Holding on in Ramallah and Gaza

“Holding on,” however, has multiple meanings and takes different forms. As the Gaza war raged, Palestinians in the “enclave metropolis” (Taraki 2008, 6) of Ramallah in the West Bank—the seat of a fragile and compromised Palestinian Authority—watched the scenes from Gaza on satellite television. With the exception of scattered protests and heart-felt donations of clothes and medicines, however, those who watched failed to act. In this sense, Ramallah households were constituted simply as yet another audience (in yet another Arab capital) to Gaza's unfolding tragedy, albeit an intensely emotional one. Life in Ramallah—with its lively cafes and restaurants, relatively large-scale economic enterprises, global and regional cultural flows, and relentless building of “towers” (braaj) and villas—continued largely as normal, albeit behind a separation Wall and surrounded by checkpoints. This normality is in stark contrast with the past, where seven deaths in Gaza provoked the first Palestinian intifada (1988–1993). Participating in one of the few women's demonstrations in Ramallah against the Gaza war, I found myself surrounded by the familiar faces of women leaders from the first intifada—but they were unable to mobilize newer and younger constituencies. Significantly, the police and security services of the Palestinian Authority blocked militant demonstrations and beat or arrested demonstrators because, as a senior police officer Brigadier Adnan Damiri explained to me in a 13 January 2008 interview in Ramallah, the police had a duty to prevent citizens from risking their lives by going to checkpoints to confront Israeli soldiers. While it is true that checkpoint confrontation may endanger Palestinian life, the police contribute to the displacement, confinement, and domestication of protest in ways that replicate colonial segregation. In reality, only the enclave can be retained. If the message from Israel to the Palestinians in Ramallah is “you can hold on to your house if you adapt to your confinement,” the message for Gaza is “you cannot hold on to your house unless you overthrow Hamas.”

Are there, then, divided and contrary forms of Palestinian householding emerging in the fragmented landscape of contemporary Palestine? Certainly, householding in Ramallah and Gaza are dissimilar. Two weddings in the summer of 2009 suggest stark distinctions. On 31 July—in one of at least ten mass weddings sponsored (and financed) by the Hamas movement in 2009—450 grooms stood proudly on a make-shift stage in northern Gaza (Maan News Agency 2009). Several girls under the age of ten, dressed as brides, stood-in for the actual brides who avoided publicity by being in the audience. Meanwhile in Ramallah, a taxi driver recounts attending an August wedding at a new wedding hall, aptly, if illicitly, named the Four Seasons:

Both weddings offer public displays in contrast to the house-bound weddings in the first intifada (see Johnson, Abu Nahleh, and Moors Reference Johnson, Nahleh and Moors2009). Both respond to the escalating costs of marriage: in Gaza—through collective marriage supported by a political movement (see Jad Reference Jad2009)—and in Ramallah—by a lower middle-class family investing a significant portion of their household income in a single, spectacular event.

The contrast is obvious. However, Ramallah and Gaza also mirror each other and the complex displacements of Palestine underway since the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993 (ostensibly producing peace) and the unleashing of the second Palestinian intifada in 2000 (less ambiguously constituting war). At the same time, Israeli messages are contradicted by Israeli practices. On the one hand, the West Bank if-you-adapt solution—a version of Prime Minister Netanyahu's offer of economic peace rather than a political solution—cannot work for many Palestinians in the West Bank whose householding is challenged by the relentless Israeli land expropriation and settlement. Nor can it work for most Palestinians confined and spatially segregated by 400 kilometers of a separation Wall (with 300 more kilometers planned) that snakes deep into the West Bank and constrained by, at last count, 613 “closure obstacles” within West Bank territory (excluding checkpoints on the Green Line) (United Nations June 2009, 1). On the other hand, the Gaza unless-you-topple-Hamas condition is contradicted by Israeli war from the air that does not distinguish between Hamas and the trapped population. A graphic example comes from Majeda's war diary of 10 January 2009 (Al Saqqa Reference Majeda2009b). Her eight-year-old nephew Wael, obsessed with airplanes, flying, and birds, answers a ringing phone and Majeda hears him asking for an “airplane with a remote control.” Exasperated, she runs to pick up the second phone:

The Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs (2009) in a 7 January press release, “IDF Issues Warnings to the Civilians of Gaza,” touted these calls as reducing the “risk of injury” to civilians with whom, it affirmed, the IDF “has no quarrel.” For Majeda and other Gazans, the messages only increased their fear and vulnerability; there was, in fact, no sanctuary. As Amnesty International (2009, 1) concluded: “[T]he borders of Gaza were kept sealed throughout Operation Cast Lead and civilians could not flee and there was nowhere that their safety could be guaranteed.”

Indeed, in seven cases documented by Human Rights Watch (2009), Israeli soldiers, using small arms, fired on civilians attempting to flee, even though they were waving white flags, resulting in eleven fatalities. Gaza, hermetically sealed and controlled through the air (and sea) by Israeli military power, was termed by Li a “laboratory” where Israel experiments with management techniques (surveillance, air power, buffer zones) to find the optimum balance between “maximum control over the territory and minimum responsibility” for the Palestinian population. (2006, 38–39). Salient to this discussion, he sees Gaza as a “proving ground” for practices of control that could be transferred to the West Bank to create an “archipelago” (39) of little Gazas. Whether Gaza is the West Bank's future is subject to debate, but Israel's turn to unilateralism and separation makes the future highly uncertain in both locations.

Perpetual emergency and Palestinian householding

Over the past sixty years, long-term precarity and insecurity have shaped key features of Palestinian householding, including persistent and contradictory demographic patterns. Perpetual emergency conditions may explain, for example, a strikingly and persistently high fertility with a current (somewhat declining since the mid-1990s) total fertility rate of 4.2 in the West Bank and 5.4 in Gaza in 2006 (PCBS 2007, 57). Women continue to marry early, with a median age of eighteen. It is unusual to have high fertility and early marriage combined with high female educational levels and relatively low infant mortality. Such concurrence suggests that indirect factors—particularly long-term insecurity and lack of public provisions and protections—prompt both women and men to prefer large families.

Since 2000, Both Gazan and West Bank households have been deeply affected by another, now persistent, factor: long-term male unemployment that has generated a profound crisis of the male-breadwinner identity. This development both undermines the household's economic security and disturbs gender roles and responsibilities. The economic crisis is caused by the large-scale loss of work in Israel—where at least 100,000 Palestinians were employed in 2000 (down from one-third of the workforce before 1996)—as well as damage to, and undermining of, Palestinian economies. This crisis is particularly acute in Gaza, where male unemployment was close to one-third to one-half of the workforce even before the war, rose again in its aftermath, and is currently estimated to be 40 percent (UN News Service 2009). These figures, however, are unreliable as Gaza's only viable economic enterprise is literally underground in the tunnel economy. Gazans respond to the Israeli blockade by smuggling vital goods—whether sheep, medicine, or refrigerators—from Egypt through a maze of precarious tunnels.

Even more telling—as a joint report by eight international aid agencies in March 2008 confirmed—is the fact that about 80 percent of Gazan households were dependent on humanitarian aid even before the war (Amnesty International et. al. 2008). Humanitarian aid is an aspect of globalization that is not adequately studied. In particular, it often generates new forms of feminized labor insofar as women and girls are the main seekers and household suppliers of what in Gaza is simply called “coupons”: chits for food and other basic supplies. Two stories alert us to complex and even contradictory effects. When a married woman in a refugee camp reluctantly leaves her house to find coupons, she returns to face violence from her unemployed husband, who seeks to prove his dominant role:

In contrast, a twenty-three-year-old unmarried woman from Beit Hanun, a town on Gaza's northern border, was defended by her parents against a brother who is a militant in the Islamic Jihad. As household finances faltered, the young woman was forced to suspend her university studies in information technology. She then volunteered her services in a local community-based organization, giving lessons and providing computer advice. Like many young educated women working in NGOs in Gaza, she, in turn, received food coupons. Her brother, active in an Islamist group, initially tried to prevent her from working in the association but she insisted, arguing the work is not shameful. Her parents supported her by saying to their son:

The detailed ethnographic work of Gaza researchers Muhanna and Kleibo (Reference Aitemad and Qleibo2008) confirms that there is no single or simple formula regarding how public insecurities translate into specific changes in gender and family dynamics. Men and women in Palestinian households produce and perform their own translations. With this in mind, we can understand a surprising result from a post-war survey in Gaza. The survey indicated that both women and men perceived a post-war increase in “Israeli killings” and in “domestic violence” against women and children, and they did so in almost equal measure: about 60 percent of men and women thought that Israeli killings had increased and about half of women and men perceived domestic violence against women and domestic violence against children as increasing (although in general, rather than in their own household) (UN Gender Task Force/Unifem 2009, 55). Whereas it is clear that Israeli killings did not actually increase after the war—though trauma, grief, and vulnerability continued to spiral—to interpret perceptions of an increase in violence towards women and children is more difficult. While it is reasonable to posit a real increase, particularly in displaced households, the example of a perceived increase in Israeli killings reminds us not only that past violence inhabits present consciousness. However, past and present public violence is translated into the household through both act and imagination.

In the West Bank, a similar associational trail translates public insecurities, political crisis, and the erosion of public trust into moral dangers (see Johnson Reference Johnson2007), both local and globalized. In a discussion with women in a poor village near Bethlehem—conducted by the author and Fadwa Abu Labban on 4 April 2008—a tall and imposing woman, Umm Nabil, supportively patted the knee of a young divorcee who was pursuing her university education and ruled in a measured tone on matters from marriage practices—girls no longer marry just anybody—to the diminishing number of sheep in the village. Umm Nabil's brother with three other militants had been assassinated by the Israeli army in Bethlehem a few weeks earlier. These deaths—coupled with problems in the village of access to work and education—were a reminder to everyone of the insecurity of Palestinian daily life. We were particularly surprised, therefore, by the quick response when we asked what the main dangers in the village were to girls in their late teens: “Television—but only satellite television. It is a disaster.”

While it would be foolish to equate the “disaster” of satellite television with the continuing tragedy in Gaza, women in this small West Bank village—like Majeda in Khan Yunis—feel that their families and households are shaken by forces beyond their control. It is hard to hold on when there are no mediating forces of protection, given the combination of unchecked Israeli power, the incapacities of Palestinian governance, and a profound crisis in the national project. However, just as Umm Nabil mourns her brother while encouraging a young divorcee to continue her education, Palestinian acts of holding on anticipate a better time. In Majeda's words (2009a, 15),