In this article, the Chilean lawyer, Nadia Silhi Chahin, tells what the Lebanese writer Joumana Haddad once published in her remarkable essay “I killed Sherezade. Confessions of a furious Arab woman”, just over a decade ago.
Was interviewed by a western journalist who said she did not know that Arab women were angry, to which Haddad replied “but that is her problem, not ours”. Indeed, Arab women, including Palestinian women, have been overlooked in the so-called West. Not seen, that is to say, idealized or demonized, often exotized and always diminished.
This follows what the Palestinian intellectual Edward Said explained in his work Orientalism back in 1978. Orientalism is precisely the way in which the so-called West conceives and represents the so-called East. East would be, for these purposes, the Arab-Islamic world. Orientalism is based on a binary vision of the world. It divides into two, west and east, and each of these halves has certain permanent, immutable, static, timeless characteristics. While the former represents civilization and progress, the latter represents barbarism and backwardness.
The diversity of the Arab-Islamic world is certainly overlooked. It is ignored, for example, that the majority of the world’s Muslims (concept alluding to a religious identity) are not even Arabs (concept alluding to an ethnic identity), although the majority of Arabs are Muslims. Or the ethnic diversity in the Arab world (a geographical concept corresponding to the Arabian peninsula and whose language is Arabic), which has never been inhabited only by Arabs, but also by other peoples such as the Berbers in North Africa or the Armenians in the Middle East.
Of course this ignorance is not accidental, but has been the mainstay of colonial ambitions of Europe and the United States, the West. It has been the way of whites to dominate the Arab-Muslims. East is a western invention, east is created from the west. This is analogous to the concept of alterity found in Simone de Beauvoir to refer to the construction of gender, where woman is “the other” of man, an appendix. Here the east is the west.
Of course this ignorance is not accidental, but has been the mainstay of colonial ambitions of Europe and the United States, the West. It has been the way of whites to dominate the Arab-Muslims. East is a western invention, east is created from the west. This is analogous to the concept of alterity found in Simone de Beauvoir to refer to the construction of gender, where woman is “the other” of man, an appendix. Here the east is the west.
And that is why orientalism is deciding on the east, teaching about it, representing it and colonizing it. Thus, while the West would be made up of rational beings, respectful of rights and freedoms, the East would be made up of irrational beings, mistreating women and homophobic.
The women of the east, in turn, would be passive, sexually repressed, ignorant and unaware of their own oppression. So, while the West delights in those “dances of the East”, “meals of the East” etc., in reality, at the end of the day, it enjoys and judges all that from a certain superiority.
Latin America, and within it Chile, is no exception to all of the above. Although one might think that the Latinos, also colonized, also victims of imperialism, feel a certain brotherhood with the Arabs, my experience is not exactly that. Although the reality of different Latin American countries is not identical, in general I think that those ideas based in the United States and Europe about the East have been replicated which really do not serve the Latinos well.
Thus, Orientalism has made Latinos feel sorry for the poor oppressed Arab women, who at the same time imagine practicing belly dancing-something that does not represent anything to the vast majority of Arab women. Even in Chile, a country that has for more than a century hosted the largest Palestinian community outside the Arab world, where 99% of them are Christians, I have had to tell feminist women several times that veiling is not necessarily a sign of patriarchal oppression. Falling into this orientalism that I hate, because like the rest of the Palestinians in Chile I come from a Christian family and therefore no woman in my family wears or wore a veil. However, being the Arab, I have to talk about veils and Islam. And belly dancing, of course.
The truth is that I would prefer to talk about other things. It would be better to talk about how Arab women organized themselves in their different countries, such as Egypt, Lebanon, Syria and Palestine, between the late 19th and early 20th centuries, to take part in the local national liberation struggle and put an end to European colonial rule, At the same time they were fighting for their own rights: to be educated, to vote, etc. In other words, typically feminist demands.
How it is that, although for women in all Arab countries except Palestine, these struggles changed once their countries gained independence and feminist demands became other, Similar to what happened with the feminist movements in Chile that went from dictatorship to democracy, Palestinian women continue to carry out this double struggle against patriarchy and against Israeli colonial oppression.
The Palestinians have not yet known the nation-state as a form of political organization and are denied the right to self-determination of peoples. Their historical territory is absolutely controlled by the State of Israel, which commits there the crime against humanity of apartheid and, being they the racialized population, have more or less rights depending on in what geographical area they are located, but never, under any circumstances, shall they have the same rights as a person whom the State considers to be Jewish, no matter from which part of the world he is.
I want to tell you that Palestinian women have been actively fighting for the liberation of their homeland since it was under the British mandate, that no matter what religion they had, because they all worked together and participated in strikes, demonstrations and boycotts. That Palestinian women from the refugee camps also joined the armed resistance and that is how Leyla Khaled has gone down in history as the first woman in the world to hijack a plane. Women played a central role in civil disobedience during the First Intifada in 1987.
Following these milestones, in 2019 the Talaat was formed, a women’s movement that groups together Palestinian women with the different identity cards that the Israeli regime has granted them in this attempt to segregate and expel the Palestinian people, as well as the refugees in exile, and who define themselves as intersectional feminists fighting against different forms of oppression of women: colonialism and patriarchy, but also capitalism and racism.
There are also Palestinian organizations that advocate for the rights of sexual diversity, such as Aswat and Al Qaws. They have played a key role in demystifying the Israeli apartheid propaganda known as pinkwashing, which exalts the goodness of Israel by presenting it as a paradise for rights of sexual diversity.
Which is nothing but a cover-up that commits war crimes every day against the Palestinians. The State of Israel uses orientalism to justify its colonial, racist and nationalist enterprise. To justify the systematic expulsion of Palestinians from their land for more than 74 years and the installation in their place of settlers from all over the world. To justify the bombing of civilians, The denial of permission to breast cancer patients in Gaza who need to break the blockade imposed by Israel 15 years ago to be eligible for medical treatment because they do not allow radiation therapy equipment into the strip. To justify torture, administrative detention, extrajudicial executions, house demolitions, children in prison.
For all this, Israel represents itself as a stronghold of Western values in the heart of the wild east. A stronghold of civilization among the barbarians. A young, democratic state, technological power, respectful of sexual diversity, in the midst of authoritarian and corrupt regimes, where women and dissidents are raped.
I don’t know if there is any place in the world where women and dissidents have achieved our rights and live safe and free. What is clear to me is that all the advantages of Israeli apartheid only reach its Jewish population. For most Palestinian women, there is not even a right to enter their land and much less to stay there. The We are not even allowed to be spectators of that paragon of virtues!
Palestinian women have their voices, stories, memories and narratives. They are peasants, workers, professionals, artists, athletes, politicians. They are from the countryside and the city, from within Palestine or refugees in exile, right and left, rich and poor. They are different voices but all have one thing in common: they have all suffered the dispossession of a European colonial project on their land. And with today’s tools, these voices are not difficult to access. Palestinian women do not need them to speak for themselves. As companions, with the Latin American women we can look at each other and build solidarity alliances against patriarchy, colonialism, racism and capitalism.
