Patriarchy in Palestine--In Palestine, women have to struggle against gendered violence by their ow

Patriarchy in Palestine

In Palestine, women have to struggle against gendered violence by their own society and by the Israeli occupation.


Palestinian women run during a protest demanding the right to return to their homeland at the Israel-Gaza fence on October 12, 2018 [Ibraheem Abu Mustafa/Reuters]


In late November, a 16-year-old girl called Yara Ayoub from the Galilee village of al-Jish went missing. A few days later, her mutilated body was found in a dumpster. Two suspects - a 28-year-old man and his father - were arrested on murder charges.Thousands of Palestinians from the girl's village and the surrounding areas attended her funeral. The outpouring of grief was palpable and people marched in the funeral procession wearing stickers reading "Yara in our hearts".

Since news of the murder spread, many Palestinians across historical Palestine have been consumed by discussions on social media about violence against women and the harm inflicted by patriarchy. There have been demonstrations in Nazareth, Sakhneen, Haifa and Jaffa, all calling for an end to violence against women. Patriarchy in Palestine exists, as it does elsewhere in the world, as a system that upholds male dominance and male hierarchies. It enforces gender binaries and stereotypes in order to preserve the current power structure. While the patriarchy affects everyone, its violent manifestations disproportionately affect women.

To paraphrase Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood, men are most afraid of women laughing at them and women are most afraid of being killed by men. This fear gets internalised - consciously or not - in our everyday behaviour. In the streets, we often have to choose between putting headphones on and listening to music so we don't have to hear verbal harassment or staying alert in case someone tries to creep up on us. At night, we often hold keys in our hands as a weapon in case someone attacks us. Some of us also have to worry about abuse and violence within the family and our social circles.

According to a 2011 survey on violence conducted by the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics (PCBS), some 37 percent of women were the victims of gender-based violence in the 1967 Palestinian territories. A November 2018 report released by the Arab Center for Social Media Advancement showed that sexual harassment is also pervasive online, with one-third of Palestinian women facing gender-based violence on social media networks. The international community often likes to spin the issue with gendered violence in Palestine as if it's an "Arab problem" and Palestinian women need saving from Palestinian men. Such orientalist discourse propagates colonial views and white saviour-complex urges that are used to justify humanitarian interventionism. It is a frequently overlooked fact that Jewish women suffer from similar rates of gender-based violence within Israeli society.

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https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/patriarchy-palestine-181204074037960.html