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Salient. Victoria University Students' Newspaper. Volume 39, Number 23. September 20, 1976

Fighters in own right

Fighters in own right

Palestinian women, while at different times have limited themselves to performing "charitable" tasks for their people, have now been forced generally, through the intense political struggle in their homeland, to throw off the chains of their traditional, sexist conditons, and have emerged as fighters in their own right demanding not only national independence and the return of Palestinians to Palestime, but the complete liberation of the Palestinian Arab woman.

Women could never be onlookers. From 1919, when men were imprisoned, hundreds of homes destroyed, and hundreds of children orphaned, when the Palestinians were fighting for self-determination and the right to live in their own homes, and struggling to stop the imposition of the "Jewish state"....women were forced to organise.

From 1919 to 1948, Palestinian women were divided in their activity by their different class stands. The middle classes and bourgeois women were involved in petitioning, organising demonstrations, and joining delegations. The illiterate village women were taking part in the armed struggle in the countryside, to defend their homes and land against the Zionists settler invasions. In the 1936 revolt especially, women played an important part, if only because the vast majority of men peasant guerrillas were in gaol or forced into exile.

The organised women's movement did not reach out from the city to the peasant women. But in 1965, the General Union of Palestinian Women (GUPW) was formed. Every woman who believed in "the revolutionary armed struggle as the only means of liberating Palestine" - was eligible for membership. The aim of the Union is to organise women and put them into service for the revolution. It also aims at putting into practice the programs that help push forward women's struggle for liberation on a social and economic basis.

The Palestinians, because they have no home, because they are refugees, meant that the Palestinian Women's Union suffered a "refugee" problem. Whatever has happened to the Palestinian people has happened to the Women's Union. In 1966, the GUPW was banned in Jordan, so the General Secretariat had to move on to Cairo. It re-opened in Jordan again in 1969, only to be closed down again during the ruthless Jordanian attacks on Palestinians in 1970