An Oral History of the Palestinian Nakba

by Doctor Nahla Abdo

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  2

  Feminism, indigenousness and settler colonialism: oral history, memory and the Nakba

  NAHLA ABDO

  This chapter contributes to a feminist analysis of indigenousness and settler colonialism through an application of the method of oral history to Palestinian women’s (and men’s) voices during the Nakba, or the genocide, as the Nakba will be defined here. The chapter begins with a critical examination of existing progressive feminist approaches, pointing to their contributions and examining their problematics. Using the method of oral history, this chapter highlights Palestinian experiences under British colonialism and Zionist settler colonialism, suggesting, in the process, the need to re-examine our concepts by historicizing them to fit the specific context within which they operate.

  At the centre of this chapter lies the voices of Palestinian women (and some men) narrating their loss of lives, homes and homeland under the terror and brutality of the British colonial and Israeli settler-colonial regimes. These voices and lived experiences establish the ground for an alternative feminist theorization, one that places land and genocide at the centre of its analysis. The chapter then concludes by advocating an anti-colonial feminism as the feminist methodology appropriate for analysing, understanding and acting on the context of indigenousness and settler colonialism.

  EXISTING PROGRESSIVE FEMINISMS: A CRITIQUE

  Feminists of all strands realize the crucial role women have had and continue to play in making their socio-economic, political and cultural history. The gendering of human history through feminist critique of official history has made a substantial contribution to reinstating women in their/our proper place in history. The development of feminism from its 1960s- and 1970s-era theory based on the concept of patriarchy and of men as the main oppressors into one that articulates and analyses the interlocking of the forces of class and race has contributed tremendously to our understanding of women “Others”.

  In 1983, Angela Davis pub
lished her seminal book Women, Race and Class in which she demonstrated the interlocking of these forces and their effects on Black women; simultaneously, a feminist debate on the integration of the forces of class and race had developed in Britain. The idea of the interlocking of the forces of violence against and oppression of women was later developed by Kimberlé Crenshaw in the notion of “intersectionality” (Crenshaw 1989, 2016; Matsuda et al. 1993). Since the 1990s, this concept, which came to reinforce already existing feminist approaches concerning the interconnectedness of the forces of gender, race, class, sexuality and so on, has become both a trend and a mantra among most progressive feminists and has been adopted by the UN Gender Unit (Yuval-Davis 2006). The inclusive approach of intersectionality provided a wider analytical framework for theorizing women and gender and has been used in various research methodologies, including oral history. In this context, intersectionality succeeded in exposing the power dynamics that exist between the researcher and the researched, the interviewer and the interviewee, contributing in the process to a highlighting of the difference between elite history and people’s history, between history from above and history from below.

  Intersectionality as method has contributed to the moralizing of the research process, especially in the forms of interviews and oral history. More importantly, through its emphasis on researchers’ positionality and political ideology (Sangster 1994, 2012) and its stress on the roles played by class, racial and other conditions of privilege (Armitage and Gluck 1998; Fleischmann 1996), it was able to remove from sociological and historical research the veil of neutrality and the Weberian notion of “objectivity”. This methodology enabled the removal of emphasis from the “ideal type” or official history, replacing it with one based on women’s – indeed, people’s – materiality and lived experience. In other words, feminism not only reinstated women into history, but it also changed the way history is read and recorded; the centrality of women for oral history, as this chapter and this volume will show, is vital.

  FEMINISM: HISTORICAL AND CULTURAL SPECIFICITY

  Still, as with all our concepts, the force of intersectionality as method is historically and culturally specific. This conceptual framework, which recognizes the different experiences of women Others, has in fact been widely concerned with Black women and women of colour in general. In considering intersectionality to be historically and culturally specific, and the fact that such specificity demands the recognition of specific experiences and refuses overgeneralizations, two questions are posed here. First, is feminist intersectionality theory capable of properly and sufficiently understanding the experiences of all Others? Second, is intersectionality as a research method (say, of oral history) capable of resolving existing feminist debate on the insider–outsider question? It is to these issues we now turn.

  The Other in intersectionality appears to be largely bounded within the settler-immigrant context of the capitalist West, especially that of the United States; the category includes poor women, Black women, women of colour and others. While at a surface level this Other seems general and the theory appears to be universal in applicability, the fact remains that intersectionality fails to include indigenous people (especially indigenous women); nor does it account for the historically specific forces of their marginalization or oppression, namely the settler-colonial state. Later in this chapter we will provide a detailed analysis for theorizing or framing indigeneity and the settler-colonial state; first, we deal with the feminist dilemma of doing research with the Other. Against intersectionality, which presumes a generalized or universal epistemology, Black feminist theory as advocated by Amoah Jewel (2013), among others, argues for the need for the specificity of the marginalized and their experiential life as well as the experience of the researcher. Jewel contends that without experiencing Black women’s lived reality, an outsider is incapable of adequately representing Black women’s lives. Considering the oppression and marginalization of Black Americans as unique, Jewel (2013: 89) asserts that “Feminist theory is made of women’s narratives that are based on women’s experiences and that such experiences are only lived by the women who underwent them” (emphasis added). While having some merits, this position is quite problematic, as will be seen in the following section.

  DOING ORAL HISTORY AMONG THE MARGINALIZED: BETWEEN THE ABSTRACT AND UNIVERSAL AND THE UNIQUE AND ESSENTIALIST

  The feminist debate about who can do research on the Other, while an old one, remains problematic, especially within the two most recent feminist developments, namely intersectionality and Black feminist thought. Whereas the former advocates a universal theory or conceptual framework, the latter emphasizes specificity as uniqueness or even as essentialism. Jewel’s contention that only Black women can understand the experiences of Black women – and by extension that only women understand women, only the poor understand the poor, and so on – is problematic on several levels. History has shown us that some of the best analyses of patriarchy have been conducted by men (for example, Engels’ work on The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State); similarly, the best work on class has been done by Marx in general, and especially in Capital. Moreover, ascribing uniqueness or essentialized qualities to any marginalized group is a rather dangerous act. In her response to Susan Armitage along the same lines, Sherna Berger Gluck noted: “I would put considerably more faith in the ability of some of my male colleagues in oral history to apply what we have often referred to as feminist principles than I would some women who are more bound by race, class, gender and sexual orientation” (Armitage and Berger Gluck 1998: 5).

  Essentialism is also problematic at the level of shared experiences and solidarity. Prioritizing one form of oppression over another, such as Afro-American experiences over other marginalized experiences, is quite limiting; it restricts the important role of comparability and solidarity under conditions of capitalist imperialism. History provides ample examples of solidarity among women of various cultures and specific instances of oppression, as the Palestinian case demonstrates. My Captive Revolution (Abdo 2014) provides a study of the importance of shared experiences within women’s struggles, especially among women political detainees; in that book, I compared the struggles of Palestinian women political detainees in Israeli prisons to those of women in other countries and continents during the 1960s. As such, these comparisons enable us to see the shared experiences of women from different cultures and who have different histories.

  This brings us to another danger: essentializing victimization and resistance as characteristics of certain marginalized groups. Positioning women in such particularity blinds us to recognizing the possibilities and importance of solidarity these women potentially generate with other women or groups of people, even without prior connection. In my conversations with Palestinian women ex-political detainees, they were very clear on the one hand about who they considered to be “insiders” that support and stand in solidarity with them, and on the other hand who they deemed to be “outsiders”, the enemy in their struggle. Women proudly relayed their experiential knowledge of the close solidarity they received while in detention from various other women, including European, North African and North American ones. They knew who practically and actually stood in solidarity with them and their struggle and who among Western (and Israeli) feminists were antagonistic, oppressive and colonialist (Abdo 2014). The women even named foreign (Arab and Western) women who joined their struggle against Israeli occupation and settler colonialism and who were consequently detained by the Israelis.

  The critique of the essentialist Black feminist, however, does not invalidate this approach altogether. Jewel’s demand that researchers possess a close knowledge and immersion in the culturally and historically specific conditions of the marginalized is important. One needs to remember that not all groups of marginalized women possess the same degree of comfort with an “outsider” such as a researcher. One such “outsider”, Ellen Fleishman, in her interviews with Palestinian wom
en found that they “were very wary of the very notion of ‘interviews’, and that interviews intimidate these women” (Fleishmann 1996: 358). The specific history of this example is that interviews with and questioning of Palestinian women under occupation by “outsiders” has usually involved the occupying forces: that is, the police, security personnel or soldiers – a frightening experience for the occupied. There is no doubt here that an “insider” who experienced occupation might realize the existence of such fear and act accordingly.

  My oral history research, based on lengthy conversations with Palestinian women fighters (Abdo 2014), pointed to the importance of language and even of the vernacular as a potential challenge to the outsider-researcher. Language expresses cultural experiences and is grounded in people’s material life conditions, and as such requires knowledge of that cultural specificity. For example, some of the women in our conversations together found it difficult to share with the group certain specifics of their sexual harassment in prison, although almost all women prisoners experienced one form or another of such harassment. Some women were unable to name – at least publicly – certain verbal sexual abuses they had experienced, notably being labelled with the socially taboo curse term sharmouta (whore, bitch), a word used by Israeli prison officials against the women (on which see Abdo 2014: 160). The courage exhibited by other women participants made it easier for those women to name the act of violence for what it was.

  Finally, familiarity with local cultural expressions (e.g. literature, poetry, popular songs, and so on) is also a valuable asset in doing research with the “Other”. In my experience, I found familiarity with Palestinian resistance culture – for example, adab al-muqawama (resistance literature) and adab al-sujoun (prison literature) – to be very useful not only for comprehending women fighters’ general status within Palestinian society, but also for appreciating the depth of their expressions and feelings. As I have argued elsewhere, there were few woman who did not recite a poem or a verse or who did not make reference to a particular piece of resistance literature as integral to their political consciousness and their willingness to make sacrifices for the cause (e.g. Abdo 2014: 100, 105, 109–110). In other words, neither an insider (i.e. a member of the class, gender or race) nor an outsider who is equipped only with a general theory of intersectionality can provide a sufficient understanding of all marginalized groups.