In the summer of 1991, Hanan Ashrawi stood before cameras at the Madrid Conference and offered the world something it had rarely seen: a Palestinian woman — articulate, uncompromising, speaking in fluent English about occupation, displacement, and rights. She was not an anomaly. She was the visible tip of a movement built across generations, in village cooperatives and refugee camps, in courtrooms and legislative chambers, by women whose names most international audiences never learned.
The history of Palestinian women in politics and civil society is not a footnote to the larger national story. It is a large part of that story — and one that has been systematically underdocumented.
Samiha Khalil and the Founding Generation
Any serious account begins with Samiha Khalil (1923–1999), born in Anabta, displaced in 1948 to the West Bank. In 1965, she founded In’ash al-Usra (Society for the Revitalization of the Family) in al-Bireh, an institution that grew to employ hundreds of women, operate vocational training centers, a museum of Palestinian embroidery and folklore, an orphanage, and a publishing house. Scholar Islah Jad, writing on Palestinian women’s movements, describes In’ash al-Usra as one of the most consequential grassroots institutions produced by Palestinian civil society — a social infrastructure built under occupation, funded largely by the Palestinian diaspora, and deliberately woven into questions of national identity.
In 1996, Khalil ran against Yasser Arafat for the presidency of the Palestinian Authority, receiving approximately 9 percent of the vote — an act of democratic audacity in a political culture that discouraged it. She lost, but the candidacy itself was a declaration. As scholar Penny Johnson, a researcher long based at Birzeit University, has documented, Khalil represented a generation of women activists who understood that social reproduction — the raising of children, the preservation of language and embroidery, the running of cooperatives — was explicitly political work under conditions of occupation and exile.
Hanan Ashrawi: Diplomat, Legislator, Dissident
Hanan Ashrawi, born in 1946 in Ramallah, is the Palestinian woman most recognized internationally, and her biography rewards close reading. A literary scholar trained at the American University of Beirut and at the University of Virginia, she became Dean of Arts at Birzeit University before entering the political arena. She served as the official spokesperson for the Palestinian delegation to the Madrid and Washington peace talks (1991–1993), a role she described in her 1995 memoir This Side of Peace as one that required constant navigation between the demands of the PLO leadership, the skepticism of international mediators, and the daily realities of Palestinians living under closure and settlement expansion.
Elected to the Palestinian Legislative Council in 1996, Ashrawi founded MIFTAH — the Palestinian Initiative for the Promotion of Global Dialogue and Democracy — in 1998, an institution focused on transparency, human rights documentation, and media advocacy. She later served as a member of the PLO Executive Committee, resigning in 2020 in protest at what she described as the PA’s failure to hold democratic elections and its authoritarian drift. Her resignation statement, published and widely reported, was characteristic: precise, sourced in principle, and deeply uncomfortable for the leadership she was leaving.
Ashrawi has been a target of sustained pressure from pro-Israel lobbying groups in the United States and Australia. In 2003, the Sydney Peace Foundation awarded her its Gold Medal; the decision triggered a significant political controversy in Australia, which she addressed directly and publicly. These episodes illuminate a recurring pattern: Palestinian women who enter international political space face not only the standard obstacles of patriarchy within Palestinian institutions, but coordinated external campaigns aimed at delegitimizing their voices.
Khalida Jarrar: Legislator Under Administrative Detention
If Ashrawi’s story is one of diplomacy and institutional politics, Khalida Jarrar‘s is one of what happens when a Palestinian legislator refuses to be silenced by military occupation. Born in 1963, Jarrar is a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and was elected to the Palestinian Legislative Council in 2006. She has been arrested by Israeli military authorities on multiple occasions under administrative detention — imprisonment without charge or trial, authorized under Israeli military orders that derive from British Mandate emergency regulations, and documented extensively by human rights organizations including Addameer, HaMoked, and B’Tselem.
Jarrar was detained in 2015, released in 2016, rearrested in 2017, released in 2019, then arrested again in 2019 and held until 2021. During her 2017–2019 detention, her daughter Suha Jarrar died of a heart attack; Israeli authorities initially refused to release Khalida to attend the funeral, a decision that drew condemnation from human rights groups and UN officials. She was eventually permitted a brief, supervised farewell. Amnesty International repeatedly classified her as a prisoner of conscience.
Her case is not isolated. Addameer’s documentation identifies dozens of Palestinian women — lawyers, activists, students — who have passed through Israeli military detention. What distinguishes Jarrar’s case is her status as an elected legislator: her detention is, among other things, a case study in how military occupation legally overrides the civilian political structures it nominally permits to exist.
Civil Society Networks and the Issa Amro Circle
In Hebron, the human rights activist Issa Amro — founder of Youth Against Settlements, himself repeatedly prosecuted by both Israeli military courts and the Palestinian Authority — has worked alongside a network of women activists whose documentation work and nonviolent resistance organizing have been central to civil society resistance in one of the most militarized urban environments in the occupied West Bank. Hebron’s H2 area, where several hundred Israeli settlers live under heavy military protection among roughly 35,000 Palestinians, has been documented in detail by B’Tselem and EAPPI (the World Council of Churches’ Ecumenical Accompaniment Programme). Women in this environment carry the particular burden of harassment at checkpoints, restrictions on movement, and, as B’Tselem’s field researchers have recorded, routine intimidation by settlers and soldiers in residential spaces.
The Palestinian feminist movement — academic, activist, and institutional — has long argued, as scholar Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian of Hebrew University and the Women’s Studies Center in Jerusalem has written, that the gendered dimensions of occupation are inseparable from its structural ones: that the checkpoint, the detention order, the settlement expansion, and the demolition notice land differently on women’s bodies, households, and organizing capacity.
Power, Presence, and the Unfinished Argument
Palestinian women have never been absent from politics. They have been present at the founding of institutions, at negotiating tables, in prison cells, and in the slow, unglamorous work of keeping communities functional under conditions designed to make that impossible. What has been intermittent is their formal power — in the PLO, in the PA, in Hamas-governed Gaza — where gender quotas have been introduced and then selectively honored, and where the tension between nationalist priorities and feminist ones has never been fully resolved.
That tension is itself a form of political seriousness. It means Palestinian women are not simply victims of occupation, nor symbols of national resilience. They are political actors with their own disagreements, their own organizations, their own losing campaigns and principled resignations — which is to say, they have a political history, not just a political metaphor.
Sources
- Hanan Ashrawi, This Side of Peace: A Personal Account (Simon & Schuster, 1995)
- Islah Jad, “The NGO-isation of Arab Women’s Movements,” IDS Bulletin, Vol. 35, No. 4 (2004)
- Penny Johnson and Eileen Kuttab, “Where Have All the Women (and Men) Gone?”, Feminist Review, No. 69 (2001)
- Addameer Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association, prisoner profiles and administrative detention documentation, addameer.org
- Amnesty International, public statements on Khalida Jarrar (2015, 2017, 2019)
- B’Tselem, “Hebron: The Policy of Separation,” and field documentation on H2 area, btselem.org
- HaMoked: Center for the Defence of the Individual, administrative detention case documentation, hamoked.org
- Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, Militarization and Violence Against Women in Conflict Zones in the Middle East (Cambridge University Press, 2009)
- MIFTAH — Palestinian Initiative for the Promotion of Global Dialogue and Democracy, miftah.org
