Last Monday, my final day in Ramallah, I spent a couple of hours at the Women’s Centre for Legal Aid and Counseling (the site’s English page should soon be working). Soraida, my contact there, said some of the staff wanted to see how the psychology/law/justice interface might relate to their own work. I was glad for the opportunity.
WCLAC’s work seems to me extremely useful and even more challenging. Essentially, this group of mostly Muslim feminists — a term that surely comes to many as a surprise — wants to revamp family law in Palestinian society. Since marriage, divorce, inheritance, and similar topics are controlled by religious courts, there is no civil-law method to get out of a bad marriage or deal with an abusive husband. This system, which was inherited from the Ottomans, lets each religion control its own families (Israel retains the same archaic system, which explains why Israelis who want to marry someone from another religion have to leave the country to do so).
WCLAC has about 40 staffers in three cities – Ramallah, Hebron, and East Jerusalem. These include seven lawyers, the same number of social workers, plus researchers, administrators, and support staff. I met with six staff members. Each explained her (or his, in one case) area of responsibility – training volunteers to pay attention to women’s rights issues, helping organize grassroots organization throughout the West Bank, advocacy work such as lobbying the Palestine Legislative Council for changes in the law, working with doctors and other medical personnel to focus them on recognizing signs of domestic violence, researching issues identified by other units as important (Soraida is the research director), and direct case work by the organization’s lawyers and social workers. They have published a wide variety of books and pamphlets, including reports of femicide (the killing of women by their “dishonored” families) and other serious problems.
The whole experience was very impressive. This organization, which began in 1991, came to me as a real surprise. I’ve known that Muslims differ greatly in their interpretations of religious doctrine and practice. But I didn’t know Palestinian society was open to organized efforts to change such a fundamental societal component. It was encouraging to see this sign of obvious resistance to conservative control, even if, as some of the women told me, they were often simply dismissed as “Westernized.” Still, despite their uncovered heads and egalitarian agenda, they say they are increasingly invited to work in small conservative villages to help women victimized by rape and sexual harassment. On that level they are encouraged, though their optimism is tempered by an awareness that Palestinian society overall is becoming more religious as Hamas’s influence grows.
WCLAC initially advocated the creation of a civil-law alternative to family courts. As in Israel, that met with little success. They have since turned to emphasizing flexibility in interpreting Islamic law, bringing in Islamic scholars who distinguish between traditional inegalitarian cultural norms and what they see as less rigid religious doctrine. The group has also studied the attitudes of Palestinian women, finding, for example, that in their sample only a minority covered their heads for religious reasons; most, including many young women, were either trying to avoid being seen as different or were pressured to cover up by husbands, brothers, or fathers. Their fashionable clothing and tight jeans often suggest the head covering is designed to follow the letter of religious law rather than the spirit.
In some ways, the issues WCLAC deals with remind me of the US feminist movement in the 1970s, trying for example to get police to take domestic violence seriously. In other cases the comparison goes back much further, to the 1800s when US courts began to limit how severely men could beat their wives and children. In any case, I found it refreshing to see so many determined activists trying to ensure that Palestine becomes a more egalitarian society. This effort from within has more potential for success, I think, than pressure from without to conform to Western norms.
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