The Fate of Palestinian Women’s Organizations in the Naqba of 1948

Abstract

The study examines the fate of Palestinian women’s organizations during the period of the Naqba (lit., catastrophe), or 1948 Palestinian exodus, how they operated prior to this national trauma and how they operated afterwards. Inter alia the study shows that Palestinian women’s organizations were well-established in the Arab political landscape and fought for gender equality whilst also collaborating with Arab women’s organizations in other countries. The organizations supported the struggle against British colonialism and the Zionist movement. However, they abstained from direct involvement in the divisive and conflictual Palestinian national politics. During the Naqba, a shift occurred in the character and orientation of women’s organizations – they abandoned the feminist and gender struggle and became aid organizations supporting Palestinian men at war, their focus pivoting to the political level and the social and national collectivity, all in the aim of helping the Palestinian and Arab cause and those in need in the community. Following the 1948 War, the Organization of Democratic Women in Israel (Hebrew acronym: ANDI, later TANDI – Movement of Democratic Women in Israel) was in the forefront of the Arab community’s rehabilitation, in large part due to its unifying ideological character, which served as a basis for its long-term survival. The organization vigorously took up the task of helping Palestinian Arab society in Israel to rise from the ashes. However, the gender radicalism of the pre-1948 era remained in the background as the duty of standing by Palestinian men through the crisis that had befallen them took precedence over feminist causes. General surveys written on women in Palestinian society heretofore have tended to skip over the period of the Naqba in 1948 and the Military Government under which Arab citizens of Israel lived until 1966. The article finds that most of the Mandate-era Palestinian women’s organizations did not survive the 1948 War with the exception of the Organization of Democratic Women in Israel, which as aforementioned became, at least in the short term, an organization focused on general recovery in the community, but later increasingly oriented toward addressing issues facing Arab women in Israel specifically and women’s rights causes in general within a communist ideological framework