Jew World Order

By the time I am writing this piece the long-running debate flooding social media over the film Huda’s Salon has finally just cooled down. 

The tense 90-minute thriller from the Palestinian director Hany Abu Asad discusses how the Israeli secret service (Shabak) recruits Palestinian women. It takes place in Bethlehem where Reem (Maisa Abd Elhadi), a Palestinian young woman, is getting her hair done at Huda’s salon (Manal Awad). Reem is then drugged by Huda, who photographs her naked with a man (Samer Bishara) who is not her husband. The images are then used to blackmail Reem and coerce her into collaborating with Shabak.

The film is based on true events. And, it is not an utterly unique story. 

Advertisement

The film shines a light on the reality of Palestinian women living under occupation, and the prejudicial patriarchal society that surrounds women’s sexuality and very often brands them with shame. It stirred a necessary conversation on gender issues within Palestinian society, and placed them within a wider context of ongoing Israeli settler-colonialism.

The manipulation of patriarchal norms such as the notion of the so-called honor ‘Erd’ is a long-used practice by the Israeli security forces to squash the capacity of Palestinian people to resist and destroy their social fabric.  However, we still shy away from bringing patriarchy and gender inequality into our discussions, or simply marginalize them as exogenous and irrelevant topics to our national struggle.

This was the logic that some critics of the film used when they claimed that it distorts Palestinian women’s role in the anti-colonial struggle, and reduces them into unfaithful wives and collaborators with Shabak.

Exploiting ‘Isqat Siyasi’

The Israeli gender violence targeting Palestinian women’s bodies and sexuality is not a new phenomenon in the history of Zionist settler-colonialism. Palestinian women have endured a heavy burden as they have been subject to daily attacks against their lives, sexuality, and bodily rights.

Historically, the intelligence apparatus has exploited the orientalist patriarchal notion of honor and used the threat of sexual violence against Palestinian women to blackmail and recruit them as collaborators in what is commonly known as ‘Isqat Siyasi’ (Arabic for political downfall). In this sense, Huda chose victims in troubling marriages or facing domestic violence to make her argument: “It is easier to oppress a society that’s already oppressing itself” referring to the misogyny within the Palestinian society.  

The practice of ‘Isqat’ does not only attempt to break the Palestinian resistance but also to fragment the fabric of the Palestinian families.  This argument is supported by a statement signed by 34 reserve soldiers who served in Unit 8200, Israel’s most secretive military intelligence, which revealed that the Israeli intelligence is designed to control the Palestinian life, and to create divisions within the Palestinian society by recruiting collaborators. 

In detailed interviews by The Guardian newspaper, soldiers in Unit 8200 asserted that Palestinians’ sexuality is a target for the unit to blackmail people and turn him/her into a collaborator. “Any information that might enable extortion of an individual is considered relevant information. Whether said individual is of a certain sexual orientation, cheating on his wife, or in need of treatment in Israel or the West Bank – he is a target for blackmail” one of the interviewed soldiers said.  

Gender violence as a tool of Israeli settler-colonialism

Recently, Palestinian feminists have evoked the question of Palestine as a feminist issue which entails revisiting our understanding of Israeli settler-colonialism in Palestine through a gender-sensitive lens, and bringing indigenous Palestinian women to the center of this reassessment. Subsequently, gender-based violence against Palestinian women — either committed by Israeli forces or domestic agents — should be understood within a wider context of settler-colonialism. 

Putting indigenous Palestinian women at the center of analyzing the Zionist settler-colonial project aims to demonstrate the connections between gender violence and colonization in the life of Palestinian women. That is to restate: gender violence against Palestinian women (including Isqat) is not by any means accidental in the history of colonialism. It is rather an oppressive tool and a systematic product of the colonialist and orientalist mentalities of Zionism that conceive of Palestinian women as ‘sub-human.’ 

Thus, to understand the gender violence against Palestinians, feminist activists and researchers must begin by interrogating the gendered and racialized aspects of the Zionist settler-colonialism itself to highlight the intersection of gender and race with violence against Palestinian women. 

We need to understand that domestic violence against Palestinian women, which is repeatedly marginalized, is not a separate issue from the issues of anti-colonization and liberation. Such an understanding fails to comprehend the intersectionality between the history of colonization and the patriarchal gender system. The reality is that it has been precisely through gender violence the colonial project has thrived. As the feminist writer Andrea Smith reminds us, in order to colonize a people the colonizer must first naturalize hierarchy through instituting patriarchy; “Patriarchal gender violence is the process by which colonizers inscribe hierarchy and domination on the bodies of the colonized.”

The commitment to the liberation of Palestine requires that anti-colonial strategies start with defying those mechanisms of hierarchy and oppressive patriarchy, to strive beyond the notions of women’s honor and virginity, and to enhance gender justice and the empowerment of women.

Source