The political, social and economic challenges encountered by Palestinian Jerusalemite women married to men from the Palestinian Authority areas pdf
Year: 2014
Author: Huda Abu Zaid
Supervisor: Lena Meari
Discussion Committee: Randa Naser & Rema Hammami
Abstract
The Zionist Settler Colonial project in Palestine has always flagrantly sought to achieve ethnic cleansing for the Palestinians, the natives. In Jerusalem, this is achieved by means of colonial laws. Depicting the status quo in Jerusalem from different vantage points shows how Israel discloses its ethnic cleansing project against Arab Palestinian Jerusalemites, whom it considers as permanent Residents. The siege around the city of Jerusalem reached its culmination by the erection of the Apartheid Wall and military checkpoints. This study attempts to shed light on the challenges that women in the Palestinian households encounter. The study tackles the Palestinian household in which the wife is a Palestinian Jerusalemite, a permanent resident in Jerusalem bearing the Israeli ID, and the husband is a Palestinian from the Occupied Territories or Gaza Strip bearing a Palestinian ID. Living under the Zionist Settler Colonial system, such families will endure the unlawful measures and policies of colonialism that gravely affect their family lives. The enactment of the law that prohibits Palestinian family reunification in 2003 is a violation of the fundamental inalienable human rights of individuals to equality, liberty, privacy and family life. The Israeli law discriminates against Palestinians and prevents them to have their right to choose a partner or establish a family. Many Palestinian families are supposed to break up and other families will not be established. This illegal law is part of the policies of siege on Jerusalem and ethnic cleansing.
There is no normalcy of life for these families who are systematically not permitted to live unified in Jerusalem. The Palestinian husbands cannot enter Jerusalem until they are 36, the age when they can apply for a special permit to enter Jerusalem. Applying for the permit does not ensure getting it approved. Many Palestinian husbands, however, are denied this right for security reasons. Many others may wait for years to get it. Under these circumstances, the husbands are prohibited to live in Jerusalem and the wives are not either able to live in the Palestinian Territories. Consequently, these families are only opted to live in Jerusalem without the husbands. Instead, some families move to live unified in Jerusalem outskirts outside the Apartheid Wall and are forced to pass military checkpoints to and fro every day. If these families decide to live in the Palestinian Territories, as some husbands may decide, Jerusalemite women will lose their permanent residency and will be expelled outside the city. The direst challenge that such families face is geopolitical, which is the issue of residency in Jerusalem. Some economic, social, and cultural challenges are all associated with it. Living in Jerusalem is unattainable for many families, not only due to political reasons, but also due to high living costs and taxation. This seriously influences the everyday life of these families and the relationships within them. The study shows how these challenges make Jerusalemite women suffer, together with their husbands and children. It also shows how these women have their own tactics to handle their everyday life that is made vulnerable by the Zionists Colonial system.
Analyzing women tactics one can understand the way women adapt themselves to the situations they live in. Also, the study shows how these women have their own tactics to evade the discriminating Zionist ethnic and racial spatiality in order to keep their families unified. Moreover, the study shows how women’s work becomes an important financial contributor that helps these women become decision makers and heads of their families. Women are shown to have done their best to adapt their everyday life to achieve their major goals, namely, keeping their families unified and living in Jerusalem. The act of not leaving their city is conceived the core of their resilience and resistance against the Zionist Settler Plans which aim to replace the indigenous Palestinians with Zionist Jewish Settlers.
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