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It was only after I
returned, on subsequent visits, that I realized that, in the winter
and spring
of 1990, I had stumbled
across an already changed landscape of the Women’s
Committee’s Movement.
The national question had rechannelled the course of its women’s
leadership, as it had
done to the Women’s Union in the diaspora. The pressure from
Islamic fundamentalism
remained, but also the hard work in the Intifada had taken its toll
on
the leadership, as
fatigue was plain in the women’s faces. But at the heart of the
change
was the fact that during
the period 1988-1990, the peace process was rapidly taking
shape, producing a
reconfiguration of the Palestinian body politics. The consequences
to
the women’s political
agenda proved both complex and detrimental.
In the end, the answer
to the question “why did the women’s leadership in the Occupied
Territories fail to
stand up to Hamas in Gaza? Has less to do with its commitment to
women’s rights and more
with how it assessed its political position. Its decision must be
seen in the context of
the new and unforeseen global and domestic Palestinian
developments, which
unfolded in the late 1980s. For Kamal and her Women’s Action
Committees, the issue of
the veil could not have arrived at a worse time, for she was at the
center of a brewing
storm inside the Democratic Front.
For some time, the
Democratic Front had heatedly debated Arafat’s peace initiative,
which
was taking the
Palestinians on the road to negotiations with Israel. Kamal, who was
the
leader of the Democratic
Front’s women’s wing in the Occupied Territories, and Yasser
Abed Rabbo, out of
Tunis, led the group that supported Arafat. Abed Rabbo was the
PLO’s chief negotiator
with the United States at the first official talks, held in Tunis in
1989.
The Front’s general
secretary, Nayef Hawatmeh, was against negotiations until Israel
accepted the UN
Secretary Council’s resolutions 242 and 338, which meant withdrawing
from the 1967 Occupied
Territories and addressing the question of the return of the
refugees. Unable to
reconcile their differences, the two factions went their separate
ways
in 1991, becoming
Democratic Front-Nayet Hawatmeh and Democratic Front-Yasser
Abed Rabbo (later the
Palestinian Democratic Union Party). The split devastated the
Women’s Action
Committees, the largest and longest-running of the women’s
committees.
Hawatmeh’s supporters
were led by Nada Tweir, an unknown young cadre from the
Tulkarem area (and
perhaps a fourth-generation leader). Tweir took with her about half
of
the membership and
several of the union’s facilities, including the Essawiya Copper
Works.
The leadership of the
union (sixty-six out of seventy members of the policymaking higher
committee) stayed with
Kamal and, for a while, both kept the same name-though it
remained more identified
with Kamal’s group which is the more visible of the two because
of Kamal’s stature in
the Palestinian movement. BY 1994, however, Kamal’s group
adopted a more
decentralized format, called the Women’s Action Union.
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