinian Affairs) (December 1974), pp. 5-19. It should be noted that the word for rape, ightisah, is more often translated as usurpation. The etymological root of the word is ghasaba, meaning to force someone to do something against her/his will. Although ightisab can be used in the context of usurpation, as in ightisab al-huquq, meaning the usurpation of rights, it always retains its double meaning and its sexual symbolism.
27. Arafat, “Al-Harb,” p. 12.
28. The Palestine Liberation Organization, “Al-Bayan al-Siyasi” (Political Communique). The official Arabic text is published in Shu’un Filastiniyya 188 (November 1988), p. 8.
29. Arafat, “Al-Harb,” p. 10.
30. Ibid., p. 11.
31. The Palestine Liberation Organization, “I’lan al-Istiqlal” (The Declaration of Independence) (emphasis added). The official Arabic version was published in Shu’un Filastiniyya 188 (November 1988), p. 5.
32. Al-Intifada min Khilal Bayanat al-Qiyada al-Wataniyya al-Muwahhada (Unified National Leadership of the Uprising) (Tunis: Majallat al-Hurriyya, 1989). I will limit myself mostly to examining the first 30 communiques that were issued in the first year of the Intifada. Hereafter, all communiques mentioned in the text, unless otherwise stated, come from this source.
33. Ibid. (emphasis added).
34. Ibid. Manabit actually means plant nurseries, like a greenhouse or a combination of several elements such as soil, climate, and environment--the proper conditions for plant growth.
35. Ibid., Communique No. 10 (emphasis added).
36. On the ideological role assigned to Israeli women in the reproduction of Israeli Sabras and its centrality in Zionist colonial discourse, see Nira Yuval-Davis, “National Reproduction and ‘the Demographic Race’ in Israel,” in Yuval-Davis et al., Woman, pp. 92-109.
37. Communiques No. 2 and 3, among others.
38. Communiques No. 12, 14, 21, and 24.
39. Interestingly, Communique No. 5 lists occupational sectors such as students, workers, etc., and vulnerable sectors such as children and older people, with women being clearly listed among the vulnerable rather than the occupational sector: “Oh our merchants, workers, peasants, students, children, women, older people, relatives, all relatives, Oh all sectors of our heroic people....” In the same communique, men, women, young and old people are called upon to resist the occupation. At the end of the same communique, women are listed with peasants, students, and workers.
40. Communiques No. 12, 14, 21, and 24. In Communique No. 12, “men and children of the intifada” are the two categories of people listed as being detained by the Israeli occupation authorities.
41. Communique No. 12.
42. Communiques No. 8 and 12.
43. Communique No. 8.
44. Communique No. 10.
45. Communique No. 12.
46. Communique No. 29.
47. Communique No. 30.
48. Communiques No. 17 and 22.
49. Communique No. 21.
50. Communique No. 6.
51. Communique No. 12.
52. Communiques No. 9, 12, and 23.
53. On the dilemmas facing Palestinian women’s efforts to develop a feminist agenda in the context of national struggle, see Rita Giacaman and Penny Johnson, “Palestinian Women: Building Barricades and Breaking Barriers,” in Zachary Lochman and Joel Beinin, eds., Intifada: The Palestinian Uprising Against Israeli Occupation (Boston: South End Press, 1989), pp. 155-69.
54. Islah Abdul-Jawwad, “The Evolution of the Political Role of the Palestinian Women’s Movement in the Uprising,” in Michael Hudson, ed., The Palestinians: New Directions (Washington DC: Georgetown University, Center for Contemporary Arab Studies. 1990), p. 71.
55. Communique No. 35, cited in Joost Hiltermann, Behind the Intifada: Labor and Women’s Movements in the Occupied Territories (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), p. 201.
56. Communique No. 53, 6 March 1990, cited in ibid., p. 201. All references to the communiques issued in 1989 and 1990 are from Hiltermann, Behind the Intifada, pp. 200-201.
57. See Communiques No. 21, 23, and 28. Like its English counterpart, the verb “to enter,” in Arabic, can be used to designate the beginning of periods, such as a storm “has entered its second day,” or a revolution “has entered its third year.” etc. Its connection to pregnancy in this context, however, is made direct due to the use of the verb “to abort” in reference to the Israeli occupiers’ constant attempts to terminate the Intifada with military force.
58. Communiques No. 15, 16, 18, 19, and 28.
59. Communique No. 29.
60. Communique No. 28.
61. Chandra Talpade Mohanty, “Introduction, Cartographies of Struggle: Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism,” in Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Ann Russo, and Lourdes Torres, eds., Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), pp. 1-49.
62. “Al-Mithaq al-Watani al-Filastini” (The Palestinian National Charter), in Hurani, Al-Fikr, p. 236.
63. Ibid. The rest of the Charter is written in the “universal” language of the individual. See Articles 17 and 30. On the always already gendered “universal” and its use in contract theory, see Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988).
64. Arafat, “Al-Harb,” p. 16.
65. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble, Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990).
66. Leila Khaled, My People Shall Live: The Autobiography of a Revolutionary, ed. George Hajjar (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1973), p. 59.
67. Communique No. 4.
68. Communique No. 5.
69. Communique No. 17.
70. Communique No. 24 (emphasis added).
71. Communique No. 8 (emphasis added).
72. Communique No. 10.
73. Communique No. 22.
74. Communique No. 28 (emphasis added).
75. It is important to stress, however, that the discursive construction of Palestinian masculinity and its subordinate, femininity, permeates all types of Palestinian literary and cultural production the very same way European (and indeed global) nationalist construction of sexuality pervades not only European cultural production but also European policies toward Europe’s own population and, by intersecting with the discourses on race and class, the peoples whom Europe colonized. For the experience of Palestinian women inside the Palestinian national movement, see the pioneering auto-critical study by Khadija Abu-'Ali, Muqaddima Hawl Waqi’ al-Mur’a wa Tajribatiha Fi al-Thawra al-Filastiniyya (An Introduction about the Status and Experience of Women in the Palestinian Revolution) (Beirut: General Union of Palestinian Women, 1975). On the representation of Palestinian women in their traditional roles in poetry, see Ilham Abu-Ghazaleh, “The Portrayal of Women in Intifada Poetry” (Paper presented at the Alif Gallery, Washington DC, 1992). On the representation of women in Palestinian popular literature, see ‘Abid ‘Ubayd Al-Zuray’i, Al-Mar’a fil-Adab al-Sha’bi al-Filastini (The Woman in Popular Palestinian Literature), 2d ed. (Beirut: Manshurat al-Hadaf, 1986). On the portrayal of women in the Palestinian press, see Urayb Najjar, “Al-Taghtiya al-I’lamiyya lil-Nisa’ fi Suhuf al-Diffa al-Gharbiyya” (The Media Coverage of Women in the Press of the West Bank), in Shu’un al-Mar’a (Women’s Issues) No. 3 (June 1992), pp. 142-58.
76. On the recent PLO-Israeli agreement, see Joseph Massad, “Repentant Terrorists or Settler-Colonialism Revisited: The PLO-Israeli Agreement in Perspective,” Found Object 3 (1994), pp. 81-90. See, also, Joseph Massad, “Palestinians and the Limits of Racialized Discourse,” Social Text 34 (1993), pp. 94-114.
77. Rema Hammami, “Women, the Hijab and the Intifada,” Middle East Report, no. 164-165 (1990), pp. 24-28.
78. Ann McClintock, “No Longer in a Future Heaven: Women and Nationalism in South Africa.” Transitions 51 (1991), p. 122.
79. For more information on women and the Intifada, see Orayb Aref Najjar, Portraits of Palestinian Women (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1992).
80. Interview with a UPWWC activist, Nablus, 17 December 1989, cited in Hiltermann, Behind the Intifada, p. 200.
81. Interview with a UPWWC activist, Jerusalem, 21 October 1989, cited in ibid., p. 203. In the context of the Intifada, Rita Giacaman and Penny Johnson argue that Palestinian women “have enlarged or extended their traditional role rather than adopting a completely new role. Many of their forms of political participation are based on aspects of this role, particularly defense of family, nurturing and assisting family members, and mutual aid between kin. These aspects of women’s role have become a source of resistance because women have transformed their family responsibilities to encompass the entire community.” See Giacaman and Johnson, “Palestinian Women,” p. 161.
82. Palestinian women have been able, however, to force the UNLU to take up some of their issues. After months of struggle, the UNLU agreed to issue Communique No. 45, in which it opposed Hamas’s control over the daily lives of Gazan women. See Hammami, “Women, the Hijab and the Intifada.”
83. Rabab Hadi, “The Feminist Behind the Spokeswoman--A Candid Talk with Hanan Ashrawi.” Interview in Ms., 14-17 March/April 1992.
84. Ibid., p. 14.
85. Ibid.
86. Hanan Mikhail Ashrawi, “The Politics of Cultural Revival,” in Hudson, The Palestinians, p. 81.
87. Despite the above-noted skepticism, the assumption that Palestinian women will legally obtain their rights along with national independence continues to prevail among many Palestinian women. As Islah Jad has argued, however, “a study of the Palestinian national movement does little to justify that assumption.” She adds that the “absence of social critique in the national movement, especially on the part of Fateh, which is its backbone, adds to the danger facing the women’s movement.” Islah Jad, “From Salons to the Popular Committees: Palestinian Women, 1919-1989.” in Jamal Nassar and Roger Heacock, eds., Intifada: Palestine at the Crossroads (New York: Praeger, 1990), p. 138.
88. Hadi, “The Feminist,” p. 16.
89. Ibid., p. 15.
90. Ibid.
91. On the lack of any major change in the way the nationalist movement views women, see Suhayr al-Tal’s “Al-Mas’ala al-Ijtima’iyya, Intifada fi al-Intifada” (The Social Issue: The Uprising within the Uprising), Sawt al-Watan (The Nation’s Voice) (Cyprus) (January 1990), pp. 15-18.
92. Here, it should be emphasized that pst-1948 notions of Palestinian nationalist masculinity differ markedly from the pre-1948 period, insofar as Palestinian nationalist masculinity then did not include being bourgeois and educated as much as being a land-holder and/or a peasant who was unwilling to sell land to the Zionists, and who would fight to expel the colonists from Palestine. On Palestinian male guerrilla fighters’ views of gender relations in relation to the national struggle, see Ghazi al-Khalili, Al-Mar’a al-Filastiniyya wa al-Thawra (The Palestinian Woman and the Revolution) (Beirut: Markaz al-Abhath, Munazzamat al-Tahrir al-Filastiniyya 1977).
93. See, for example, the critiques leveled by ‘Ashrawi herself against the PNA’s record on women in her recent autobiography, This Side of Peace: A Personal Account (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995), pp. 293-94. See, also, the papers presented at the Cairo Palestinian Population and Family Planning Conference, 3 April 1994, many (although not all) of which are pro-natalist and conceive of Palestinian women’s bodies and their reproductive capacity as part and parcel of the national struggle. See especially Dhiyab ‘Ayyush’s paper, “Towards a National Population Policy in Palestine,” which argues that the increase or decrease in the Palestinian population should be subject to the exigencies of the national struggle. ‘Ayyush is the PNA’s deputy minister of Social Welfare.
Joseph Massad is a doctoral candidate in political science at Columbia University. He is currently writing his dissertation on anti-colonial nationalist discourse, focusing on the post-colonial state’s use of law and the military in constructing national identity, and in defining nationalist agency. The country focus of his study is Jordan from 1921 to 1988. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the annual conference of the Middle East Studies Association held in Portland, Oregon, October 1992. The author would like to thank Rabab Abdul Hadi, Mervat Hatem, Neville Hoad, Marc Lynch, Afaf Mahfouz, Edward Said, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak for reading and commenting on earlier versions of this paper.
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