A Feminine Nationalist Narrative: Zeina Ghandour's The Honey Zeina Ghandour's The Honey investigates the potential of a Palestinian feminine discourse of national liberation through a strategic reversal of gender roles and a redefinition of family ties and emotions in the context of the dominant Islamist and Nationalist discourses. In this novella that uses the fantasy genre, the protagonist, Ruhiya, plays a masculine role prohibited for Muslim women, as she performs the call to the morning prayer on behalf of her bedridden father, breaching thus an Islamic taboo that considers a woman's voice as 'awra or private. The protagonist's act, however, proves to be agential in reconfiguring Palestinian history, as it dictates a different outcome for her childhood love's mission to blow himself up, who upon hearing her voice retreats from his mission without detonating the explosives. The protagonist, thus, uses her voice and love as means to divert her beloved from carrying out his deadly operation. Traditionally, maternal and family ties have been used to limit women's agency to traditional gender roles and to hinder their movement and travel while allowing men the freedom to venture into the public space including the battlefield. In The Honey, however, it is the male protagonist who is prevented from departing/dying using a feminine sense of communal and national responsibility that materializes only by transcending gender roles. The novel thus reverses patriarchal gender roles and nationalist appropriation of emotions and familial ties in order to configure a feminine alternative to the Palestinian history of oppression, loss, and martyrdom exacerbated by masculine discourses of national resistance that recognize women only as symbols rather than as active agents. In light of the Palestinian traditional leadership's recurrent failure to achieve dignity and freedom to the Palestinian people The Honey's call for more egalitarian roles for both Palestinian men and women becomes indispensable. Moreover, this feminization of the liberation discourse can also be interpreted as an attempt to ward off the possible erasure of women's contribution to national liberation. Ghandour's novella is a poetic exploration of the potential of a more democratic nationalist narrative that includes all Palestinians, men, women and even children as responsible compatriots not restricted by crippling gender roles and patriarchal hold on traditional family ties. In order to examine The Honey's gender and political implications I will use literature on Palestinian women's nationalist participation in occupied Palestine as well as postcolonial theory.