A Gendered Return

Abstract

I was born in Jerusalem, where my ancestors planted roots centuries ago. My family is from Shuʾfat, a village north of the Old City, where I spent the first few years of my life. My connection to Jerusalem has always been strong, even when my father moved our family to the United States to avoid the political problems of the region. He also did not want us to experience the poverty he endured as a child in post-Nakba Jerusalem, then under Jordan’s jurisdiction. We left Palestine on a snowy, cold day at the end of 1987, just as the first intifada was brewing. In the United States, Palestine was always present in our new home. My parents spoke only Arabic at home, my father told us of his adventures in Jerusalem growing up in the 1950s and 1960s, my mother cooked the dishes she grew up with (i.e., makloobeh, warak dawali), and the iconic painting of the old man carrying Jerusalem on his back hung in our living room, along with a framed painting of the Dome of the Rock. My upbringing nurtured a deep longing for Palestine and a desire to return one day.In 2002 I was finally able to return to Palestine when my mother’s family bought me a ticket as a high school graduation gift. I spent six blissful weeks with my extended family, exploring the Old City, praying in al-Aqsa Mosque, shopping in Ramallah, and taking day trips all over historic Palestine. I left the country yearning for more. Over the years I made many trips back to the homeland, exploring and soaking up as much of it as I could before leaving again. Those trips were never enough for me. Finally in 2019 I moved to Jerusalem to begin my dissertation fieldwork and work on reestablishing my Israeli permanent residency.1 Because I left Jerusalem as a child, the Israeli government revoked my residency and I had to apply to have it reinstated—a lengthy, time-consuming, and expensive process. I knew that I would encounter numerous difficulties moving to Jerusalem from the United States, mainly living under a military occupation with soldiers and guns everywhere, but also because of the cumbersome Israeli bureaucracy and my lack of Hebrew-language skills. However, I was also worried about life in my ancestral village, surrounded by curious relatives wondering what inspired “the American,” as they called me, to return to Palestine. For decades the Israeli settler-colonial project has worked to dispossess us of our homeland by any means possible: for example, by forcing someone like me—born in Jerusalem and able to trace my lineage in the region back centuries—to prove to Israeli airport workers that I am visiting my numerous family members and by limiting me to a three-month tourist visa. I viewed returning to Palestine and obtaining my residency as a prime example of sumood, or perseverance, essentially, staying on the land no matter the difficulties.My encounters with the Israeli government went hand in hand with my experiences within my own community. I had come back to Shuʾfat as a full-fledged adult with meaningful experiences, mainly outside the Palestinian community, ready to jump into a new chapter of my life. However, I have been struck by how gendered the experience has been because of how people expect me to behave as a woman within specific notions of femininity, explaining my so-called discretions as a result of my upbringing abroad. Three main issues became apparent: first, as a young, single woman, I was not allowed to speak on my own behalf or solve my own problems; second, I was expected to exhibit notions of femininity in the face of direct bad behavior by young boys and men by being enduring and patient, quiet, accepting, and forgiving; and third, people blamed my upbringing in the United States for my inability to comply with their notion of what a woman is and treated me as an outsider. My community views me, an unmarried woman, as someone who has not achieved full personhood and therefore cannot be trusted to act independently or rationally. Whenever there was an issue, my relatives (men and women) would tell me an uncle or male cousin of mine should handle it. But when I approached an uncle or cousin, they always told me ithamalee, or endure, and let things pass, because I was making a bigger problem. My voice was a bigger problem than the disrespect I faced.Being ignored and dismissed became a common theme. But the men in my family did not expect me to persist and make my voice heard no matter the difficulties. I was criticized for being unfeminine and qawiyyeh, or strong-willed. During my first six months in Palestine, my paternal family decided that it was time to settle inheritance issues that have long plagued and divided us, as they do with so many families here. These issues are further complicated by Israel’s burdensome landownership laws and policies as well as by the illegal confiscation of land for settlements and so-called public improvements (roads, parks, schools, etc.). I am the oldest of my siblings (the rest of them male), and since my father had passed away and I was the only one living in Palestine, they gave me the responsibility of ensuring that we received our fair share. We also agreed among ourselves that I would receive the same amount as them, instead of the half that was technically guaranteed me under Islamic law. However, as a woman, I was not allowed to attend the qaʾadat izlam (meeting of men), where the decisions were made, nor was I told what took place at those meetings. At one such meeting a decision was made about my father’s share of the inheritance, but neither my siblings (since they were out of the country) nor I was consulted. I did not find it fair and refused to go along with it. After I had insisted on being part of the larger conversations around the family inheritance, male relatives scolded me for being qawiyyeh. They reminded me repeatedly that I was no longer in the United States and needed to get used to how things were done in Palestine. One relative threatened to go over my head and make an agreement with my brothers. “Islamically, your share is not as significant as you think. Here the girl gets half of what her brother gets,” he said with a smirk. “And you have three brothers.”Throughout the Arab Muslim world, women are fighting against unfair inheritance laws. In a unique move that gave the rest of the region hope, the Tunisian government in 2018 passed a law ensuring that men and women received equal shares of inheritance. In Palestine women complain that they do not receive even what is owed them under local Islamic law, and there have been numerous calls to provide further legal protections. This problem has been detailed in the report “In-Depth Assessment of Women’s Access to and Ownership of Land and Productive Resources in the Occupied Palestinian Territory,” by the Palestinian Working Woman Society for Development (Said 2020). The main issues affecting Palestinian women’s inheritance rights are Israel’s military occupation and land appropriation, which lead to chaos because the availability of land is not always known, and the absence of a dedicated, working system that people can turn to for recourse in such matters. In my own situation I persisted and kept voicing my opinion. I refused to be quiet and told everyone that I was being railroaded and ignored. After months of discussions and arguments, I convinced some of my male and female cousins to gather to discuss an equitable settlement. Several male relatives, wanting bigger shares than they were entitled to, ruined our chance of agreeing on a settlement. To this day, the inheritance issue has not been resolved, mostly due to the limited legal resources available to those in East Jerusalem. Additionally, legal recourse is expensive and time-consuming, taking ten or twenty years to resolve. However, some of my male relatives now take my position more seriously, since I asked a lot of questions and they have seen that I will not naively agree to what they want. They consult and share with me possible solutions, knowing that I will never let them bypass me and go to my brothers, especially since I am physically in Palestine and they are not. While I am still criticized as qawiyyeh, I am no longer ignored and dismissed. Ironically, by being qawiyyeh, I have gained respect from my relatives.Unfortunately, Israeli military occupation creates another condition in Palestinian neighborhoods in Jerusalem: lack of community space where people can gather during their leisure time. According to the Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI), 15 percent of East Jerusalem, which is only 8.5 percent of the entire Jerusalem region under Israeli rule, is allotted for residential use by Palestinians. Therefore many boys and young men in Shuʾfat take it on themselves to find entertainment. Many have 4 × 4 bikes and enjoy riding around the village, even though the operation of these bikes is illegal within municipal boundaries and produces intense noise and unbearable pollution. As is typical of most Palestinian areas, Shuʾfat is bursting at the seams with homes and cars and has narrow roads. My house sits on the corner of a main road, and for hours on end these 4 × 4 bikes zip back and forth. The noise infiltrates my house, and the smell of gas and rubber wafts through my windows. One day some of these young men gathered between my house and the neighboring mosque, their 4 × 4 bikes running and music blasting in the middle of the day. I told them that it was not appropriate to do such things in the middle of a residential area while people are resting or working. The young men were shocked and annoyed by my confrontation. One said that he was in front of his house and could do whatever he wanted. Another got close, as if to intimidate me, and said that it would be better if I went back to my house. Someone called my male cousin to force me to go home. I refused to leave until they quieted down because they were constantly disturbing my peace. They refused, and I threatened to call the police. One of them pretended to hand me his phone and said, “Go ahead.”In my house I made the call and returned to tell them that the police were on the way. Shocked, they moved quickly to disperse. One young man’s father scolded me for calling the police.The story quickly centered on me, “the American,” daring to call the police. No one cared about the young men disturbing the peace. Other male relatives were called to control me, but I would not back down. I was yelled at, and not once did anyone try to understand or help solve the problem. They called me a traitor and spy for calling the Israeli police.2 But I later learned that the police are in Shuʾfat on a regular basis, especially when there are fights among the men and they call the police on one another. As a woman, I was not allowed to do such things but was expected to rely on male relatives to fix the problem—if they deemed it a problem worth fixing. But I was at my wit’s end and astonished by the flagrant disregard for my concerns by members of my own community and neighborhood.This situation was a clear example of toxic masculinity, in that men were given free rein to do whatever they wanted in communal spaces, with no regard for the community at large, and others ignored their bad behavior and disrespectful manners. In Palestine, Zionist settler colonialism emboldens toxic masculinity because of the incredible pressure Palestinian men are under at the hands of the government. From a young age they are routinely arrested and/or beaten up by Israeli soldiers. According to the ACRI, 73 percent of the minors arrested in Jerusalem in 2020 were Palestinian. Furthermore, Palestinians are usually the low-level workers in Israeli society: construction workers, servers, cleaners, and the like. Because Palestinian men lack respect and power outside their community, they end up creating power within their own community by taking up too much space and being disrespectful.The 4 × 4 Bike War, as I termed it, would continue for months. The young boys and men would not give up on taking up more space than they should, and I would not give up on protecting my peace and sanity. I approached these young men several more times. I tried to enlist the help of my male relatives, but they thought their intervention unwarranted. “You can’t tell people how to live,” they told me. “You have to get used to it. This isn’t America.” By referring to me as “the American” and referencing the United States constantly, they dispossess me of the deep roots and connections I have to Palestine. I am othered because I grew up in a different place, and this erases my identity as a Palestinian and my intense commitment to my community as a scholar and writer.As it turned out, the young men and their bikes disturbed many people, who had spoken out against them. Others did not feel that they could, because the young men had a strange chokehold on the village. There is a culture of enduring and not calling out bad behavior, perhaps because everyone had grown up under Israeli occupation and was used to abuse and violence in everyday life. Therefore calling out bad behavior disturbed the illusion of peace in our community. Everyone I spoke to said that they were tired of these boys, but no one wanted to confront them. Their toxic masculinity was the power they created for themselves to do whatever they wanted, unchecked. One late night I was walking home from my grandmother’s house. A 4 × 4 bike raced back and forth on the narrow road leading to my house. The driver got dangerously close, and dust flew in my face. He was one of the young men I had confronted many times. He was deliberately bothering me and flaunting his unchecked bad behavior. I changed my tactics and recorded him on my phone, which is a delicate matter, given Israel’s enormous and ever-reaching surveillance of Palestinians. Israel’s surveillance uses social media since people have taken to recording their lives on such platforms. The driver asked what I was doing; I told him I was recording him to show my relatives and his parents how he was taunting me. He started yelling at me. I smiled and said, “You’ve been terrorizing me for months. You won’t listen to me. You won’t respect me. It’s my turn to drive you crazy.” He went off in the direction of a male cousin’s house. I followed and heard him tell my twenty-four-year-old male cousin that I was driving him crazy.This cousin, who is more than ten years younger than me, would later scold me for talking directly to a ghareeb, an unrelated man, since the young man was from a different family. Later he would tell me I lacked gentleness, or latafa, something most women possessed.Over and over again I was told that I was not acting with appropriate feminine behavior. I should be seen and not heard. I should not directly call out toxic masculinity and the bad behavior it produced, even if it affected and disturbed me. My relatives were constantly calling out my so-called inappropriate behavior instead of trying to help me resolve the root cause of all the problems. Perhaps they viewed me, as a woman, as more controllable than those young men causing the problems.Months later the COVID-19 pandemic began, and the Israeli government instituted a nationwide lockdown. Throughout the pandemic we went under three lockdowns. This meant that restaurants, hotels, and buildings were closed, and more people were home, including the young men disturbing the village with their 4 × 4 bikes. Since they had all the time in the world, they were on their bikes all day every day. I was still working, processing my fieldwork data, and teaching undergraduate courses online; I often had to pause a lecture because the noise was too intense, even when all my windows and doors were closed. I continued to confront them, to no avail, but others were also increasingly annoyed. One male cousin who ignored me repeatedly and told me several times that I had no right to complain about them got so frustrated that he went to each of their families to complain. As a man and village elder, rather than a woman and an outsider, he had more clout than I, at least in theory. His actions produced some results, but not enough.In May 2020 the lockdown continued and Ramadan began. Again, the young men of Shuʾfat were out to the early hours of the morning with their bikes. At 2:30 a.m. I confronted them once more.I told him I could not because it was affecting my mental health, since I was home all the time. He disregarded what I said, yelled at me, and hung up. My uncle later told me that he knows these boys and men are disruptive and should be contained, but he also is embarrassed by the attention I draw to him and the family. He is torn between what he sees as wrong—boys and men who cannot be contained by their families—and a niece described as bint qawiyyeh bila latafa, a strong-willed girl without gentleness. These days this uncle tells me to quietly call the police on them instead of directly confronting them, because he understands how disruptive they are to my peace and sanity. Once he explained to me that this generation does not respect its elders as previous generations did; the only ones this generation fears are the Israelis. This could be because with each passing year the violence of Israeli settler colonialism becomes more brutal, and children are not raised in normal circumstances.In returning to Palestine as a resident, rather than a visitor, I was forced to take off my rose-colored glasses. Living under Israeli settler colonialism is like existing in a pressure cooker, because we are always wondering when the next bad thing will happen: housing demolitions, revocation of permanent residencies, arbitrary arrests, executions on the streets we walk every day, and harassment by Israeli settlers. This produces an unconscious tension in our lives as Palestinians, one that I became aware of because of my position as a so-called outsider, having lived in other contexts. I walk around my city and among Israeli Jews with fear—careful not to carry a bag with Arabic writing on it or even to speak Arabic on the phone. This tension is fueled by the lack of space and infrastructure in Palestinian neighborhoods where we have no green spaces or parks and not enough parking spots. In turn, this tension affects our internal structures as Palestinians. Toxic masculinity emerges in response to this tension, as young boys and men assert their own power with aggressive driving and taking up more space than they should in the limited communal spaces available to us. The Israeli settler-colonial logic aims to dispossess Palestinians of their land, identity, language, food, heritage, and traditions but also to destabilize internal social relationships through the strife caused by these pressures. As a system of violence, settler colonialism creates a chaotic and unstable everyday reality that destroys social cohesion among Palestinians. Shuʾfat was once a village full of fallahen, or farmers, often working together. They operated through an internal structure in which younger generations respected the word and requests of the older ones. Even the house I live in, built more than one hundred years ago, was a community effort. My great-great-grandparents needed a home, and so the community came together to build one. In returning home to Palestine, I have had to endure certain difficulties as a woman and outsider. But ultimately, I will not allow the Israeli settler-colonial project to drive me out of my homeland. In resisting dispossession and practicing sumood, I will stay on the land whatever the difficulties.