“Critical feminist perspectives must begin to analyze and account for the modalities by which suffering becomes a tool that upholds settler-colonial relations, to read the structures of power in the everydayness of maiming women’s psychosocial entities. It must attend to the voices, silences, and sufferings, the effects of the humiliation and endured pain. However, it must also look to the countervailing effects of survival. The Palestinian women interviewees demonstrate incredible steadfastness, or sumoud, in the face of suffering—indeed, managing not only to survive, but to infiltrate the nation that usurped the comfort of their lives and homes. Their agency, too, must be recognized, for their simple acts of surviving, giving birth, and going home may be seen as nothing less than undermining a settler-colonial regime.”
- Infiltrated Intimacies: The Case of Palestinian Returnees, Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian
Kevorkian ends her piece with a feminist call to arms. We have to be able to see the angles in which settler-colonialism seeks to uphold itself as a rightful presence, yet we must be able to see how these colonized communities resist their oppression. In this case, the survivance and resistance of Palestinian women under the Israeli regime. Palestinian women face violence on the axis of both Palestinian and woman, marking them as vulnerable to specific violences of biopolitics, “where the uses and abuses of women’s bodies become tools of oppression and serve to further Israel’s settler-colonial project (Shaloub-Kevorkian 169).”
The conversion of Palestinians from civilians to “intruders” represents an orphaned beginning. Palestinians are separated from their homeland and their family, many having to flee or change themselves in order to survive. The unmediatable damages inflicted onto women continue to haunt them, infiltrating the intimate interiors of their life as something unspeakable. The unspeakability of their pain is an Israeli victory, isolating them from the rest of the world, the past continues to haunt their very being.
This reconfiguration of identity was used to mobilize Israeli violence against the Palestinians, as violence was conducted under the name of security, instead of purely self-gain. Achille Membe’s concept of “necropolitics” describes “the state’s ability to wield biopower in the subjugation of death over human bodies and populations, for the purpose of the preservation of the state’s sovereignty and the authority of its institutions (Shaloub Kevorkian 169).” Even in death, Palestinian bodies are constructed monstrous, signifying the successful protection of Israel from imminent contamination.
The mere existence of Palestinian women is a form of resistance against the Israeli colonial state, where she is proof that the Israeli settlement is one of attempting genocide. She is proof that the rightful owners of her land is that of colonizers. Shalhoub-Kevorkian upholds the importance of survivance and autonomy in her academic discourse. The act of living is weaponized.
A just future is one that provides reparations for Palestinians and actually holds colonizing entities accountable for the damage they have done. I believe that even the most inhumane of violences can be healed over generations, if given the correct conditions. This means a future where colonization, slavery, and genocide are truly monsters of the past. The future is held in the present. The stubbornness of life provides hope for the future, disrupting present evils that try to extinguish it.
