The Jerusalem Fund commemorated International Women’s Day, which the world celebrates annually on March 8th in order to shed light on issues relating to gender and women’s rights, with a virtual discussion with Asmaa AbuMezied, an expert in gender and economic justice, on the current realities facing Palestinian women.
Watch or read the transcript below to learn more about how Palestinian women and civil society are dealing with Israel’s ever-escalating occupation, how Israel’s attacks on Palestinian civil society organizations affect the implementation of the Women, Peace, and Security (WPS) Agenda, the role of the international community, and more.
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Asmaa AbuMezied is an economic development and gender justice expert working to address issues of gender, development, and climate change. Her main area of focus is women’s economic justice through gendered economic policies, women’s rights in economic sectors, unpaid care and domestic work campaigning, inclusive markets, and feminist economics in fragile and conflict areas. Her work is published in different spaces such as Oxfam policy and practice, Development and Gender Journal, Al-Shabaka, and the World Economic Forum.
Event Transcript
Asmaa: I’ll be speaking a little bit about the realities of Palestinian women. As the world today is celebrating International Women’s Day, we are seeing the celebration everywhere on our social media feeds, events that are being held everywhere and in countries where International Women’s Day is considered a national holiday, and people are enjoying taking that time off.
However, Palestinians woke up today, like they have been waking up recently, to the news of the Israeli regime’s land confiscations, home destructions, and military invasions of cities in the West Bank. Starting from, Jerusalem, Nablus, Jericho, and most recently Jenin and Huwara, killing six Palestinians. And where Israeli settlers have been attacking Palestinian homes, where women reside, where these homes are considered a safe space for Palestinian women.
Today is International Women’s Day, while Palestinians in Gaza continue to wake up under an Israeli blockade entering its 16th year, that has left them in survival mode with sporadic air strikes and bombardment taking place every once in a while, creating unending trauma for Palestinians; where Palestinians in lands occupied in 1948 are also facing threats of being uprooted from their own homes and their own communities like the Bedouin communities in a Al-Naqab. Palestinian families in Jerusalem are also facing home demolitions and erasure of their identity, as the city is being Judaized by the Israeli regime. And we woke up today as civil society is attempting to fight against the Israeli law of 2022 that bans Palestinian family unification, that really destroys the Palestinian family structure. And Palestinian women, as part of the Palestinian community, are experiencing all these realities.
Today, as the world is celebrating International Women’s Day, 172 Palestinian women prisoners and detainees continue to strike in Israeli prisons demanding their basic rights of medical treatment and family visits. Women who are cancer patients, where 53% of cancer patients in Gaza continue to attempt obtaining their rights to have medical treatment outside Gaza, where proper medical treatment exists, and they continue to suffer from the denial from the Israeli authority, denying them permits to seek their medical treatment. A lot of them are taking the harsher route of amputating their breasts when they are suffering from breast cancer, because they understand that obtaining a permit might be impossible. And I want to mention specifically my aunt, who also decided to amputate her breast because obtaining a permit was not an option and the amputation was the easier route.
Today the world is celebrating International Women’s Day while the percentage of Palestinian women who are heading their households increases, because Israel continues to imprison more than 6,000 Palestinians. 12% of Palestinian households are headed by women due to death, imprisonment, and targeted killing of Palestinians. And as the world is celebrating International Women’s Day, the families of Palestinian women who have been killed in 2022 continue to mourn the losses of their beloved female family members.
What we are witnessing is that the Israeli occupation and Israeli regime is shaping the experiences of Palestinian women in particular, and in addition to the Palestinian community. But another layer that women face is experiencing discriminatory patriarchal social norms that hinder their contributions and roles in the Palestinian community.
It’s extremely important to point that you cannot separate the patriarchal norms that exist in Palestinian society from the Israeli occupation of Palestine, and how they are reproductions of each other. The gender-based violence that Palestinian women face within their own community is a reproduction of the systematic and structural apartheid state violence that the Palestinian community as a whole is shaped by, and we have seen that manifested in so many incidents. For example, in 2014, after the aggression on Gaza, families and women had reported an increase in domestic violence, again from their intimate partners, particularly in Shuja’iyah and Khan Younis, areas that had been destroyed during the 2014 assault.
We also see that, after 2021 in Gaza, the number of women seeking refuge from domestic violence has increased to reach 500. And we’ve seen how Palestinian women in the lands occupied in 1948 are also facing domestic violence, yet are unable to pursue any protection from the Israeli judicial system because they understand that the Israeli judicial system and legal system and police system are there to erase Palestinian existence, and that seeking protection will actually jeopardize Palestinian existence in the long run for their family members, but also for their own existence. So it’s important to understand the linkages between Israeli violence and women’s liberation, and we cannot separate the national liberation discourse for Palestinians from women seeking the rights and also liberation from patriarchal norms.
I just want to mention today the struggle of Fatima and Wissam. Two amazing young women in Gaza who have been for the past few months demanding protection from their abusive father. And then we’ve seen with the case of Wissam and Fatima, how their father has used national liberation discourse to bring back the girls into his custody and not receive any protection from the community because he used the excuse that the occupation is brainwashing women. We’ve seen also across all the liberation movement in Palestine, particularly for women, how the occupation is pinkwashing all of its actions and justifying a lot of abuses and oppression against Palestinians as a savior for women from oppression by patriarchal norms.
That’s why it’s extremely important on International Women’s Day not to separate the experiences and violence women are facing within their own community from the overall and overarching systemic violence. I work in the field of economic development, and it’s an area where you can clearly see the manifestation of the Israeli policy on Palestinian women’s experiences.
The Israeli regime has left the Palestinian economy completely paralyzed. An economy where poverty, food insecurity, and dependence on humanitarian aid are the main characteristics of the economy. In the West Bank there are so many cases where women had to seek employment in Israeli settlements, suffering from extremely precarious working conditions, where they have to leave at dawn and work all day long without taking any breaks. The moment they enter the Israeli settlement and start working in agriculture, their phones are confiscated from them. In one of the stories that we encountered, a woman had lost one of her children, and the family had been trying to contact her all day long, and she didn’t know about losing her child until her shift ended and she was given back her phone. That kind of abuse by local contractors, by both capitalist oppression and colonial oppression, is an example of what Palestinian women face when they try to seek a livelihood and try to attempt to seek a source of income.
Looking at the economic fragility of the Palestinian economy, we see how Palestinian women are concentrated in informal work. They are concentrated in jobs where there are very limited rights being given to them, where they face a lot of obstacles and discrimination when it comes to wages, when it comes to safety at the workplace. Despite the very high attainment of Palestinian women of education, they represent only 19% of employment and participation in the labor market.
What we are seeing is that in this snippet, Palestinian women attempt to work on every aspect of their lives. However, they are contained in specific boxes within their homes, with very limited representation in the economic sphere and economic participation, and very limited representation in public policy making and the political sphere. Women end up being the unpaid family care workers. In the agricultural sector, women end up being the main caregivers for their families, taking care of their children, teaching them, even bearing the brunt of the energy poverty that is a result of Israel preventing electricity from coming into in Gaza.
Palestinian women also bear the brunt of cyber violence that has been increasing over the past few years. Palestinian women are facing cyber violence and blackmailing and censorship when it comes particularly as a way for silencing those who are calling for women’s rights.
Despite all of these challenges Palestinian women do celebrate the successes that they are doing, and they do attempt to make breakthroughs in traditional and nontraditional fields and sectors. They continue to seek employment, to come up with entrepreneurial ideas, and to come up with ways to collect and organize. We’ve seen an increase in the feminist movement within Palestine, the very young movement organizing and attempting to highlight not only their struggle as Palestinian women, but also linking that struggle with the national discourse for liberation.
That gives us hope about how we can change the realities that we are facing as Palestinian women. How can we connect with other women who exist around the world and in the MENA region [Middle East & North Africa] particularly who share similar struggles? And how can we extend our form of solidarity together? It’s not an easy route, I must say. And I know that we need to be hopeful, and we need to continue working. And the Palestinian women are doing that, and they are surviving, and struggling to survive in a way that fights the drivers of oppression that are being imposed on them. They are attempting every single day to shape their lives as they wish to.
I’ll stop here and we can discuss more on the different angles.
Said: Thank you, Asmaa. That was really a very compelling presentation. It gave us a panoramic view on what Palestinian women endure and how they deal with life. I mean, some of the figures that you cited are staggering, like 12% of Palestinian households are headed by women. That is a huge, huge number.
The fact that there are hundreds of Palestinian women literally in prison right at this moment, and some of them even have given birth in prison. The fact that they have to endure working for the colonialists, by going to the settlements and do agriculture work, and some do domestic work and so on, without the ability to access of their families during the day for many long hours, to say nothing of what they endure as they enter or as the depart with the checkpoints.
So there’s so much, and the fact that they have to deal with layers of repression. There are layers of repression that Palestinian women must endure, and top of course among them is occupation, Israeli aggression, the usurpation of their land and their identity. But also there are things that are direct result of Israeli criminal aggression, such as what you cited from 2014, in places like Shuja’iyah and other places where women have been subjected to increased domestic violence as a result of that aggression. I am sure the same thing goes on in the West Bank, near Jerusalem, everywhere there are Palestinian women, in the camps in Lebanon, or in the camps of Syria, that have to be escaping with their families and their children from place to place. You covered a great deal.
I’m really sort of miffed with to where to begin. So let me begin very simply with you in your encounter as a Palestinian woman, as a woman who is a professional, who is out there trying to chart her way into economic independence and so on, let me begin with that. How do you deal with it every day? What are some of the obstacles or some of the challenges that you deal with on a daily basis that you can share with us?
Asmaa: Thank you Said. I think one of the biggest drivers that shape the daily reality, but also the daily reality of Palestinians, is that constant state of uncertainty that we face as Palestinians, but also as Palestinian women. The constant state of not knowing when the next air strike is going to happen, and how that affects so much of your life choices, of whether you want to have children or not, whether this is something that you want, to bring people to this world. Where do you want to live? What do you want to do? How do you navigate your nephews asking questions that you don’t have any answer to? What kind of choices do we have?
The fact that Wissam’s and Fatima’s experience of not even being able to leave Gaza when they wanted protection the most, because we are under blockade, it means that whenever a woman is facing threats to her life there is no refuge. The fact that we have to deal with and navigate the electricity cuts and how it puts so much burden on women to do so much of the household work manually, of doing the cleaning manually, of taking care of the house chores manually. It’s taking so much time from women that they would have used for social participation or pursuing educational opportunities, and so on.
For me, what I found extremely exhausting is the mental burden that comes with living in Gaza and living in Palestine and that feeling of hopelessness that there are so many things that need to be done, and there is very little progress that we see in very little spaces where we can actually change the status quo, considering the limited roles that Palestinian women are placed into. I think it’s important for me as a Palestinian woman to get to know to the role that Palestinian women have played in the 1970s and the 1980s, and even in the 1930s, and how they have been extremely powerful drivers for social change, but also political drivers for change, and how that role has been lost over the past few decades.
Said: I am from the Nakba Generation, so I remember when I grew up in a Palestinian village right outside of Jerusalem, and I remember the women in my village, some illiterate, and some educated, but they were all driven. I remember as a peasant, as a Fellah basically, I remember the women of my hometown, Abu Dis next to Jerusalem, they would go to the fields and do all the work most of the day. And then they have to do all the housework. So it is quite a challenge. And then it’s always a challenge for them to go to school or to send their kids, especially girls, to school.
My question to you on this point, when you begin to prepare your daughter or your younger sister on how to go about this, what steps do you take? I mean, how do you keep the hope alive? You talked about some really compelling and riveting things that hold you back, like the feeling of uncertainty that is a huge, huge burden, and the feeling that not knowing, in your own words, when the next air strike is coming in, whether you want to bring children to this world or not, and how you endure it.
So let me begin by simply asking, how do you talk? I don’t know if you have sons or daughters, I know you are a mother, so how do you prepare your daughter, or your sister’s daughter, or your friend’s daughter, to endure? I have no doubt in my mind that Palestinian men and women will be liberated sometime in the future, simply because the Palestinian people are tenacious and they will continue to fight. Nothing will deter them. But how do you prepare them for the long haul? How do you prepare them to deal with these issues?
Asmaa: For me, I would start with how our grandmothers had prepared us. You’ve mentioned Palestinian women from before the Nakba and how they were working in agriculture. But they also played a fundamental role of transferring oral history from generation to another. So the stories of my grandmother telling me about what she used to do, and the labor she used to deploy, and that narrative that transferred from one generation to another, it tells you a story as a young girl about what our ancestors had been doing, what women had been doing. And there are a lot of attempts to try and erase that narrative, to put Palestinian women’s struggle as something very secondary, although it was a central part of liberation.
I think, because there are attempts to erase that, it’s extremely important to bring it forward. And we are seeing this. I would think that the heritage and transferring the narrative of our ancestors to the future generation is something fundamental to build into the generational struggle and efforts into the liberation.
Without that kind of generational, cumulative knowledge, we will continue to go in circles and reinvent the wheel. That’s one thing. The other thing, and the thought that for me is extremely important, is not to bring in the resilience narrative that we see right now. To me, the resilience narrative that we see now is about telling our daughters, telling Palestinian women, to live with the status quo and bear with it and do very little to change it, and not challenge it, not coming with something extremely revolutionary like what our ancestors had been doing. For me, it’s not about living your life as it is, and being resilient, and coping with whatever struggles that come along, but rather about looking at our history and seeing the examples of how women have been revolutionary, particularly in the seventies and the eighties.
The third one is for our men, not to allow the violence that the Israeli regime is imposing on us as Palestinians to be reproduced against Palestinian women. And I think this is very, very powerful because by doing that, by reproducing the same violence, the occupation and colonialism are winning because that’s what they’re trying to do. They are trying to instill in Palestinian men and Palestinian women that they are not complete that the Palestinian woman is responsible for their honor. And therefore, you need to control that Palestinian woman in order to control your life.
Reproducing that vicious cycle of violence is something that we need to break down now so that we can have a generation that is able to think about liberation, and with the recent statistic saying that 70% of Palestinians in Gaza are suffering from depression, 50% of Palestinian and West Bank are suffering from depression, we need to act now. It should not only be the responsibility of Palestinian women to change the reality and their daily struggles. It should be a collective work, together.
Said: Excellent. You mentioned so many things and you just actually reminded me that I must mention my good friend and leader of Palestinian women, the former leader of the Palestine Women’s Union, the great poet and writer Mais Sayegh, who is from Gaza, who passed away last month. God bless her soul. She was always in the forefront of the struggle, both the militant struggle and the non-militant struggle for the Palestinians. I just wanted to give her a shout out at this moment because we are celebrating International Women’s Day and the Palestinian woman’s struggle. The Palestinian woman has always been in the forefront of the struggle, amazingly so.
I wanted to ask you something because I want to talk about domestic violence and what are the alternatives and remedies, but you also mentioned Fatima and Wissam Taweel, I believe that’s their last name. I remember reading about it last month sometime when they were returned by force to their father. So what is their status now, if you can share with us and what, do they have any recourse whatsoever?
Asmaa: Unfortunately, there isn’t official news about Wissam and Fatima since they were forced to go back to their father.
And to be honest, the case of Fatima and Wissam puts a huge question mark to all the work that civil society and women’s rights organizations are putting in, because if we cannot protect two young women who have been for months speaking about abuse and their fear for their lives, then it’s a reflection of how most of our work right now are very individualistic wins rather than something collective. It’s not something systematic, and it’s extremely important to not stop and to reflect on how we can approach our Palestinian women’s liberation in a systematic way.
That’s why, again, I really bring it back to connecting the national liberation movement with Palestinian women’s liberation. Because whenever there is an attempt by feminist and women’s rights advocates to advocate about specific issues related to women’s rights, the backlash they receive, the censoring that they face, the death threats that reach some, are huge. And it shouldn’t be, because what’s the justification for a community that is under oppression to exert the same type of oppression on another group that is part of the community?
Unfortunately with Wissam and Fatima, there isn’t much public information.
Said: So we don’t know what their status at the present time is.
Asmaa: They’re alive. But we don’t know anything. They’re alive.
Said: Okay. So, let’s say a Palestinian woman is subjected to domestic violence, is there such a thing as a halfway home, or a place to go to, or a refuge to go to? I remember during the heyday of the Palestinian resistance in Beirut, there were of course places like that in Beirut and in the camps and so on, simply because of the time and the rise of the PLO and the position of PLO at the time, that there were actually places for women who were subjected to domestic violence to go to, or recourse. Not something very modern as you would find in the West, but at least there was something.
Is there anything similar to that in Gaza, for instance, or the West Bank?
Asmaa: Yes, there are two safe houses in Gaza. One that is governmental and another one is by civil society and funded by humanitarian aid, or donors. And there are several safe houses in the West Bank. Again, some of them are governmental safe houses and some of them are not.
The problem when it comes to the safe houses is one related to the capacity of safe houses, to what extent they can offer services for women? At what extent they can absorb the number of women who come seeking refuge? And also the utilization of a tribal authority to solve issues when it comes to domestic violence. Taking the legal route, the Palestinian law has so many issues when it comes to providing protection for women, and even protection from an abusive father, and abusive husband, and abusive family members. There are so many structural issues that exist in the law. And even if you want to go for the legal route, despite the existence of legal assistance, it’s long and it does not give you full and independent protection from your family members.
Said: Okay. So, are these safe houses in contact, or are they assisted by, let’s say, other foreign organizations, whether in the Arab countries or in Europe, in the United States or elsewhere?
Asmaa: These safe houses, as I mentioned one of them is public, but the other one receives assistance from civil society organizations, international nonprofit organizations and non-governmental organizations to ensure the sustainability of the services that they provide. And the safe houses, it’s not only about housing, but also the legal services, the psychological services, that is being provided for women who are survivors of violence.
Said: I know your expertise is in the economic aspect of Palestinian society, including women. So I have a number of questions on this issue.
First, I know that in America we don’t have equal pay. There is no such thing as equal pay for men and women especially. Maybe if you are a cardiologist, even at that level, there’s probably not equal pay. Is there equal pay for Palestinian women? I mean, how do they deal with this issue, but let’s say agricultural women that go and work day labor? I’m not an expert on this. Lemme ask you, is there such a thing as equal pay?
Asmaa: So the short answer is no, we don’t have equal pay. For example, when we talk about the private sector, over 40% of Palestinian women who work in the private sector companies don’t have contracts. So, they are informal workers and therefore the minimum wage does not apply to them. The disclosure of their wages is not something that you can have data on and therefore compare the two wages for men and women. But in the jobs that women do have formal contracts, and there is disclosure of their salaries and wages, there is at least a 25% gender pay gap and that gender pay gap increases and decreases based on the sector in which women are being employed in.
Now in agriculture in particular, women are usually unpaid family workers. They do harvesting, they do the weeding, they help in planting, and so on, but they are unpaid family workers. And the justification for that is that agriculture is not a very profitable, particularly if you have a small piece of land, it’s not very profitable to pay for salaries. So they view that whatever income comes to the family, it’s an income for the whole family and there is no need to divide that income into wages. Now for women, for example, working in the childcare sector, like in kindergarten in Gaza, women received 200 shekel as a monthly salary, which is about $50 per month. Of course there are differences in the standard of living between Gaza and the West Bank, so you can see clearly differences in their experiences.
The other aspect that women also suffer from is the nature and protection of their work. To what extent their work is precarious, is there any protection? Again, because of the informal nature of their work, they don’t have safety gear in factories that are not formalized. All this contributes to the realities of women. Even when they want to establish their own businesses, access to finance, for example, access to markets are also areas where they are struggling a lot with considering that women’s ownership of assets of land is very minimal in Palestine.
Said: Is there such a thing as women-owned businesses in Gaza?
Asmaa: Yes, there are. There are in Gaza, there are in West Bank. What characterizes these businesses is that they are mainly micro and small businesses, so they’re very small scale in their operation. But there is an increase in the entrepreneurial ideas and integration of women in entrepreneurial startups in fields like industry and agriculture and clothing. Another area for entrepreneurial startups is in the tech industry.
Said: If you were to advise a young Palestinian woman, a woman who is just graduating from college, or who’s about to go to college, and who wants to have her own business, what business should she go into? What are the businesses that are available to women?
Asmaa: I would advise it a little bit differently. It’s just because, in my opinion, entrepreneurship in the context of Palestine is really shifting responsibility of creating an economy from the state and from the occupation to the individual. So if the person failed to find a job, if the person failed in their business, it’s because they are the ones who failed, which is not accurate because the whole enabling environment for a business in Palestine is very restrictive, even for someone who has the best qualifications and business skills. To operate a business in Palestine is followed with challenges that come from the restrictions on markets, the political divisions, and deployment of laws in Gaza and the West Bank, and so on.
Now, there is advice in the development sphere that technology and IT is a place where you can find jobs, where you can work as a freelancer. My workers’ rights hat is saying yes, but there has to be structural changes in the way it works because by asking people to become freelancers, we are taking away the responsibility of private sector companies to provide healthcare services and insurance for their workers, to take responsibility for their employees’ wellbeing, to give them annual leaves. So a lot of their workers’ rights are not existent anymore if we are only focusing on freelancing, informal work.
It’s a very difficult challenge to think about because, yes, we do need more women to join the labor market, but did you know that 64% of people enrolled in higher education are women? Yet only 90% of them are actually engaged in the labor market. And the reason for that is not only because they don’t have the skillset that is needed in the market. It’s because there is so many stereotypes that exist in the market, patriarchal norms. There has to be homework done by private sector companies to provide a working environment that is suitable for women’s labor. There has to be laws by the Palestinian government and by the Ministry of Labor, by the Ministry of Economy, that force companies to provide decent working conditions for women in Palestinian companies.
Said: Do women get to keep their salaries? In such a patriarchal society, do they actually get to keep what they earn? And do they have healthcare? Do they have maternity leaves? Do they have safety equipment?
If you could please go through this, and then I’m going to ask you about the authorities. Whether in Gaza or the West Bank, how do the authorities deal with women’s ambitions to own their own businesses or women’s ambitions to work as professionals? Because what we see is that Palestinian society, including men and women, is becoming educated, is going to college, and is going to professional schools, and so on. And that by necessity will produce women who are highly qualified.
Asmaa: In terms of rights, only 50% of women get to have maternity leave as stated by the Palestinian law. So obtaining women’s rights, as stated by the Palestinian law, is not something that is happening in every company for women. There are still gaps between obtaining maternity leave, and even paternity leave. Having even a sexual harassment-free working environment is something that still needs a lot of work.
You’ve asked a question whether Palestinian women get to keep their income. Unfortunately, Palestinian women face a lot of economic violence with not having control over their income and over their businesses and so on. Of course, it differs from one city to another. It differs also based on so many factors. It differs also based on the families where women are growing up, and the existence of a supportive family or not.
What we are seeing, Said, is that when you establish a business for family, it’s kind of bring the family together, and trying to create sustainability. And that’s why it’s extremely important for anyone working on women’s economic justice and women’s economic empowerment to work with the whole family in order to ensure that we are not risking women’s lives, are not putting them in a way that they will be facing psychological, or even economic, violence.
I want to also mention something, that Palestinian women are responsible for so much of the unpaid care work, and this is something that does not get accounted for, not monetized, nothing. So, if a woman has spent all her life taking care of her children, doing the house chores and so on, she does not get entitled for a pension scheme or social security scheme. And that labor that women do, whether by choice or forced by social norms, is valuable labor that needs to be compensated in one way or another, it has to have protection for those women who opt or who are forced to do that kind of labor. And that’s the responsibility of the government to provide that kind of protection for those women, to provide for them social security, to provide for them some type of a social network a safety net. That’s a conversation that is very fundamental, and needs to happen.
And it’s happening around the world. We’ve seen with Covid how the shift has been huge in terms of burdening women with the responsibilities of teaching children when the schools were shut down, of doing paid work and unpaid work at the same time. We need to do something about it. The solution is not by forcing women to go to the paid labor market. We need to find mechanisms to allow women to choose what they want to do, but also have safety nets in all these choices.
Said: Women’s rights in America took a nosedive last year with the Supreme Court overturning the law that is called Roe v. Wade, which is a woman’s right to abortion. So there’s been a step back for women’s rights in the United States of America, and I want to ask you a controversial question: Do Palestinian women have access to birth control if they choose?
Asmaa: There is a lot of work that is being done by civil society to ensure that there is an awareness about women’s reproductive health, that there is access to some of the services that exist in clinics, and so on.
Is it enough? No, it’s not enough. There is a lot that needs to be done. The access to health in general is an area that the occupation also influences, particularly in Gaza in terms of what kind of medication that enters, what kind of tools that enter and are accessible to people.
But there is a gap, Said. There is a huge gap between the demand, between the awareness that is needed, and the services that are being provided. Civil society organizations will tell you that the shifting of aid that is happening recently is influencing their ability to provide the support that is needed by other people.
Said: In this case, Palestinian women would prefer to go to a female healthcare provider. Does that make a difference in terms of her ability to access reproductive health services?
The challenge is that the majority of Palestinians in general and Palestinian women are depending on either health centers that are provided by UNRWA [United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East] or public health centers that really face a lot of deficiencies in their services. What’s happening is that there is an emerging private sector for healthcare, and that’s something that a lot of people cannot afford, including women who have very minimal financial resources. So the challenge is that civil society is trying to fill in the gap where there are no public services. But it’s not enough. Now, in terms of what kind of reproductive health services women can access, there is a limitation to that. Abortion is not something that is provided by public institutions and centers of civil societies.
You mentioned your aunt with her breast cancer and the fact that she had to have a mastectomy as a treatment rather than being able to be treated to prevent the cancer. I am the husband of a woman who had breast cancer and had the same thing. So I want to ask you, is there education available? Is guidance available on breast cancer, which is obviously present in Gaza and Palestinian territories as it is everywhere else? Is there material available? Are there publications that can be made available? Is there a campaign to educate women on this issue?
Asmaa: In October every year there are huge efforts in “Pink October” to raise awareness about breast cancer, encouraging women to go and do the examination, and so on. But one of the challenges that faces those educators is that women are afraid because if you got diagnosed with cancer, you will have to think about so many things. You’ll have to think about the stigma that comes with breast cancer. You need to have family who are supportive enough to go with you through the mental process of being a breast cancer patient and the treatment.
But also women think about the financial cost that comes with being diagnosed with breast cancer. Women think about the job that they will have to lose if they were diagnosed. There is resistance because not knowing doesn’t come with the thinking process, and the responsibilities, both financial and mental, that come with all of that.
To answer your question shortly, yes, there are efforts. It is increasing. But it’s also increasing because we are witnessing a lot of diagnoses of cancer, particularly after every aggression that is happening in Gaza. And there hasn’t been a lot of research that looks at the connection between exposure to white phosphorus, the chemicals in the air strikes and the bombs that fall, and cancer patients. You can see the increase in blocks of houses, communities that were targeted during the different aggressions on Gaza.
Said: You mentioned something I just wanted to clarify. You mentioned the figure early on, that 64% of education is garnered by Palestinian women. Did I understand you correctly?
Asmaa: 64% of people enrolled in higher education are women.
Said: What about the education apparatus? In terms of teachers or administrators, do you have any idea as to the ratio of men to women, or how Palestinian women rate or fair with this?
Asmaa: The teaching sector or education sector is considered a feminized sector because women represent over 50% of the workers in the public education sector. But women are mostly concentrated as teachers, not in higher decision making.
Said: And when they leave higher education, what would be the most likely area to which they go? When a woman graduates from institutions of higher education, where would they go?
Asmaa: Basically women, influenced by patriarchal norms, choose fields that would graduate them as teachers. So, they would go for geography, history, and so on. When they graduate, they become teachers in public institutions because of the stability of being a public employee. What we are seeing is that there is an increase in business administration.
Where do they go? To be honest, there aren’t many places. Unemployment rates among women are extremely high. Among young women, it’s over 71%. Women end up either doing home-based businesses like bakeries or embroidery projects. So they do come up with solutions, but again, the solutions are very individualized solutions, rather than having a systematic solution that can absorb the talent that exists within the Palestinian woman.
Said: And lastly, I wanted to ask you about, let’s say the UNRWA schools, for instance. Is there more room or space for equality for educators in this case, or healthcare providers in this case, and so on, within their organizations for both men and women?
Asmaa: I’m not aware of any research that looked at that, but the idea is that by being an UNRWA school employee and being a public school employee, you get access to a healthcare. Now for the public educators, they get access to public healthcare, but the challenge that they face is that there isn’t much medicine that exists in public healthcare. For UNRWA employees, once they seek healthcare from UNRWA clinics, they have access to a specific medication that might not exist.
Now, the discrimination when it comes to education comes in relation to the law that says women and men get paid equally, but then when you have a child, a male teacher gets a salary increase, while a female teacher does not get increases on her salary when she has child. That’s how the gender pay gap accumulates between educators.
Said: So if a child is born to a male teacher, he gets a raise, and the mother does not get a raise. Fascinating.
Well, I tell you what, I salute you, and I salute to all Palestinian women who have been on the forefront of the struggle. But I salute you in particular. You have been really one of the finest examples of the modern Palestinian woman who is setting a great example for all women in the struggle for liberation and freedom. And I want you to end, if you like, with whatever words you want to say to Palestinian women and girls.
Asmaa: Thank you Said and I’m really honored to be here. I really think that the most amazing women that I’ve met are the Palestinian women who are farmers. To work on the land, to continue to cultivate the land during the heat of the summer, dealing with climate change, and continuing to work, and to produce, food that’s necessary for a family’s food security is something is extremely powerful, and I don’t wish to glorify that. It’s something that should push us for ensuring that the rights of those women are being obtained.
I really wish us to not glorify Palestinian women’s resilience. We want to acknowledge that they exist. We want to acknowledge that they have an amazing and very strong role in the Palestinian national struggle, but also for fighting for their own rights, and we should not allow the kind of erasure of their role to happen. But we also have a responsibility as a community, both male and female, to ensure that all Palestinian women have their rights along the journey for the national liberation.
And we need to remember those who are most invisible. Again, agricultural women workers, women who are doing so much of the unpaid care and domestic work in the houses that is fundamental for our society’s sustainability and ensuring that they have the rights and access to their social safety net and to social security. And for Palestinian women who are prisoners who are heading households, and for all those Palestinian women who are struggling to shape their lives in the best way that they can.
Said: Well, with those profound and compelling words, we end our event. Thank you so much Asmaa.
