Palestinian women suffer under occupation
PHYLLIS BENNIS
Progressive Media Project, 8 March 2001
Malake Kafishe lives in Hebron's Old City, and she was seven months pregnant last November when the Israeli military attacked. There was shooting, and then I heard the helicopter gunships coming in and my heart just stopped, she said. She began to bleed and then collapsed on the doorstep. Her family telephoned for an ambulance. Because of a curfew imposed on the 40,000 Palestinians in Hebron's Old City, it took an hour for an ambulance to arrive. In place of paramedics, two Israeli soldiers insisted on examining Kafishe.
Before the ambulance could get her to a hospital, it had to pass four checkpoints. At each roadblock, soldiers swung open the vehicle doors and peered at the ashen-faced woman inside. By the time she reached the hospital, a journey that normally takes five minutes, one and a half hours had elapsed. The baby was dead. The doctor told me, 'If you had got here 20 minutes earlier, you could have saved the baby,' Kafishe said.
Israel's continued siege of Palestinian territories is taking a particular toll on women.
Because the Israeli military controls the roads in both Gaza and the West Bank, mothers often cannot take their children to school, doctors cannot reach their clinics in the smaller towns. And pregnant women and the sick, however desperate, often cannot pass the checkpoints to reach a hospital.
Palestinian women have also suffered because of the plunging standard of living. According to the United Nations, unemployment jumped to 38 percent from 12 percent following last fall's siege, and the World Bank reports that one out of every three Palestinians is living in poverty. Because Palestinian territories have been closed off from Israel for the past five months, the Palestinian economy is losing about $11 million daily, according to the United Nations. Miftah, an independent organization founded by Palestinian spokeswoman Hanan Ashrawi, reports the closures forced more than 100,000 families into abject poverty, making them survive on less than $2 per day.
The UN World Food Program recently renewed its emergency appeal for $4 million to feed Palestinian refugees now facing unprecedented starvation. By February, the number in need of food had soared to 250,000. Most of them, according to the United Nations, are families of workers kept from their jobs in Israel, and widows and their children.
It is Palestinian women who figure out how to cope with closures of cities and towns, the blocking of roads and the economic siege. And as is the case in any community under such economic pressures, social and household tensions rise, and families and the women who sustain them face unbearable strains: how to feed their families when even flour and cooking oil run low, how to care for traumatized children, how to look after the not-really-fearless young men confronting the soldiers. It's the women who must hold their families together.
Palestinian women remain vocal in demanding an end to Israeli occupation. They see a viable Palestinian state as necessary to ensure their rights as women.
Some Israeli women recognize the same reality. Bat Shalom (the Daughters of Peace) recently reasserted that our principles - a real peace, one based on a just resolution of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and equal rights for all the citizens of Israel - are strong and resilient. And, maybe because we are women, no one can convince us that violence is the only road that leads to peace and security.
An article in the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz last November clarified the point. It quoted a young Palestinian woman in Ramallah, on the West Bank, who said, There is one subject that makes the issue of the establishment of a Palestinian state more important for women: You need a sovereign framework to fight for human rights in general, and for women's rights in particular.
Ending Israel's occupation of Palestinian lands would be a good start.