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Feminine Comrades: Women and Armed Struggle in the PFLP, 1967-1975
Abstract
The extant scholarship on women’s participation in armed Palestinian popular resistance groups (fid?’? organizations) remains primarily limited to political and anthropological studies of women in the Palestinian National Liberation Movement (Fatah) and largely glosses over their role in groups further to the political left like the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). Anthropologists like Rosemary Sayigh, Julie Peteet, and Amalia Sa‘ar have contributed greatly to our understanding of Fatah’s institutional mobilization of women, primarily through the vehicle of the General Union of Palestinian Women (GUPW), established in 1965. Their research has rightly centered on Palestinian women’s agency in the social revolution that accompanied the ascendance of Fatah in the aftermath of the June 1967 War and has explored the ways in which these women used collective organizing, passive steadfast resistance (?um?d), and writing to shape Fatah’s social platforms. Yet the accounts of these scholars and the memoirs of Fatah members also reveal that the party’s leadership, including Yasser Arafat, placed limits on the power of women in the party, particularly concerning access to weapons and military training, during the late 1960s and early 1970s. In contrast, the Marxist-Leninist PFLP viewed women’s involvement in armed struggle during the same period as vital to its proletarian revolution. Drawing on articles from the PFLP’s Arabic monthly magazine, al-Hadaf, and other party pamphlets and bulletins, my paper seeks to demonstrate how the PFLP’s social and military platforms afforded women a more central role as fid?’iyy?t than their counterparts in Fatah. Furthermore, my study complicates the traditional critique of revolutionary Arab Marxism during this period, which claims that Arab leftists ignored feminist issues or treated them as subservient to class struggle. I instead argue that the PFLP leadership, including George Habash, Leila Khalid, and Ghassan Kanafani, were actively engaged in global discussions about the intersection of gender and class issues as interlocutors that contributed to, and not only consumed, Marxist-Leninist theory.
Discipline
History
Geographic Area
Palestine
Sub Area
Gender/Women's Studies