By Tanvi Suri

Abstract 

“Gaza has always been rebellious. I am her daughter, and I look like her,” exclaims Asmaaa al-Ghoul who refuses the role of victim—of Israel, of Hamas, of any of the men or women in her life. She works steadily as a journalist—the good, troublemaking sort—from the age of 19 onward. She refuses to cover her hair, talks openly of falling in love, marries twice, and divorces twice. When Hamas police or mosque officials challenge or upbraid her, she does not hesitate to let them know that they are the ones bringing shame to Islam. This article talks about Ghoul’s defiance, Hamas as a repressive force in the war-stricken Gaza strip. 

Behind the Lines of the Arab Spring : One Woman’s Story, By Asmaa Al-Ghoul, Sélim Nassib, published in 2018. Asmaa al-Ghoul, a Palestinian journalist who was raised in the Gaza refugee camp of Rafah, provides a unique perspective on a young woman discovering her political and secular values within the region’s constant turmoil and Israeli occupation. She has received criticism for being “too strong-minded,” for not concealing her hair, and for speaking out. She has led protests and been outspoken in her opposition to Hamas and Fatah as a journalist and activist, which has caused family friction, imprisonment, cruel interrogations, death threats, and assaults.

Asmaa al-Ghoul, a Palestinian writer from Gaza born in the Rafah refugee camp, pens down her opinions with utmost transparency. She makes friends easily and has a natural ease and exuberance that allow her to say what she thinks without seeming assertive. It would be unjust to define her solely by her defiance of the current patriarchal oppressionist regime. Her stance against male chauvinism, subjected to the totalitarian regime of Hamas, is the prime focus of all kinds of oppression in the Arab nation, and her resilient self absorbs and rejects them all. One of the toughest challenges for women in a war-torn country was the fight against patriarchy and misogynistic structures. Gaza was at the hands of two major political powers, Hamas and Fatah, both clashing for authority to establish their regimes. The two, being male chauvinistic, differed in their views towards religion, Fatah being the secular one. A rebel in Gaza provides clarity as to how Gazan women deal with patriarchal oppression in their daily lives and how they’ve repeatedly ingrained these conservative structures.  Both Hamas and Fatah propagate sexist ideologies that confine women to roles in the private domain. Primarily, how men use religion to suppress women, leaving them with no opportunities whatsoever, only to be oppressed Women’s subjugation and patriarchy cannot simply be attributed to men’s innate desire to rule over them or to something that is fundamentally set and unchangeable. Instead, it has been shown by Western anthropologists, Marxist feminists, and feminists from the Third World that this universal conception of male dominance tends to hide rather than reveal the differences in patriarchal relations by disregarding the distinctive inner dynamics and gender entities of particular historical and cultural forms of patriarchy. The paper is an analysis of how Gazan women survived patriarchal oppression.  Even though women in Gaza were constantly suppressed by men and their ideologies, I argue that they came across as resilient and strong women. 

After she landed in the Emirates, she started going out with her head half-covered and talking to male cousins, and it wasn’t long before people began speaking ill of her. They would shout as she went past them. “It’s the girl who’s come from abroad and dresses in that indecent manner.” She went to the beach with her brothers, which wasn’t done. The seashore has a bad reputation, it is looked on as a place where bad things are done: sex, hashish, debauchery. When people say about a young woman that her boyfriend took her to the beach the suggestion is that they behaved badly.  As Kandiyoti observes, in Middle Eastern societies, the corporate body of the clan or hamula—that is, the extended family that includes parents and siblings as well as close and distant relatives and occasionally even other members of the community—defines and regulates female sexuality. From a young age, women are taught that their sexuality is not their own and cannot be given or withheld; rather, it is the unalienable property of the hamula. As a result, lineage honour and sexual purity are considered to be mutually exclusive. Early arranged marriage is one approach to protecting lineage honour; sex segregation is another. The latter practice has two negative implications. On the one hand, a sex-segregated society upholds the predominant male prerogatives while perpetuating female servitude. Al-Ghoul, like many Gazan women, dares to take a stance against oppressive patriarchal regimes that prevail. She is a powerful woman who refuses to cave in fact, chooses to put on a bright dress, and stands out from the crowd: a rebel from Gaza. Hamas propagated the agenda for the wearing of the hijab, as well as persuading women to take up primary roles in private arenas, promoting segregation from men, and promoting polygamy. He even tried to enforce Islamic law in Gaza, under which hijab is imposed on women at schools, institutions, and courts. Strong, opinionated women who chose to defy wearing the hijab were restricted from their freedom as well as harassed both physically and verbally. In the name of religious beliefs and morality, the Islamic group ‘Swords of Truth’ threatened to behead female TV broadcasters if they didn’t wear strict Islamic dress. “We will cutthroats, and from vein to vein, if needed, to protect the spirit and morals of this nation,” their statement said. Patriarchy predominantly exists in the Palestinian territory, as it does in other parts of the world,  as a system of oppression that upholds male superiority and social position. Primarily, this social position granted to men by patriarchal society is what causes violent expressions disproportionately affecting the women’s strata of society.

To Asmaa, Gaza is a city of love, life, death, and oppression. She believes the territory possesses some kind of magic, it feels like home, and someone who comes to visit here for a few weeks ends up staying for months. Whereas to Hamas, Gaza is just a means to gain control and the support of the Palestinian masses, he propagates extremist nationalism and promotes Islamic ideologies. Asmaa practises Islam in general but doesn’t believe in rigid practices, on the other hand, Hamas propagates fanatical nationalism through stringent structures. Asmaa’s father shaped her version of what it was to be a Muslim at heart. She defied wearing the veil at several instances in the book, as she knew in her heart what it was to be a good Muslim. Hamas was very repressive in his ideologies, especially those about women. He forbids them to go out, always be veiled, not watch TV, and as Asma said, “Women were expected to do nothing but wait for their last day. When Hamas officials confront and summon Ghoul, she does not stumble to enlighten them that they are the ones bringing shame to Islam, and she’s the one protecting it. Asmaa was an impressionable little girl. When some of her uncles allied with Hamas during the first intifada, she paid for her defiance after a letter she wrote to one of her uncles came under public scrutiny. She received her first death threat, yet she didn’t stop there; rather, as she attained the majority, she began to speak out more often. One such incident was when she was harassed by Hamas officials for merely going to the beach without a male companion.  Later, she took a stand against the ban on women cycling forbidden by the Hamas government. Ghoul’s confrontations with Hamas consisted of being detained unexplainably and being beaten black and blue by the female prison guard. According to Canadian author Margaret Atwood, women are most fearful of being killed by men, whereas men are most afraid of women laughing at them. This fear gets internalised, consciously or not, in our everyday behaviour. Despite all of this, she refuses to let her dislike of Fatah turn her into a supporter of the group; instead, she asserts that Fatah has a worse track record than Hamas when it comes to alleged “honour crimes,” and she bluntly states of both groups: “Don’t think that the one is more progressive than the other. The two of them concur in regards to women.” Ghoul doesn’t revolt against Islam itself, despite her professed secularism and resistance to Islamism. She argues that Hamas’s actions propel Muslims away from Islam, but she still seems to have an attachment to the faith she was brought up in. Otherwise, it’s not just when standing up to Hamas that al-Ghoul reveals her strong-mindedness; she never loses sight of the fact that Israel is the main persecutor of the Palestinians. 

Gazan women come across as tough individuals. Despite the curtailments placed on their freedom, they’ve taken on roles other than those of victims. Their fight serves as an ideal instance of how male dominance and sovereignty over land are similar since, for the most part, it gave men—”the lover”—the ability to reconcile with land—”the bride”—while excluding women from this process. Islamist women are expected to live as good moms and loyal wives or to become role models for political activists, which is a difficulty that most secular women also confront, according to Islah Jad. The first feature, as well as a gendered labour force, segregation in public spaces like schools, and the progressively imposed every day limitations on women living under Hamas, have frequently been emphasised in the mainstream media. In fact, a woman is referred to in the Hamas Charter as “the factory of men” and is assigned the duty of proactively taking care of the family. Asmaa reiterates that she was once told at school that “God was going to punish us girls if we behaved badly. He had once opened the grave of a woman who wore short skirts while she was alive and found that her legs had been burned.” Terror and fearfulness were used as a medium to inculcate societal acceptance and expectations for women, which would indicate how women ought to behave. A flabbergasting instance from the novel is when Asmaa, a mature adult, visits the beach with her friend May, Hamas security officials disapprove of her and phone her father as she was at the beach without a ‘muhrem’ (father, husband or brother who must be responsible for a woman). Toxic masculinity was regimented, and the argument behind this was also backed by Islamic principles and moral policing. The ironic bit is how Gazan women were veiled just so; a certain sect of men doesn’t visualise hair from a sexual point of view. The notion that  Hamas forbids women to carve their own lives only to prevent these predatory men from looking at them sexually is astounding as well as extremely misogynistic. One such instance is when Asmaa recalls hearing that the police had asked the people taken into custody – Of one: “Have you slept with Asmaa?” Of another, May’s brother, “You went with Asmaa and left one of your friends behind you with your sister. How do you know he didn’t take advantage of that to sleep with her behind your back?” All these cretins could talk about was sex; it was a real obsession. 

Gaza has always been rebellious, and Asmaa is indeed its daughter in the true sense. She abstains from being veiled, talks blatantly about falling in love, weds and divorces twice, and does primarily everything that is considered “halaal” for a woman in Islam. The Arab society in the true sense is patriarchal, women are regarded as inferior and their lives are conditioned to evolve around the men in their lives, comprising of their fathers, brothers, and husbands. Rarely is she considered an entity of her own, she’s just an overshadowed soul with zero rights of her own to claim. A woman’s social status is regarded as inferior to men in a traditional Arab family set-up is administered by Islamic principles and morals, with which the preponderance of the community complies, thus shielding men who persecute and abuse the female members of their family. Palestinian women endure to contest for their rights and gender parity, all of which are confined by two major forces: the Israel state and internal patriarchal control. Across the novel, one can easily interpret Hamas’s master plan for waging an ideological war. Religion is used as a medium to unify the masses and curb them all at the same time and the people being gratified with the dogmatic views of Islam have no other choice but to rely on Hamas during such times of distress. The government in question intends for people to think that it is there to protect us and to safeguard the interests of women, whereas, in actuality, they are destroying our privacy rather than defending it. That is the reality of what they are doing, and it must be expressed. Gaza is a place filled with hardship but also with magic, as though its seclusion and suffering highlight the compassion of its residents. According to Ghoul, life in Gaza has an optimism that gives the impression that death doesn’t exist, “except during war.” Palestine is the ideal example of how colonialism, capitalism, and patriarchy collude to perpetuate an unjust system of subjugation of women, the poor, and the marginalised. 

Author’s Bio

Tanvi Suri is a third-year law student at Jindal Global Law School and a staunch advocate for women’s rights. 

Image Source: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/dec/05/rebel-gaza-strip-asmaa-ghoul-review-selim-nassib-lebanese-novelist