Transformative incrementalism: Palestinian women’s strategies of resistance and resilience amid gendered insecurity and neoliberal co-optation

Abstract

Palestinian women have envisioned and enacted resistance and resilience in different ways throughout the long-running Palestinian resistance movement. Strategies have ranged from direct collective actions to the resolute maintenance of everyday life in the face of ongoing occupation, settler-colonialism, displacement and violence. Palestinian women in the occupied West Bank have begun to develop tactics that attempt to negotiate a widespread aversion to ‘illegitimate’ and aid donor-prescribed actions, as well as to the gendered risks with which politically active women must contend. While this approach once encompassed the principle of resilience, recent times have seen the growing rejection of neoliberal resilience narratives in the belief that they normalize and entrench an oppressive status quo. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in the West Bank, this article explores how women’s search for legitimate and feasible modes of resistance and resilience has generated tactics characterized by incrementalism, but which form part of a transformative social change strategy. In so doing, it reveals the dynamic ways in which women constantly renegotiate resistance to violence in Palestine. It also demonstrates how development models based upon neoliberal understandings of resilience exacerbate gendered impacts of insecurity while eroding women’s capacities to withstand them.

Keywords

Conflict gender resistance resilience violence Palestine Israel

Introduction

Throughout the history of the Palestinian liberation struggle, Palestinian women have developed and performed various modes of resistance and resilience, often in response to changing conditions. In the contemporary period, changes have included the neoliberal co-optation of concepts like resilience and their use in foreign donor-funded development programmes. Drawing on interviews and focus groups conducted in the West Bank, this article explores the resistance tactics that Palestinian women have devised in response to dominant neoliberal agendas in international development and how they are designed to meet their own personal standards of radicalism while simultaneously abiding by local gender norms. Overall, I argue that despite being individualized, small-scale and incremental by necessity, the set of resistance tactics practised and envisioned by these women aims to transform power relations, not merely subvert them temporarily – and in such a way constitutes an alternative to the depoliticization of resilience frames and narratives in Palestine. For this reason, I have characterized these tactics as constituting what I call ‘transformative incrementalism’. The tactics in this category all aim at changing the foundations of Palestinian society, politics and culture – a step participants saw as a necessary part of the struggle for national liberation.

In recent times, use of the term ‘resilience’ appears to have reached a saturation point. Whether in the context of international development, mental health, human resource management or education, a growing emphasis on the cultivation of resilience or ‘resilience training’ has become notable (Béné et al., 2012; Bourbeau, 2018a, b; Bourbeau and Ryan, 2018; Brand and Jax, 2007; Chandler, 2014; Holling, 1973; Juncos, 2018; Kindra, 2013). However, by reaching buzz-word status, resilience has also attracted criticism for its use as ‘a catch-all term that removes responsibility from institutions and fails to address the problem of worsening mental health’ (Binnie, 2016).

In Palestine, resilience narratives have also begun to lose currency. Where activists, commentators and scholars once celebrated the resilience of Palestinians in their endurance of hardship, their everyday survival strategies and their determination to uphold nationalist values while living under Israeli military occupation, they are now problematizing or even rejecting the term’s widespread use (Badarin, 2021; Browne, 2018; Keelan and Browne, 2020; Lax, 2021; Shwaikh, 2021). Brendan Ciarán Browne, for example, critiques the way in which international organizations have created a ‘resilience industry’ in Palestine:

By promoting Palestinian resilience instead of holding Israel accountable for its multiple breaches of international law, and its involvement in the destruction of Palestinian society, the international community is masking its own failures – and shamefully abdicating its responsibility to the people it claims to be helping. (Browne, 2018)

By pressing resilience into their service, the development sector has also impacted Palestinian women’s narratives and strategies of resistance. A traditionally key part of their resistance repertoire, resilience and its related strategies of steadfastness, perseverance and endurance have enabled Palestinian women to engage in individual, covert, everyday forms of resistance that carry lower physical and social risk than do other methods. However, another key part of Palestinian women’s risk calculations when it comes to resistance involves an assessment of the legitimacy of strategies (Kayali, 2020). More specifically, because women face higher social barriers to resistance than men, they are likely to place more weight on whether a resistance activity is considered politically and socially legitimate by Palestinians. Thus, when the frame of resilience is perceived to have been co-opted by an international development community with ulterior motives, it is subject to increased scepticism. This article demonstrates how women’s resistance strategizing reflects the primacy of these assessments, and how more recently this has resulted in a shift away from the kinds of resilience-related frames that previously formed a key part of their ‘everyday’ resistance. This serves as an illustration of the dynamic ways in which women constantly reimagine and renegotiate resistance to violence. In addition, the article further shows how models of development based upon neoliberal understandings of resilience exacerbate gendered impacts of insecurity at the same time as they erode women’s capacities to withstand and respond to them. While the particularities differ, the almost uniform approach taken by the development sector to women’s empowerment and resilience globally makes this study relevant to contexts beyond Palestine.

Method

The majority of the 54 participants involved in this study were women who came from the various villages, towns and refugee camps within the Bethlehem governorate, and who ranged in age, class, religion, marital status, occupation and educational attainment. Most were ‘non-activists’, in the sense that they were not regularly involved in formal politics, the activities of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) or organized activism. However, none could be said to be ‘apathetic’. All the women I spoke with cared deeply about the struggle for Palestinian liberation and wished to see the re-emergence of a popular resistance movement. Many occasionally participated in one or more forms of activism, but not consistently. Some had even at one stage of their lives been highly involved in activism and organizing, but withdrawn their participation since. The aim in seeking out non-activist women was to understand what influenced their decisions around resistance participation, and thus to develop a clearer understanding of what has driven the general decline in women’s involvement in visible, direct collective actions. Of course, despite their diverse characteristics, the interviewees discussed here cannot be said to be representative of non-activist Palestinian women as a whole. Among other factors, their views and experiences are partly shaped by the conditions of life and politics specific to the Bethlehem governorate – varied though they may be.

Interviewees were identified through community networks and snowball sampling and, as much as possible, interviewed and interacted with several times over the course of my fieldwork between January and September 2013. Having the chance to get to know participants in this way helped me to develop relations of trust and be able to engage each interviewee with a greater appreciation of her unique personality and circumstances. Interviews were semi-structured and mostly conducted in Arabic, although sometimes using a mix of Arabic and English. Efforts were made to hold interviews where participants would feel most comfortable – sometimes this was in the home, in a public space near the university campus (in the case of students), in a social club, or at times in a café where family members were not likely to intrude at any moment.

While my identity as an Australian of Palestinian background appeared to ease interviewee concerns about my basic political views regarding Israel–Palestine, beyond this I could never be certain of how it otherwise impacted on the way I was perceived. Perhaps more important in this regard was the fact that I was conducting research on behalf of an Australian university and held a crucial source of protection and privilege: an Australian passport. Because of this, the ultimate responsibility I held throughout the project was proving worthy of the trust interviewees placed in me, particularly given that the risk my research posed to their safety was so much greater than any risk it posed to mine. As such, with their security and anonymity in mind, the names of participants have been changed and the amount of identifying details kept to a minimum.

The politics of resilience in Palestine

In its promotion of Palestinian resilience, the development sector has had an assist in the pre-existing and closely related Palestinian concept of ṣumūd – an Arabic term that also roughly translates as ‘steadfastness’ or ‘perseverance’ but that has developed among Palestinians as a distinct value and practice since its rise as a political ideology in the 1970s (Farsoun and Landis, 1990: 28). While it has undergone various incarnations, acts of ṣumūd today are understood to involve informal and small-scale demonstrations of endurance, identity, dignity and well-being that, at their core, oppose Zionist settler-colonialism and Israeli political violence. This is captured, for example, in the slogan ‘to exist is to resist’. As Jean Zaru explains, ‘to practice sumoud means to remain steadfast on one’s land and, more generally, to remain steadfast in service to one’s homeland and to the struggle for freedom’ (in Seidel, 2011: 42–43). As such, ṣumūd comprises everyday resistance, or ‘infrapolitics’ – that is, daily, invisible, unobtrusive methods of struggle undertaken by subordinate groups. Such tactics have been theorized to prevail in situations characterized by acute imbalances of power where open demonstrations of opposition carry extreme risk (Scott, 1990: 183). A similar concept, developed by Asef Bayat, is that of ‘social non-movements’. These comprise leaderless, unorganized, protracted, individual actions undertaken by disparate individuals and groups. Social non-movements operate through a gradual accumulation of acts – that is, by means of ‘quiet encroachment’ (Bayat, 2013: 35). Bayat distinguishes this concept from everyday resistance, which he sees as more defensive and consciously political (Bayat, 2013: 43, 46, 48). In contrast, however, while ṣumūd may encompass acts of quiet encroachment, most of its tactics constitute intentional acts of defiance that are explicitly assigned national political significance. As Jan Busse points out, ‘sumud is unquestionably political, as it only makes sense as a response to the Israeli occupation’ (Busse, 2022: 584). In this sense, this article agrees with Caitlin Ryan’s view that an act of resilience can constitute a form of resistance – that is, more than simply a means of coping – and that therefore ṣumūd can in many cases be classified as ‘resilient resistance’ (Ryan, 2015). Indeed, most acts of ṣumūd constitute resilient resistance in the sense that they do not ‘reflect living with uncertainty but, rather, living despite uncertainty’ (Ryan, 2015: 300).

At the same time, however, it should be noted that the prevailing nature of ṣumūd in Palestine is variable and contingent, having undergone several changes over the history of the national movement. For example, upon becoming institutionalized in the late 1970s, ṣumūd took on a static or passive character, primarily limited to encouraging Palestinians to remain on their land. Soon after, however, grassroots organizations popularized ṣumūd muqāwim (resistance ṣumūd) – a more direct and proactive ṣumūd that encouraged Palestinian self-reliance and active non-cooperation with Israel. It was this type of ṣumūd that helped to generate and sustain the First Intifada – the Palestinian uprising against Israeli occupation that lasted roughly between 1987 and 1993 (Farsoun and Landis, 1990: 28). During this time resilience entailed a collective capacity to maintain and support resistance efforts by way of an approach characterized as the ‘suspension of everyday life’ (Jean-Klein, 2001; Usher, 1990: 95). This approach demanded austerity in day-to-day life; festivities, recreational activities, social outings and frivolity were considered distractions from the national struggle. Ordinary Palestinians took on the task of applying this approach in their everyday lives while simultaneously helping to collectively police adherence in their communities (Jean-Klein, 2001). In such a way, ṣumūd has historically worked to centre everyday and domestic activities in Palestinian life (including the maintenance of family, home and community) and to endow them with national political significance. The corollary to this has been that Palestinian women’s roles have also been recognized as having particular national importance. Indeed, in addition to spearheading ṣumūd, women also played crucial roles at the forefront of the resistance movement during the First Intifada.

By the start of the Second Palestinian Intifada in 2000, ṣumūd had transformed from a ‘suspension of life’ to an ‘affirmation of life’ strategy. This shift was reflective of political, structural and material changes underway in Palestine by this time. During the First Intifada, Palestinians were resisting unmediated and all-encompassing Israeli military control in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT), operating over not only physical space but the economy, education, civil order and political expression. This created numerous sites of confrontation in everyday life. Moreover, with the bulk of the Palestinian political leadership in exile at the time, the national resistance movement was able to develop a decentralized, democratic, grassroots structure that mobilized and organized large sectors of the population. However, the signing of the 1993–1995 Oslo Accords changed this. This set of agreements set the terms for limited Palestinian administrative control of certain parts of the West Bank and Gaza Strip and led to the establishment of the Palestinian Authority (PA) as an interim governing body. The formation of the PA resulted in a reorientation of Palestinian politics, which from that point became centralized within a foreign-funded formal organizational structure.

Further, in place of the constant and ubiquitous presence of Israeli forces on Palestinian streets, Israel substituted new forms of spatial control. These included the fragmentation of the West Bank through a network of bypass roads, highways and infrastructure that connect ever-expanding Israeli settlements, as well as border controls, checkpoints, roadblocks, closures, differential travel permits, the separation wall, sniper towers and advanced surveillance techniques, in addition to regular raids and arrests (Halper, 2000).

Spatial fragmentation and resulting community isolation took place in parallel with the disintegration of grassroots activist structures and networks. This disintegration was spurred in large part by the ‘NGO-isation’ of civil society in Palestine (Jad, 2004). NGO-ization largely resulted in the professionalization of organizations and movements, which became increasingly depoliticized and wedded to a globalized project logic shaped by foreign donor funds, conditions and interests (Hammami, 1995, 2000; Hanafi and Tabar, 2005; Jad, 2004, 2007; Kuttab, 2010). Consequently, rather than having their agendas shaped by a participatory mass base, NGOs instead competed for donor funding via technocratic, standardized, sector-wide working modalities. This reorientation of Palestinian NGOs resulted in a distancing and loss of trust between them and local communities, which seriously limited their capacity to mobilize the grassroots (Hammami, 2000). See, for example, the following quote given by Nawal, who grew up during the First Intifada:

In the past, the NGOs did have an effective role – we’re talking ten or so years ago. [. . .] [But now] people have stopped seeing them. Or if they see them, they don’t trust them. They’ve concluded that these organizations collect money at their expense and don’t provide any kind of valuable service on the ground. There is no trust now between the people and the NGOs. (Interview 1)¹

Further, the Oslo Agreements ushered in a period of neoliberal state-building in Palestine, supported by an influx of international aid (as per the ‘state-building-as-peace-building’ paradigm) (Hanafi and Tabar, 2005; Le More, 2008; Merz, 2012). Principles valued in Palestinian resistance – such as sacrifice, community cohesion, voluntarism and collective identification – clashed with the neoliberal development model pushed by key international development and financial organizations.² More specifically, they clashed with its central tenets of individual interest and autonomy, the marketization of social and political institutions, economic rationality as a driving force and globalization. As a result of the penetration of this paradigm, Palestinian society increasingly demonstrated individualization and social alienation, as well as declining voluntarism (Kayali, 2020: 128–136).

These changing factors made collective ‘suspension of life’ strategies less feasible and less appealing to a broad public. As such, Palestinians largely shifted their practice of ṣumūd to a strategy oriented around resisting immobility, maintaining ordinary life and experiencing joy in difficult circumstances (Allen, 2008; Junka, 2006; Richter-Devroe, 2011). This shift also reflected an increased number of restrictions placed on the movement of goods and people, which hindered commerce, social relations, leisure activities and education. As noted by Rema Hammami, ṣumūd became a ‘collectively understood, but individually achieved’ strategy aimed at ‘simply getting there’ (2004: 27). That the strategy would now be ‘individually achieved’ demonstrates the extent of decline in the culture of community-based coordination and collectivism. In terms of women’s changed practice of ṣumūd, Sophie Richter-Devroe describes how Palestinian women’s practice of travel in the pursuit of leisure frequently aimed not only at subverting Israeli ‘spacio-cide’ but also patriarchal controls over women’s mobility. Notably, however, this particular form of resistance or ṣumūd was not undertaken in the expectation of transforming power relations but, rather, of only subverting them temporarily (2011: 40–43).

Here it should be noted that while resilience is a culturally embedded term whose use in English does not map precisely on to Arabic, the amorphous nature of ṣumūd and other related concepts produces a significant overlap in meaning and practice with resilience. The UN Development Programme (UNDP), for example, took advantage of this overlap in 2016 when it named a conference aimed at discussing how to implement resilience-oriented programming the ‘Palestine resilience conference – From sumud to transformative resilience’ (Lax, 2021: 156).

Neoliberal resilience-based approaches in Palestine

Given the term’s widespread use in relation to Palestine, it is worth, at this point, discussing some of the dominant global conceptualizations of resilience and how applicable or appropriate they are in the Palestinian context. In international relations, many scholars note how a neoliberal model of resilience enables states, agencies and institutions to transfer responsibility for care onto the individual during crises (Bracke, 2016; Joseph in Bourbeau and Ryan, 2018: 222). Alternatively, however, resilience has also been conceptualized as a societal response to, rather than an instrument of, neoliberal governance (Hall and Lamont, 2013; Schmidt, 2015 in Bourbeau and Ryan, 2018: 222). Meanwhile, Philippe Bourbeau and Caitlin Ryan (2018) critique the tendency within international relations to treat resilience and resistance as dichotomous and mutually exclusive, while also ignoring the transformational dimensions of resilience.

These conversations around resilience in politics and international relations reflect its unsettled status in these disciplines, as well as its broader ambiguity. Most sources appear to converge upon a definition of resilience that denotes an ability to ‘bounce back’; to return to a prior state; to positively adapt; to withstand; or to recover quickly when faced with stress, hardship or adversity (Bracke, 2016: 54; Herrman et al., 2011: 259; Keelan and Browne, 2020: 459). However, there is less agreement on the term’s more specific elements. Certain scholars, for example, go beyond the resilience-as-recovery definition to see as implicit in resilience the potential for transformation – that is, that it involves ‘bouncing back as well as bouncing forward’ (Bourbeau and Ryan, 2018: 226). Other differences centre around whether resilience is primarily a personal trait, a product of support systems/collective assets or, indeed, a dynamic process (Herrman et al., 2011: 259–260). A newer conceptualization, however, understands resilience not only as an interactive process occurring within a particular social context, but as culturally determined (Marie et al., 2018: 23–24; Barber, 2013; Giacaman, 2020: e370). In other words, sources of resilience in one cultural context may possess greater value and meaning than they do in others.

Perhaps because of these definitional variations, some scholars have been careful to distinguish ‘neoliberal resilience’ as a particular form of resilience that became prominent at the same time as neoliberalism acquired hegemony (Butler, Gambetti and Sabsay, 2016: 6). As Sarah Bracke explains,

global institutions such as the IMF and the World Bank are currently investing in training programs to build and enhance resilience of individuals, notably those in the global South, an investment that might be understood as a way to ensure that long-standing and ever-creative strategies of survival are safely molded into the needs of the greedy global economy: a resilient subject is one who can absorb the impact of austerity measures and continue to be productive. (Bracke, 2016: 61)

This mode of resilience can involve recovery from or even adaptation to hardship but, crucially, does not involve transforming or challenging the structures or power relations that produced the hardship in the first place.

The UNDP has been particularly notable for its embrace of ‘resilience’ in its programmatic language – even going so far as to appoint ‘resilience experts’ for various projects.³ In Palestine, for example, it currently runs both the Investment Programme for Resilience (IPR) and the Community Resilience and Development Programme (CRDP). The IPR, funded by Germany and KfW Development Bank, claims to enhance the resilience of Palestinians by supporting the response to COVID-19, improving access to services, and alleviating ‘the medium to longer-term socio-economic effects in the areas of health and employment’ in the West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem (UNDP, 2022). It claims to do so in line with the UNDP’s ‘Transformative Resilience’ approach, as well as the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development’s ‘Boosting Resilience in Fragile Contexts’ strategy. The CRDP also claims to align its work with the UNDP’s ‘Transformative Resilience’ framework, which ‘places national ownership and leadership, self-reliance, and Palestinian identity at its core’ (UNDP, 2019). Focusing on Area C and East Jerusalem, the programme aims to protect Palestinian land and property and prevent the kind of deterioration of Palestinians’ living conditions that ‘undermine[s] their development capital’ (UNDP, 2021). In both their language and their focus on the promotion of small-businesses and community-based (rather than state-based) service delivery, the IPR and CRDP’s emphasis on ‘self-reliance’ accords with neoliberal forms of governance. Indeed, although the UNDP claims to have moved its definition of resilience from one based around bouncing back from shocks to one that emphasizes transforming after shocks (i.e. ‘building back better’) (Kindra, 2013), in practice such shifts appear little more than rhetorical. Serving to highlight this is how lightly the UNDP makes the claim that ‘by 2017, the CRDP has enhanced the resilience of more than 112,000 Palestinians living in East Jerusalem and Area C’ (UNDP, 2021), without an attempt to explain how this was measured, let alone an acknowledgement of the difficulty of measuring resilience in this way.

Gender and neoliberal resilience

Into this perspective we must also incorporate an understanding of the gendered dimensions and implications of this notion of resilience. To do this, we must understand the gendered relations, logics and dynamics that are produced and reproduced in different ways and in different sites in processes and practices of conflict and resistance. In Palestine, women’s bodies have historically posed as key sites of battle due to their association not only with reproduction and the family but also, crucially, with male honour. During the First Intifada in particular, Israeli forces exploited traditional notions of honour and women’s sexual ‘purity’ – specifically by using threats of sexual abuse to stoke moral panic (Rubenberg, 2001: 168). This led to a more rigid policing of women’s movements in Palestinian communities and generated such high anxiety among women and girls that they would often choose to limit their own movements or withdraw entirely from the public sphere (Rubenberg, 2001: 168). In the present context, amid ever-increasing forms of militarized spatial control, women are not only restricted in their ability to travel freely around the West Bank, they are also confronted with a growing number of sites where they may be exposed to sexual violence and harassment by Israeli soldiers (Shalhoub-Kevorkian, 2009).

Less widely recognized than such direct gendered violence, however, is the predominantly unpaid care work women provide for households, families and communities during and after conflict and crisis (see, for example: Blomqvist et al., 2021; Pittaway, 2013; Smyth and Sweetman, 2015). What this means, in practice, is that apart from being made responsible for sustaining their own resilience amid structural and physical violence, women are also expected to bear ultimate responsibility for sustaining the resilience of the community and, indeed, the nation. In Palestine, where women have been characterized as the ‘shock absorbers’ of their communities, deteriorating living conditions and growing insecurity have plunged households into deep crisis (Kuttab, 2006). Interviews I conducted reflected this, as women routinely communicated the sense that they were being burdened with more responsibilities than they or prior generations had previously been forced to bear. Among numerous factors, the separation wall and tightening restrictions on movement have not only lengthened travel times but also impeded access to medical care, workplaces, schools, universities, neighbouring locales and social and support networks (United Nations Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC), 2015). Over the course of my fieldwork, Israeli military incursions and night raids increased in regularity. So, too, did house demolitions, land confiscations and incidents of settler violence. Added to this, resources have become increasingly scarce over decades of occupation. Dozens of communities in the West Bank are not connected to a water grid, while others must contend with unreliable water supply and poor water quality (ECOSOC, 2015; Amnesty International, 2009). As stated in a 2015 UN report, water scarcity in Palestine ‘has significant implications for women’s and girls’ burden of care, health, time spent collecting resources and ability to generate income in Gaza and the West Bank’ (ECOSOC, 2015). Moreover, as women have come to take on an expanded set of roles and duties, including, in some cases, replacing their husbands as primary income earners, this has not been accompanied by a commensurate increase in control over resources or in decision-making power in the household (Shalhoub-Kevorkian, 2009: 104). As Maysa, a mother of three with a postgraduate degree and a full-time position, stated,

there’s a paradox there where you’re told to find employment and to go to work, but that you can’t make decisions. [Men will still say,] ‘I’m the head of the household’, ‘You’re not allowed to do this’, ‘You have to ask my permission before you do anything’. [. . .] In my home I’m stuck in a past age that even my mother didn’t live some 50 years ago, where I have no material or social authority to make decisions. It’s the way that men and society view women that oppresses them. This is the conflict that women are living. (Interview 2)

These pressures have been exacerbated by social alienation and the erosion of grassroots support structures – fuelled in the main by NGO-ization and the neoliberal state-building project (Nakhleh, 2012) – which have shifted even greater responsibility for care work from the community onto individual women. Despite these issues, however, women’s labour continues to be treated by development organizations and policymakers as though it were an inexhaustible resource (Rai, True and Tanyag, 2019: 570). The neoliberal conceptualization of resilience therefore has serious implications for Palestinian women. In its adoption by the development sector, it risks placing even greater pressures on women to shoulder individual responsibility for their and others’ well-being. Moreover, scholars have demonstrated that ‘the devaluation or nonrecognition of social reproduction, including unpaid care labor, leads to the depletion of the wellbeing of individual women, households, and communities.’ (Rai, True and Tanyag, 2019: 564)

How neoliberal resilience fails Palestinian women

In a study of Palestinian youth and resilience, Viet Nguyen-Gillham et al. (2008) noted that organizations providing psychosocial care to young people in Palestine rely on Western-style individual counselling and psychiatric interventions. This model, largely prescribed by international donors, ‘overlooks the notion of collective resiliency and fails to build on existing social capital within communities’ (Nguyen-Gillham et al., 2008: 291). In doing so, the authors argue, these organizations disregard the value placed on communal support in Palestinian culture. This argument echoes those of others within the field of psychiatry who critique the (donor-funded and World Health Organization-supported) globalized Western mental health paradigm for its myopic focus on biomedical forms of care to the exclusion of the sociocultural and sociopolitical, despite the lack of strong evidence for the efficacy of this approach (see, for example, Bracken et al., 2016; Summerfield, 2012). Indeed, there is increasing evidence that, due to their preoccupation with individualized approaches and the medicalization of issues stemming from chronic political violence, such interventions have had limited effect (Nguyen-Gillham et al., 2008; Sousa and Marshall, 2017; Veronese et al., 2018). In contrast with the development sector’s tendency to address well-being through a pathologizing lens, studies of resilience in Palestine have identified active political participation as an important means of restoring dignity and agency (Giacaman, 2020: 370; Veronese et al., 2018: 864). In one study of agency among Palestinian children, the authors state that ‘political agency seems to enhance children’s capacity to cope with traumatic experiences, increasing their resilience and moderating the effects of trauma’ (Veronese et al., 2018: 865). They therefore conclude that the dominant form of psycho-social intervention and its narrow focus on symptom-reduction ‘risks normalizing the political nature of suffering’ and fails to recognize Palestinians as ‘situated social actors within a community that is engaged in resisting oppression and humiliation’ (Veronese et al., 2018: 868).

In addition to political agency, psychiatric and psychological studies have also emphasized such factors as social bonds and support networks as being determining variables of resilience (Sousa and Marshall, 2017; Wilson et al., 2021). Overall, therefore, while individual and inherited cultural traits certainly play a role in determining resilience, decisive factors remain those that can be fostered through intervention on the community level. For example, a study by Wilson et al. (2021) of psychological distress among Palestinian refugee children identified poverty, violence and marginalization as key risk factors, for which significant remedies were youth education, supportive relationships and social participation. In addition, the study noted that Palestinian refugee girls tended to emphasize the importance of family cohesion and access to an extended network of female family members as determining the level of their resilience (Wilson et al., 2021: 314). Importantly in this regard, recent survey findings indicate that Palestinian women across the OPT report lower levels of satisfaction with their sense of community belonging than men (Barber et al., 2016: 99). In addition, Palestinian women have comparatively fewer opportunities for education, employment, recreational activity and access to social or support networks as a result of tightening Israeli spatial control as well as patriarchal forms of control over women’s mobility (Kayali, 2020). As a result, women are becoming increasingly cut off from what they have identified as key sources of resilience. Thus, the prevalence of the neoliberal notion of resilience as a trait that can be individually cultivated has the potential to do further damage to women by implying that a lack of resilience is a personal failing.

The impact of the new resilience discourse on Palestinian women’s resistance

What the above discussion highlights is that hegemonic global understandings of resilience tend to overemphasize the role of individual capacities in resilience-building and excessively rely on medical/psychiatric interventions. Not only does this approach overlook the importance of Palestinian values of community solidarity, it also ignores the political conditions to which psycho-social problems in Palestine are tied. And yet, because of the influence of NGOs over development and civil society, these understandings are increasingly forming the basis for most interventions into well-being in Palestine. Further, because of the penetration of NGO discourse, they are also impacting on local usage of resilience and its related class of terms. The rate and scale of this penetration is a function and reflection of the NGO-ization of Palestinian civil society that occurred in the wake of the post-Oslo influx of donor aid. This is captured well by Ava Leone’s observation that in Palestine ‘virtually no space, physical or imagined, has been untouched by some aspect of foreign aid’ (Leone, 2010: 3).

Palestinians, having witnessed the invasion of donor interests, foreign agendas and hegemonic discourses attendant upon the introduction of aid and development programmes, have grown to be mistrustful of NGO influence. So deep-seated is this mistrust that it often exists in the absence of clear justification, as demonstrated by the following interaction I had with Fatima, a university student who occasionally took part in protests: ‘I can tell you that I am against NGOs. I am completely against them. But I can’t tell you exactly why’ (Interview 3). This cynical mindset is a particularly crucial one for Palestinian women to maintain, given that conservative patriarchal attitudes around women’s participation in politics and public activism mean that they have more to lose should an activity or organization with which they are involved be perceived as illegitimate (Kayali, 2020). In other words, Palestinian women not only potentially risk their physical safety and their families’ disapproval when they engage in political activism, they also risk considerable damage to their reputations and, in turn, their life chances. This damage is magnified in cases where foreign or unfavourable political influences have played a hand in co-opting an effort – since participants will be deemed complicit.

Thus, as demonstrated, Palestinian women’s sensitivity to discursive framings helps alert them to potential reputational dangers. As such, in the case of resilience, the growing delegitimization of the resilience discourse further limits the narrow field of socially acceptable resistance strategies available to women in Palestine. This has been an important consequence of the spread of donor discourse more broadly throughout the OPT: the depoliticization and resultant delegitimization of formerly radical terms. In addition to the effects of NGO-ization described above, donors have supported an approach to Palestinian development that Sari Hanafi and Linda Tabar argue ‘suspends all political questions’ (Hanafi and Tabar, 2005: 55–56). In this approach, key issues of development – like human rights, gender equality, health, democracy or security – are addressed without reference to occupation, settler-colonialism or other fundamental political problems (Allen, 2013: 80; Kuttab, 2008: 107). While some groups within Palestinian civil society demonstrate a commitment to radical principles and language, in practice the competition for funds leaves organizations with few alternatives besides conforming to the demands of the donor market. Moreover, because foreign-funded NGOs now dominate Palestinian civil society, the power they wield as knowledge producers generates shifts in activism on the local level. It is an almost simultaneous process, therefore, that as the development sector discursively mobilizes concepts like resilience, they also erode them of their legitimacy and political salience among Palestinians.

Living in a context of an ongoing conflict that is subject to changing dynamics of aid and development as well as international diplomacy and contestation, Palestinians feel the presence of global power politics in their everyday lives acutely. As such, there is a sense that almost all actions require careful judgement on the basis of nationalist ethics. As demonstrated by the quote given by Fatima, above, when professing that she opposed NGOs without a clear reason why, the result is that Palestinian women wishing to engage in resistance feel as though they must navigate a minefield when deciding where to direct their limited and already overburdened energies.

Subverting neoliberalized resilience through transformative incrementalism

What options, then, remain for Palestinian women wishing to perform resilience and resistance with real revolutionary significance? In considering this question, the women I spoke with appeared to be faced with a dilemma. The overwhelming majority were nostalgic for the activism of the First Intifada, when voluntarism and cooperation united the community in collective effort and commitment. This type of joint, coordinated resistance, they claimed, is what is needed to achieve radical change. But when it came to organizations or groups engaged in such forms of collective resistance, most of the women I spoke with were unable to identify any that commanded the kind of legitimacy that would justify the gendered risks that would be associated with their involvement. They wanted to engage in actions that could effect real change, but were hamstrung by the lack of legitimate options on offer.

What this meant was that to imagine a mode of resilient resistance they could feasibly enact in the ‘here and now’ – that is, in the absence of acceptable avenues for direct collective action – women had to reconcile their political ethic of disavowing ‘normalizing’ activities with their belief that some form of resistance was better than none. In other words, they had to construct a frame that enabled them to ‘meaningfully’ engage in the national movement (as per their standards) while clearly subverting neoliberal notions of resilience advanced by donors and NGOs. Further, this action frame had to fit into, rather than add on to, the gendered set of roles and responsibilities with which they were already loaded. The types of actions that these women settled on all constitute everyday forms of resistance, or ṣumūd. However, they also constitute a particular subset or form of these, which I have classified as transformative and incremental. In doing so I intend to distinguish this class of ṣumūd from the other forms that have been identified by scholars such as Richter-Devroe – i.e. material, cultural, and social and ideational (2011: 33) – mentioned above. This is because, while the tactics pursued by women accorded with these post-Oslo era ‘affirmation of life’ tactics of ṣumūd in a number of ways, they also featured a number of key differences. Certainly, tactics of transformative incrementalism were predominantly undertaken on an individual basis, in much the same way as other ‘affirmation of life’ tactics. However, while the women I spoke with cared deeply about the importance of joyful pursuits and the maintenance of everyday life, none framed these things as resistance. On the contrary: most would deride the labelling of such activities as resistance, arguing that their focus on pleasure and normality and their lack of any intent to transform (rather than merely temporarily subvert) power relations meant they were, in a sense, normalizing.

As such, the tactics that interviewees instead identified were chosen for their apparent potential to transform Palestinian politics and society in the long term. Corruption, division, despair, greed and other issues have become so widespread, they argued, that no resistance movement would be able to succeed without first addressing these problems at the base of Palestinian life. As one interviewee stated, ‘We need to fix the problems inside us to be able to fight the occupation’ (Interview 6). In contrast to their radical aims, however, these tactics were only ever envisioned as working gradually, from the ground up. This stemmed from necessity rather than preference. The lack of legitimate avenues for collective activism, discussed above, meant that women could not risk their involvement in anything but individual actions – with necessarily modest, incremental goals. This is because the high level of social scrutiny being trained on women who are active in the patriarchal, male-dominated public sphere in Palestine means that involvement in visible direct collective actions could cause reputational damage and stigmatization. As women explained to me, not only would such risks be more likely to attach themselves to women involved in ‘illegitimate’ actions, they would also be too high a price to pay for a resistance action that was not fully committed to achieving radical outcomes – in particular, Palestinian liberation.

While, as will be shown, collective women’s initiatives have since started to emerge, they are nonetheless based upon the same holistic, transformative strategy of ṣumūd that the women in this study set forth – operating in the same conditions and by the same logic. Indeed, throughout my interviews with Palestinian women it was possible to sense their regret in their having to imagine a set of tactics that conformed with the neoliberal turn to individualism, which they diagnosed as being a key problem in Palestinian society. And yet they nonetheless believed that these individual efforts could lay the groundwork from which a ‘real’ (i.e radical), inclusive and sustainable collective resistance movement could emerge.

The main categories into which women’s incremental and transformative tactics fell included: education, consciousness raising, social reform and social enterprise. As noted, almost all were conceived as being performed individually, rather than collectively. ‘Start[ing] with yourself, and then with the people around you’ as one participant put it (Interview 4), was therefore typical in terms of the process and pace of change imagined (Table 1).

Table 1.

Prevailing forms of ṣumūd in the post-Oslo West Bank.

Material and cultural ṣumūd	Social and ideational/joyful ṣumūd	Transformative and incremental ṣumūd
• Largely informal and non-organized	• Informal and non-organized	• Informal and non-organized
• Performed individually or collectively	• Performed on an individual basis	• Initially performed on an individual basis, with a view to collective organizing and action
• Nonviolent	• Nonviolent	• Nonviolent
• Preservation of Palestinian land, life, and customs (e.g. through tending land, celebrating traditional culture, and performing traditional dance and music)	• Maintaining hope and normality; pursuing pleasure (e.g. through travel)	• Reforming society and politics (e.g. through education, consciousness raising, social reform and enterprise)
• Framed as both a survival strategy and as resistance to settler-colonialism and erasure	• Aims at/anticipates a temporary subversion of power relations through small-scale acts	• Aims to slowly transform power structures and relations through cumulative, small-scale changes
• As a strategy practised in isolation, can sometimes be characterized as static or passive	• Proponents view the pursuit of pleasure as oppositional; a form of resistance	• Proponents do not condemn the pursuit of pleasure, but do not view it as resistance

Social enterprise and reform

While participants of all ages and characteristics appeared to favour an incremental, bottom-up approach to transformation, what was unique among younger university-educated interviewees was an emphasis on enterprise and entrepreneurship. See, for example, the following statement given by Maria, a university student involved in a number of voluntary student initiatives around healthcare, sustainability and community development: ‘We need entrepreneurs. We need people who are going to work for change. [. . .] So, you know, project by project we’re going to make a change’ (Interview 5). Another university student, when asked about what specific transformative actions she would be interested in undertaking, replied

I do have an idea, a secret idea, for a social business that I will do in the future. [. . .] It will need a lot of funds, but I don’t want it to be sponsored in the NGO way. I want it to be a social business, so I will be providing social things but with a business. So it will be a revenue-generating social business. (Interview 6)

What is notable in these approaches is the desire to balance a spirit of enterprise with social, ethical and national concerns – demonstrated above not only through the intention of creating a business with an express social benefit, but also through the avoidance of NGO-style donor dependency. This is again illustrative of how transformative incrementalism differs from other forms of ṣumūd. While rooted in the practical realities of life and the modern economy, such tactics nonetheless keep a view to how structures and relations of power can be shifted.

Alongside patterns of donor dependency, several women also identified corruption and cronyism in Palestine as key issues on which to focus efforts for change. This was most commonly discussed through use of the Arabic term wāsṭa, which refers to the use of personal connections or influence to secure positions, benefits or outcomes. University student Raneem, for example, identified the predominance of wāsṭa as one of the biggest problems in Palestinian society, saying, ‘The right man is not in the right place’ (Interview 7). As another interviewee explained,

however much we can do from our position as youth or university students, you can’t be as effective as a person in a position where he has all the power and all the possibilities to make change. So when this person is the wrong person and all that he cares about is his own interest, nothing will happen. (Interview 6)

Muna, an interviewee involved in women’s training and organizing, encountered similar responses among the women she met as part of her community work, and thus set about organizing their efforts toward demanding the end of wāsṭa:

their frustration is that other women who haven’t graduated yet and who have lower grades are being employed before them. [. . .] I really want to coach and support them as much as I can so that this change can happen, because that would be big. (Interview 8)

Education and awareness-raising

The lack of enterprise and initiative diagnosed by the women I spoke to was commonly believed to stem fundamentally from failures in the education system in Palestine. Thus, while educational attainment did feature regularly among the sources of resilience that women put forward, another common theme was the desire to improve education and social consciousness. The following view expressed by Yasmine was echoed throughout my conversations: ‘Our problem comes from the base [of our society]. We don’t have an education system that builds our creative thinking [. . .] We don’t think out of the box, and this affects our economy, our society, and our traditions’ (Interview 9). However, this sentiment went beyond a critique of the formal education system to the cultural awareness instilled at the level of the family and community, as stated by Mariam: ‘Here, we have no awareness or cultural education at all. [. . .] We have a lot of problems within ourselves’ (Interview 10), as well as by Nawal, a working mother of three who lived in a refugee camp, who said

[During the First Intifada, women] weren’t educated scientifically, but they were nationalistically aware and educated. [. . .] Nowadays, as mothers, we don’t bring up these topics at all. It’s due to being too busy with work and being distracted and busy, but it’s us falling short at the end of the day. (Interview 1)

As for general educational attainment, while it may be speculated that by classifying education as resilience women are merely assigning radical value to a self-interested pursuit, it is worth noting that unemployment is significantly higher among educated women than less educated women (United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (ESCWA), 2015: vi; World Bank, 2018). It is also much higher among educated women than educated men (47% versus 18% in 2018) (World Bank, 2018). Despite this, the rate of women’s enrolment in higher education in Palestine has consistently been higher than it has been for men (Wafa, 2022). This is not to say that resistance necessarily lies at the core of this impulse. And yet nonetheless, Palestinians have long viewed education as part of a national survival strategy and ‘as a form of protest in response to the region’s on-going conflict, displacement and upheaval’ (Royal Academy of Science International Trust (RASIT), 2018; Brand, 1991: 12–13). Indeed, even while acknowledging the poor job prospects they faced in Palestine, many of the women I spoke with would still emphasize education’s transformative benefits. Like, for example, Raneem:

I know that when you go and throw a stone or something like that you’re fighting for your country, and I do respect and appreciate that. But if you were killed I think that – well that’s the end of the story. But if you go to university, if you tried to get your BA, you travelled abroad and you came back and tried to build your country and raise the awareness of your people here, then that would be much better. [. . .] And then you are culturally better, economically better, and even politically better. (Interview 7)

Importantly, the ‘education as resilience’ frame has comparably more purchase among women than men in Palestine. As Nguyen-Gillham et al. (2008: 296) write,

partly because of social prohibitions, Palestinian girls express resilience through a different form. The very act of going and being at school becomes more than an ordinary daily activity. Commitment to education signifies an individual and collective act of defiance, reinforcing a sense of shared beliefs and communal belonging.

Indeed, it was often discussed among participants that because men and boys are freer from social scrutiny, their resistance activities are chosen with less caution and, therefore, often with less seriousness of purpose. Protests, in particular, were viewed by numerous women interviewees as a way for Palestinian men to ‘let off steam’, release their frustrations and perform masculinity. This gendered difference accords with a 2021 study on psychological distress and resilience factors among Palestinian children in the West Bank (Wilson et al., 2021). In it, the authors find that boys see education as ‘inseparable from the pursuit of wealth and hence, empowerment’, while girls see it as ‘a route to equality and autonomy, enabling informed political activism and offering the prospect of independence’ (Wilson et al., 2021: 314). Overall, education as a mode of self-improvement and access to community provided women with a key source of resilience that could easily be connected to the broader national struggle. University student Abeer, for example, stated: ‘I feel content when I’m helping people and also when I’m educating people politically’ (Interview 11).

Transformative and incremental ṣumūd as a precursor to organized resistance

It increasingly appears that for Palestinian women, their ability to participate meaningfully in an effective resistance movement is being seen as tied to both their social improvement and the political education of the community. The recently established Palestinian feminist initiative Tal’at, for example, is premised on these principles. Emerging in September 2019, the movement gained prominence for organizing marches in a number of cities (including Jerusalem, Haifa, Rafah-Gaza, Ramallah and Berlin, among others) to protest the rising femicide rate and the oppression of women more broadly. Aside from being an independent grassroots movement that has resisted foreign and political involvement, Tal’at has been notable for the way it has stubbornly refused to separate or dilute any of its social, political and emancipatory aims, noting how the post-Oslo environment worked to fragment rights, movements and peoples in Palestine (Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung (RLS), 2020):

We aspire to build a different world, for our emancipation is hinged on the shattering of capitalism, colonialism, and patriarchy all at once. Hence, Tal’at does not prioritise making institutional demands, be it from the Palestinian Authority and definitely not the Israeli state; our struggle is an internal Palestinian one for the building of our social and political fabric, embarking on a process of radical collective healing, that informs our liberation struggle, in discourse and practice. (Marshood and Alsanah, 2020)

Such an initiative appears to be the result of a now widespread diagnosis about the condition of both Palestinian society and the liberation movement, but also of the bubbling up of women’s alternative movement imaginaries.

Conclusion

The fluid way in which Palestinian women devise and revise strategies and narratives of resilience reflects a dynamic responsiveness to both local and international events, forces and discourses. In the contemporary, post-Oslo, neoliberal, fragmented, NGO-ized West Bank, Palestinian women have been choosing incrementally transformative tactics out of the desire to identify a resistance strategy that a) commands local legitimacy, b) has the potential to produce radical outcomes and c) is feasible for women in a context of gendered violence, patriarchal social norms and marginalization. While many of these tactics appear vague and limited in scope, the fact that they are compatible with Palestinian women’s political ethics, as well as the limitations placed on their participation in activism, gives them particular resonance. Notably, also, transformative incrementalism presents as both a demonstration and source of resilience for Palestinian women. Women repeatedly affirmed how important it was to them that they felt they were contributing to their communities and the project of national liberation, and thus felt that this strategy held the promise of creating meaning in their lives.

Finally, transformative incrementalism also represents an important means of subverting the constraints of a ‘resilience’ framework championed by international NGOs. By commandeering resilience, the development sector has continued a pattern of co-opting formerly radical concepts – diminishing their local legitimacy in the process. In this case, by advocating a neoliberalized version of resilience, international organizations have presented Palestinians with the proposition that political violence must be overcome individually or through the help of medical intervention. It is not a resilience that draws on the strength of the collective or the possibility of challenging causes of injustice – ‘bouncing back’ is merely about resigning oneself to the reality of one’s situation and living as though it were normal. While a turn toward holistic, transformative tactics suggests a return to the radical ethos of earlier Palestinian resistance movements, it is still vulnerable to the creeping effects of NGO-ization. However, women’s determination to begin a transformative process that starts from society’s foundations provides greater prospects of sustainability and grassrootedness – and therefore a greater chance of reclaiming mobilizing concepts and ideas.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The author is very grateful to the editors and anonymous reviewers for their comments.

Funding

The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This article was made possible (in part) by a grant from the Fondation Maison des Sciences de l’Homme and the Carnegie Corporation of New York. The statements made and views expressed are solely the responsibility of the author.

ORCID iD

Liyana Kayali

Notes

Interviews cited

Interview 1: Nawal, refugee camp, Bethlehem governorate, 2013.

Interview 2: Maysa, refugee camp, Bethlehem governorate, 2013.

Interview 3: Fatima, university student from village, Bethlehem, 2013.

Interview 4: Sima, Bethlehem, 2013.

Interview 5: Maria, university student, Bethlehem, 2013.

Interview 6: Farah, university student, Bethlehem, 2013.

Interview 7: Raneem, university student from village, Bethlehem, 2013.

Interview 8: Muna, Beit Jala, 2013.

Interview 9: Yasmine, university student, Bethlehem, 2013.

Interview 10: Mariam, university student, Bethlehem, 2013.

Interview 11: Abeer, university student, refugee camp, Bethlehem governorate, 2013.

Liyana Kayali is a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Sydney. She was previously a researcher with the Fellowship Program on Exiting Violence at Columbia Global Centers, Amman, a lecturer at the Centre for Arab and Islamic Studies at the Australian National University (ANU) and a research fellow at the School of Law, Politics and Sociology at the University of Sussex. Email: Liyana.kayali@sydney.edu.au

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