| Publication |
2011.
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| Summary/Abstract |
As a contribution to the discussion on women's empowerment in the Palestine-Israel Journal, this article reflects on the possibilities for women's empowerment and peace-building under a condition of prolonged occupation. Specifically, it focuses on the near-impossibility of the manifestation of empowerment and peace for those who have been disenfranchised under a paradigm of extreme oppression in the context of Occupied Palestine. If one uses Eileen Kuttab's contextualization of Palestinian empowerment as historically being embodied in practices of mobilization and resistance, then being allowed neither mobility nor the right to organize resistance to Israeli military violence makes it clear that the prospects for successful peace-building and the realization of Palestinian women's empowerment face significant obstacles.1 This is a result of the autocratic imbalance of power that has seeped from external into internal dynamics. The external factors are the architects and participants of the occupation comprised of an illegal Israeli military occupation force of women and men, abetted by an international community that does not adhere to its mandates to the fullest extent and follows an aid praxis that further serves to annihilate mobilization and resistance. The internal obstacles to women's empowerment are an extension of the external, that is, elements of the Palestinian local governing structure that was meant to be temporary in nature.
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