Occupied Territories, Resisting Women Palestinian Women Political Prisoners 1

• Published in: Global Lockdown pp. 201 - 214
• Main Author: Bayour, Elham
• Format: Book Chapter
• Language: English
• Published: Routledge 2005
• Edition: 1
• Subjects: Women Political Prisoners; Young Man; Palestinian Dialect; Palestinian Women; LISA; Zina Ordinance; Bl Ac; WAFA; USA Patriot Act; Video Cassette Recorder; Palestinian Authority; Sexual Terrorism; UNRWA; Welfare Reform; Violate; NAOMI; National Liberation Struggle; DEA Agent; Global Lockdown; UN; Ta Ge
• ISBN: 0415950562; 9780415950565; 0415950570; 9780415950572
• DOI: 10.4324/9781315810812-17

Palestinian women have been the backbone of the Palestinian national liberation struggle for over seventy years, well before the birth of the Palestinian Liberation Organization in the mid-1960s. Their contributions and sacrifices have been overlooked locally and ignored by Western social scientists. Palestinian female political prisoners have been detained since the mid-1970s, 2 and yet no comprehensive research has been conducted to make visible their political involvement. In this chapter, I discuss Palestinian women's contributions to the national liberation struggle and their experiences of imprisonment as a result of their political activity. I argue that occupation policies toward these women constitute sexual terrorism. Palestinian women from three refugee camps in the Gaza Strip describe their experiences of detention and torture and lives after imprisonment in their own words. Palestinian women face a Western colonial bias at the hands of Western writers and feminists, by whom they have been repeatedly labeled controlled and oppressed subjects. This chapter aims to deconstruct the scholarly misrepresentation that erases Palestinian women's political activities.