In Palestinian Refugee Women from Syria to Jordan, Afaf Jabiri considers the discrimination and violence experienced by Palestinian women displaced from Syria to refugee camps in Jordan. Based on four years of field research including interviews with refugees and NGO workers, the book is an impactful critique of the humanitarian, legal, settler colonial and conventional feminist frameworks that marginalise Palestinian women, writes Layla Saleh.
In a world seemingly preoccupied by feminist concerns but unwilling to grasp the plight of Palestinian women, Afaf Jabiri’s book Palestinian Refugee Women from Syria to Jordan is a noteworthy intervention. Written before the latest war and probable genocide in Gaza, this book grapples with the profound injustices facing Palestinian refugee women displaced to Jordan in Syria’s own revolution-turned-war. That these women garner very little attention from the humanitarian community and are abused by neighbouring governments is no coincidence. Their Palestinian origins and identities leave them “excluded” from both sustained scholarly and practitioner concern, argues Jabiri. She charts the difficulties they face as they flee legally or illegally to Jordan, living in various camps and labelled according to a confusing system of legal categorisation on the basis of which are dispensed (or not) various rights or services.
Jabiri’s methodology involves participant observation (drawing on her own work in the humanitarian field) and interviews with women and their families. Here she adds to the feminist epistemological emphasis on centring women’s lived experiences. She admits to the difficulties of trying to understand some women’s choices. Doing so required of Jabiri not just listening, but “re-listening to women’s voices, trying to carefully hear what they wanted to share” in order to “respect and [better] respond to women’s messages” (13). She insists on “respecting women’s choices [and] also recognising them as active-speaking…subjects and equal producers of knowledge” (14). Conventional feminist concerns in scholarship and humanitarian literature too often overlook the primacy of Palestinian identity and inter-generational memories (Jabiri cites works by Jennifer Hyndman, Jane Freedman, Zeynep Kivilcim, Nurcan and Özgür Baklacıoğlu and the Women’s Refugee Commission as examples. Resultant analyses fall short in explaining how the Palestinian struggle sometimes overtakes narrow understandings of gender justice. This glaring error of omission leads to faulty analysis, which she seeks to rectify in this very interesting book.
Her interlocutors highlight their experiences as Palestinians before their difficulties as women (or men). Their stories always start with the original displacement in 1948.
Jabiri writes back against “anti-Palestinianism.” This knowledge-practice of settler colonialism attempts to mute the voices of Palestinians who refuse to stop vocalising the history of an occupied people, who do not give up on the right of return. Theoretically framing her exploration, she combines Constantin Zurayk’s Nakba with Stuart Hall’s juncture-point to underscore Palestinianism. Hence, “the Nakba as a juncture-point is a defining historical moment” that “normalize[s], defend[s], and protect[s]” settler colonialism while sidestepping or trivializing the narratives of those who actually survived genocide (22). The expulsion and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in 1948 that rendered them (and the generations since) refugees is an ongoing ordeal that relates as much to material existence (death and homelessness/statelessness) as to immaterial (psychological, identitarian) destruction. The Nakba transforms and transcends time but also geographies, political systems, and legal frameworks. Equally important, the Nakba marginalises and silences Palestinians and their histories through Spivak’s ‘epistemic violence’. Central to this ongoing dynamic is the classification of Palestinians “as a differentiated group” against whom discrimination becomes legitimised in regional countries’ laws and in international gender policies (24). Jabiri’s analysis is feminist as well as decolonial. Her interlocutors highlight their experiences as Palestinians before their difficulties as women (or men). Their stories always start with the original displacement in 1948.
Home for Jabiri’s female interviewees is not only a ‘multidimensional place’ spanning Palestine to Syria, but also a ‘sense of a continuum of losses’ narrated and re-narrated
Next, Jabiri empirically demonstrates how Jordanian laws on nationality and border entry are gendered, sometimes affecting family members differently (58). She shows how this categorisation manifests in humanitarian practice. Through adherence to laws of states such as Jordan, the assistance of humanitarian aid policies inflicts harm. The category of ‘UNRWA refugee’ to which a whole host of rules and procedures applies is itself part of the problem (61). Palestinians’ right of return is perpetually deferred by humanitarian agencies through hollow references to non-binding UN resolutions, effectively ignoring the Nakba itself and in turn Israel’s (and colonial powers’) culpability in their refugeehood (67). Concretely, exclusions practiced by the UN High Commission on Refugees for instance deprive Palestinians of international ‘women’s empowerment benefits’ including cash and medical care (71).
Jabiri levels a trenchant critique of epistemic violence by feminists themselves. They are not immune to “the trap and logic of categorization” that masks the specific suffering of Palestinians (79). Taking this critique seriously does not imply a kind of competition whereby Arabs of various origins (e.g. Syrian vs. Palestinian), victimised by their respective governments or foreign invaders, vie for the status of least fortunate. Rather Jabiri’s analysis suggests the ways in which the Palestinian cause as such – including the right of return – is conveniently overlooked in the thicket of international agencies working through or with national governments. The accumulating plight of statelessness firms up over generations, rendering Palestinians always doubly victimised. Before Syria’s war, Palestinians were expelled from Kuwait after Saddam Hussain’s 1990 invasion, then left stranded in the desert border with Jordan upon fleeing the Americans invasion of Iraq in 2003. The abuse Arab regimes heap upon Palestinians, ranging from deportation, barred entry, separation of families, to forced living in camps such as Jordan’s Cyber City, seems to leave Israel secure in its unending attempts at (narrative and physical) erasure of Palestinians. Jabiri’s point is that the network of complicity is vast indeed, comprising the Arab regimes, the UN, and possibly well-meaning feminists – essentially relieving Israel of responsibility as states pursue their own “national security.”
Gender equality is not the only issue at hand. Instead, the violence women confront is inseparable from Israeli settler colonialism, militarism in Syria, and engendered nationalism in Jordan
Jabiri does more than catalogue the material, psychological, and legal tribulations that Palestinian refugees from Syria face. Building on Arendt, she considers women’s self-identifications as part of the “Palestinian condition.” Being a Palestinian is inseparable from the trials of displacement and the persistent quest for return. Home for Jabiri’s female interviewees is not only a “multidimensional place” spanning Palestine to Syria, but also a “sense of a continuum of losses” narrated and re-narrated (96). Women experience their perceptions of lost homes in different ways, in part based on their legal status. Some choose to integrate and become socially active in camp life. Others seem unable to overcome grief over past lives in Syria before Assad’s bombing of Yarmouk (in 2015 and 2018) and other camps pushed them to flee.
In chapter five, Jabiri puts forth the memorable conceptualisation of “masculinist manoeuvrings.” Women and men attempt to restore traditional gender relations upturned by the deprivations of displacement. She suggests that women deliberately try to uphold forms of masculinity (roles of men in the household and in society) as a mode of resistance against Jordanian policies. Power here is not just about male/female dynamics but about a shared struggle within families who decry injustice against Palestinians. Her critical approach is an avenue to questioning assumptions about sources of degrees of oppression. Some may prioritise being Palestinian over a presumed individualised female agency abstracted from broader political commitments. Jabiri gives examples. To assuage the blows of a father losing his former role as family breadwinner, one income-earning mother instructs her son ask his forcibly unemployed father for money (125-6). Here Jabiri may be planting seedlings for future empirical analysis. To an extent, she prompts researchers to reserve (Western/liberal feminist) judgement about gender roles within the family and society by seriously considering women’s own narratives.
This emphasis on linkages of oppression is a significant conclusion to be heeded by feminist or women’s studies scholars and policy practitioners alike
Finally, Jabiri’s thorough investigation into gender-based violence (GBV) charts how Palestinian women that fled Syria to Jordan face several violences. The discrimination of nationality laws is harmful to refugee women and wives of refugee men: inability to complete school; pressure for early marriage; detention of children; deportation of husbands. For one Jordanian citizen unable to share her rights (education, healthcare, mobility, birth certificates) with her family, these privileges for her become a burdensome liability (145-6). Widening the scope of research on GBV, Jabiri follows Françoise Vergès‘ decolonial feminism‘ framework. Gender equality is not the only issue at hand. Instead, the violence women confront is inseparable from Israeli settler colonialism, militarism in Syria, and engendered nationalism in Jordan (153-4). Jabiri gives her female interlocutors credit in unpacking the various interconnections between forces and structures that oppress them. “…their voices clearly know how to narrate, connect, and represent their stories as a cohesive whole” threading history, politics, and individual encounters (154). Paying attention to the cruelty of classifications schemes in this case, she adds, is a necessary step toward gender justice for Palestinian women.
This emphasis on linkages of oppression is a significant conclusion to be heeded by feminist or women’s studies scholars and policy practitioners alike. Following Jabiri, the horrifying violence against women in Gaza must be situated within Israeli settler colonialism and Western support for Israel’s onslaught using American weapons. Alongside children, women comprise over 75 per cent of the more than 40,000 killed in Gaza. They endure sexual abuse, birth without anaesthetics, high rates of miscarriages, the impossibility of menstrual hygiene, and inability to nurse babies due to famine, according to the UN High Commissioner on Human Rights. Jabiri’s account exhorts the thoughtful reader to action rather than simply commiseration. Violence against women can end only when “oppressive systems end…through destabilizing the connections tying these systems together” (155). Whether trapped in Jordanian camps or in blockaded and bombarded Gaza, Palestinian women, children, and men suffer under the logics and practices of settler colonialism re-created and re-lived for over 75 years.
Note: This review gives the views of the author and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, nor of the London School of Economics and Political Science.
Image: Omar Chatriwala on Flickr. License: CC BY-NC_ND 2.0
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