On the 23rd of December 1996, on my way back from Jerusalem to Gaza, I was stopped by Israelis at the Eretz checkpoint. With me were about two hundred women and children travelling back to Gaza after having visited their brothers, sons, mothers, and fathers, still inside Israeli prisons. It was a very cold night. We were ordered to sit on the ground and were not allowed to ask why. The children, who had started their visit at three o' clock in the morning, were crying. Tired and hungry, they were being punished because they had visited their loved ones inside the Israeli prisons. ( It is a basic human right to return home at any time.) Here are some other facts about the " peace" we are living through these days as Palestinians:

• Palestinians are not allowed normal access through the Israeli checkpoint. Instead they are forced to go through passageways, the way cattle are driven through sale yards. This is humiliating for Palestinians and also causes distress for women and children.

• Between February and June, eight Palestinians died as a result of being delayed at the Eretz checkpoint.

• Because of the closure, the rate of unemployment is 68 percent.

• 40 percent of Palestinian children are working in the streets and inside small factories, leaving school to earn whatever they can to help their families survive.

• Since 1993 around four hundred Palestinian have been killed, including seventy in the recent uprising

I am a Palestinian from a refugee family. My parents were forced to leave their home and properties in 1948 like the rest of the Palestinians. Physical force, psychological intimidation, terror, and death threats accompanied the expulsion or exodus of Palestinian refugees from their own homeland in 1948. As though the were denying the fact of their exile, Palestinian refugees guarded the keys of their old houses and the deeds of their lands, keeping all the documents that attested to their connection with lost homes. They held onto these documents as if they might need them at any moment. Such documents proved, at least, that the owners were not merely derelict nomads, but people with status and rights, the owners of houses and property. When my grandmother died in 1969, she still had the key to her house in Beir El Sabaa, which is now known as Beir Sheva. Now, my father keeps this key with other documents of family properties, still dreaming of the day he will return

The 1948 catastrophe has been a central focus of fear and insecurity, deeply affecting the innermost layers of the Palestinian psyche. The shocks of being uprooted and living in exile have resulted in widespread feelings of helplessness and dependency. In 1967, when I was only twelve years old, the Israelis occupied Gaza. During the raids we spent days and days inside a shelter, tens of people unable to move. I remember the fear on men's faces, frightened that the Israelis would act as they had in 1956, when they tried to occupy Gaza before. They had killed thou sands of innocent people, especially from the Khan Younis area. Men were ordered to stand up facing the walls, and they were all shot.

The lightning speed of Arab defeat 1967 and the resulting occupation of the West Bank and Gaza shocked the Arab masses, but particularly the Palestinians. Their dreams of liberation, Arab unity, and victory were suddenly shattered, while their underlying feelings of helplessness, victimization, and paranoia were deepened. Unprepared and unprotected, the Palestinians found themselves face-to-face with an old enemy, who was now armed with a sophisticated, modern arsenal.

Clinically, the forty years during which the Palestinian community has been terrorized and increasingly haunted with a sense of helplessness and frustration have translated into various psychopathologies, particularly depression and anxiety. Drug addiction has spread rapidly among the young. Throughout the general population, various forms of physical and verbal violence and antisocial behavior have increased. Families, clans, and political factions have been plagued by infighting, while men have abused women and children, the most helpless and vulnerable members of society. I read these phenomena as indications that Palestinians have directed aggression inward ,in reactive self- destruction.

Initially, the Intifada transformed this psychological pattern; it restored a positive self-image, high self-esteem, and national pride. Helplessness was replaced overnight by a positive assertiveness. Individuals felt responsible and identified strongly with national struggle. The Intifada was an outlet for the simmering, bottled-up anger. The individual and the communal psychic tension found a legitimate target: the Israeli soldiers.
Four years after the Intifada started, the picture changed. The stagnant political process and the aggressive Israeli response have both contributed to the re-emergence of feelings of frustration and of calls for radical and violent tactics. This is particularly the case in the Gaza Strip, which in many ways fits the model of a prison. It has become a huge detention center. More than 6,000 Palestinians are still in Israeli prisons. Palestinians in exile are not allowed to return home. Families of ex-political prisoners often become targets of those ex-prisoners' anger and frustration. The unstable political situation, the Israeli practices of closure of the Gaza Strip, and restrictions preventing Gazans from moving freely and finding work to support their families result in deteriorating economic situation.
In this environment, everyone is affected by the overwhelming stress, which is bound to reactivate various forms of violence. According to a study of adult Palestinians, 64 percent of the participants had been subjected to humiliation, harassment, and beating. The resulting anxiety is then transmitted to children. Children themselves have experienced a variety of traumatic events, such as being beaten or injured or witnessing their parents being beaten or killed. Some have been terrified by night raids by soldiers, and not a few have been forcibly separated from their parents. The youth are now prepared to sacrifice everything, even their lives, for the cause of liberation of the Holy Land. Glorification of the life hereafter makes death acceptable.
In 1990, I started to work at the Gaza Community Mental Health Program. This program was founded to help Gazan people overcome their traumas. It was through this work that I began to understand more about the problems and feelings of my people. I was shocked when I visited the El Shti refugee camp for the first time to study the situation of the displaced wives of Palestinian prisoners. Their shacks or cinderblock houses have no electricity or running water.
There are open drains in the streets, and everywhere one is confronted by swamps of rubbish. In the absence of their husbands, uneducated, desperate young women and their young children live with their families- in-law and describe themselves as failures in their roles as mothers and wives. Palestinian women, I realized, are faced with two burdens: the violent environment and a seemingly eternal victimization by our won authoritarian and patriarchal society.
They are victims of all kinds of violence: political, social, domestic.
The human rights of Palestinian women are violated daily in a variety of ways. They are not free to choose when or whom to marry or how many children to have and when to have them. There are innumerable in equalities and injustices in opportunity in education, employment, and health care. As every where else in the world, childcare and domestic labor have little or no value. Concerning education, the percentage of women being educated at the elementary level is 44 percent that of the men. At the preparatory stage it is 38 percent, and at the secondary stage, 34 percent. Between 33 and 56 percent of Palestinian women from fourteen to forty-four years of age are illiterate (Al Quds, Sept. 4. 1995). Furthermore, Palestinian women suffer from the general deterioration of educational standards.

During and after the Intifada, the number of women leaving school before graduating was particularly high, despite the fact that education had been seen as a major resource in Palestinian society after the 1948 catastrophe with its resulting loss of land and properties. The lower female enrollment in educational institutions was partly due to the closure, curfews, and strikes. Also, families with limited resource have, in general, invested their resources in the education of males rather than that of females. A third significant factor has been the increase of arranged marriages at very young age. Research has shown that in 46 percent of divorce cases, the age of the husbands was between fifteen and twenty years (Al Quds, sept. 1995).
Palestinian women and work present another important issue. The Israelis deliberately used economic measures to impoverish the Palestinians. The Israeli confiscation of Palestinian lands and water resources, for example, made the
Palestinians consumers of Israeli products and prevented them from building an infrastructure of their own. The Palestinian territories thus became a slave market where the Israelis could get cheap labor. Many young Palestinians had to leave the area to find work in Israel. This, in turn, hurt families and especially women. Furthermore, Palestinian women were forced to confront the economic and social fall-out of the increase in divorce and early marriage, not to mention the problems presented simply by being wives and mothers. Out of the total 1990 work force, 15 percent were women. In 1992, unemployment among women reached 88 percent. Whether employed or unemployed, women were, and still are, constantly exploited.

These circumstances already translate into multiple hardships for women. Add to them the ways the politically turbulent recent history of Palestinian society has put the Palestinian women in a number of contradictory positions.
First, she has had to confront displacement due to the massive Jewish refugee settlement movement that led to the creation of the state of Israel. This uprooting affected the economic base that sustained basic cultural values, including gender roles and the division of labor. Without the benefit of a normal process of adjustment allowing the development of new roles within society, Palestinian women, form all sectors of the society, have found themselves forced to step out of their domestic cocoon into the unfamiliar terrain of social and political activism, sometimes even into participation in military operations. I would emphasize, though, that their activism is an aspect of the general national movement. Though Palestinian society needs women's active participation, its various institutions have not gone through the stages of development necessary to facilitate more effective and continuous participation of the female sector. Palestinian women's participation has been thought of in terms of traditional values, not redefined by the intensity of political conditions and the severity of the economic reality.

To conclude, I will offer two stories that exemplify the compounding of military violence by social victimization. Fatma got married at the age of sixteen. Her husband was wanted by the IDF (Israeli Defense Forcees) and was later killed. She was then pregnant with their second child and, therefore, forced to move back to her family, returning to their control. Fatma decided to take revenge for her husband's heath. She joined the faction her husband used to belong to, the PFLP (Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine), and because of her political activities, she was imprisoned for a few months. Her imprisonment was a severe shock to her family, and they were very angry with her. As a result, they regularly beat Fatma and her children. Fatma, however, decided to continue the struggle despite the pressure and cruelties from her family towards her and her children. She was imprisoned a second time for more than five years. Fatma had to leave her two children behind with her mother. Tthey kept visiting her in prison. "I felt guilty. Every time they visited me, I felt how sad they were. Their eyes full of tears and sadness. They kept asking me: "Why did you leave us on our own?" When Fatma was released, she started to question many thing: she no longer covered her head, she wanted freedom to move and to join meetings and political activities. These ideas were not accepted by her family. She was, and still is beaten and humiliated by her brothers. Fatma's daughter was forced to marry at the age of fourteen, against her will. Fatma has tried to commit suicide many times.
Sometimes, women suffer abuses such as political repression in ways that are similar to those inflicted on men. But since the dominant image of the political actor in our world is male, the problem for women is visibility.
Samiha, twenty years old, was beyond tears; dry eyes, a tense little face, and a child's body. She couldn't make herself tell me what had happened. I had to coax the words out of her, one by one. "I was married at the age of sixteen. It was an arranged marriage like most marriages. I moved to join his family in their home. One week later I was in despair. He used to beat me with plastic pipes, I was locked in the toilet, unable to move, night after night. I kept knocking on the door the whole night calling for help. His mother also joined him in beating me sometimes. When they started they did not stop until I was bleeding. I lost weight, teeth, and hair. Once I was locked in the pigeons' cage for the whole night. My husband was imprisoned before was got married. Everything he experienced in prison, he used against me. He pulled out my nails. He banged my head on the wall. I decided to run away. The moment I entered my family home, my sister fainted. I had changed so much. Was this really the beautiful bride from six months age?
Asserting their position, following many years of sacrifice and struggle, women have realized that they have not made many social and political gains and are doubly burdened, both by new political and economic responsibilities and by the traditional view that they should be subservient to men. Thus the Intifada has brought about basic changes in the way women themselves view their role in the political movement. Dear sisters, what we need and are calling for is a just peace, respect as human beings, and freedom.

• This paper was published in Frontline Feminism, Women, War, and Resistance
  Edited by: Marguerite R. Waller & Jennifer Rycenga 2000