Gendering Palestinian Dispossession: Evaluating Land Loss in the West Bank

Abstract

Despite increasing attention to Palestinian territorial dispossession, there is inadequate attention paid to how this dispossession is gendered in its legitimising discourses and practices. Inattention to gender results in a failure to understand the power relations at play in the processes through which Palestinians are dispossessed of their land, the discourses that serve to support that dispossession and the impacts of that dispossession. This article examines the roles of Israeli hegemonic militarised masculinity as deployed in discourses and practices of "security" as well as idealised Zionist femininity and idealised Zionist masculinity as deployed in discourses and practices of "God-given Righteousness". It finds that both are effective means of dispossessing Palestinians of their land, and that in settlements in the West Bank, the hegemonic militarised masculinity is often subsumed under idealised Zionist femininity and masculinity when it comes to settlement expansion and the violent dispossession of Palestinian land.

Feminist geolegality

“…More recently, feminist geographers have been illustrating the intimate relationship between law, geopolitics and geoeconomics. One such example is a feminist geolegal analysis of dispossession (Casolo and Doshi, 2013;Ryan, 2017). Brickell's research (2014Brickell's research ( , 2016 charts how women from Boeung Kak Lake in Phnom Penh have deliberately crossed the 'line' between private/public, personal/political to contest the alignment of Chinese-backed 'development' in Cambodia with the necessity to illegally bulldoze homes.…”

Women and checkpoints in Palestine

“…Attending to these power dynamics in a specific borderland, the account provided here makes the important contributions of showing how the checkpoint constitutes a space where women encounter the contradictory politics of gender and occupation. Women in Palestine are figured variously as victims of ‘irrational and unpredictably violent’ Palestinian men (Ryan, 2017: 478); bearers of responsibility in the demographic/reproductive imperative of the nation (Abu-Duhou, 2003); and as threatening covert operatives (‘suicide bombers’) ready to self-detonate in a quest for shahida (martyrdom) (Amireh, 2011). Each of these contradictory constructions are in evidence in the space of the checkpoint as women are simultaneously revered, shamed and intimidated in varying but consistent measures.…”

‘Housing is a Human Right. Here to Stay, Here to Fight’: Resisting Housing Displacement Through Gendered, Legal, and Tenured Activism

“…It therefore follows that housing displacement and forced eviction is not a genderneutral phenomenon. Rather, such processes disproportionately affect women Ryan, 2017;Watt, 2018). This is due in part to factors relating to expectations of women as primarily responsible for the home and family, and mothers being less likely to be in paid employment due to such caring responsibilities (Fernandez Arrigoitia, 2017;Watt, 2018).…”