Suha J. Sabbagh

By Janet McMahon

The brilliant West Indian physician and social theorist Frantz Fanon was one of the first to speak of "the other" in colonial society. In The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon wrote of the agonizing ambivalence of the oppressed, and of their struggle to retain their own identity in the face of the insidious and sometimes overwhelming urge to identify with the colonizer and view themselves and their culture as the always inferior "other. " A decade earlier, the French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir wrote, in The Second Sex, of woman as "other, " defined in her own eyes as well as man's by the values and standards of male society.

Dr. Suha J. Sabbagh, director of the Institute for Arab Women's Studies in Washington, DC, know and writes of both worlds. As a Palestinian woman who grew up in Israeli Haifa, she has lived with what she calls "the constant issue of identity" since her earliest years.

The Limits of Co-existence

Growing up in a Christian Palestinian family living in what had become a Jewish neighborhood, the young Suha was aware that her family had "a different set of traditional norms" than her neighbors, who, nevertheless, accorded her family respect. (In part, she believes, this was because they were viewed as "Christians" rather than "Arabs.") Sabbagh learned to accept and appreciate cultural differences, an experience which, she says today, "informed my whole life and prompted me to seek a solution. "

This co-existence, however, "ended at the neighborhood borders, " where Arabs were second-class citizens in every respect, in a society where the Hebrew-speaking majority spoke Arabic only when cursing.

To add yet another degree of cultural confusion, Sabbagh attended a French parochial school whose curriculum "centered around the conquests of Napoleon, " and where she thus received an education that prepared her "to live in Europe rather than the Middle East."

In 1965, Sabbagh came to the US to complete her education, studying, and then teaching, art history in La Crosse, Wisconsin. In the '70s, she moved to Madison to obtain her doctorate in comparative literature. Studying theories of society and culture, "always related to identity, " she wrote her thesis on Frantz Fanon and the cultural aspect of colonization.

It was in 1975, as a student at the University of Wisconsin living and working with other Palestinians, that Sabbagh began to feel "a stronger sense of Palestinian consciousness and identity. " She points out that prior to 1967, Palestinians living in Israel and in what were to become the occupied territories had virtually no contact with each other. Cultural differences had developed from 1948 to 1967 between the more urban Israeli Palestinians and the generally rural West Bank and Gaza Palestinians. The Palestinians living in Israel had lost some of their cultural identity by having to adapt to their new situation. After 1967, with all of Palestine under Israeli control, however, these barriers began to break down.

Sabbagh moved to Washington, DC in 1982 and worked for four years as a researcher at the Institute for Palestine Studies. She then spent a year at Georgetown University's Center for Contemporary Arab Studies doing post-doctoral work on Palestinian women. Looking back, Sabbagh says she made the shift to women's studies at just the right time: the intifada, which erupted a year later, has focused attention on, and changed the lives of, Palestinian women as never before. Indeed, without their heroic contributions, the intifada would not be alive today.

This reality sharply contrasts with the traditional view in the Western media and social sciences of the Arab woman as either a docile victim and shrouded nonentity, or, upon removing her veil, as an exotic sexual object. Sabbagh attributes these stereotypes to the fact that Western observers and "orientalists" based their impressions on the women they were able to meet—typically entertainers and courtesans, and not average Arab women on the street.

Beyond this limited experience, and Western generalization therefrom, Sabbagh cites the ethnocentricity of contemporary American feminism, which perceives itself as value-free but imposes its paradigms e.g., veiled = victim—on cultures not its own, not Western, not white middle-class. Does the feminist concept of "victim" adequately describe a woman whose husband is in prison and who is raising 10 children on no income?

Applying Ideologies

Men, Sabbagh notes, have tended to discuss ideologies, while women have had to apply them. Theory often conflicts with reality. Sabbagh sees the 1967 defeat by Israel of Arab forces as a setback for men and male ideologies, Marxism and Arab nationalism, for example. Men, in an utter daze, were unable to pick up the pieces. It fell to women, who had to be concerned with the practicalities of home, food and raising children, to organize life in the newly-occupied territories.

The institutions created by Palestinian women, moreover, have evolved with the political environment. Before the intifada broke out in December 1987, there existed between 200 and 400 social service agencies on the West Bank, all run by women, usually middle class, with a "top-down" approach, providing jobs and other services to those in need. In the late '70s, development committees, with a " from-the-bottom-up" approach, began to form. In both instances, however, women worked separately from men.

With the onset of the intifada, men and women began to work together. Each neighborhood had its own committees, with women, often the daughters of earlier activists, frequently constituting over half the members and involved in decision- and policy-making as well. This development, Sabbagh states, is "very much a product of the intifada. "

In the Third World, Sabbagh contends, feminism and nationalism go hand-in-hand. As a result, Third World feminism is often "less confrontational" vis-a-vis men precisely because it develops in the context of a national liberation struggle. It does not challenge the patriarchal system, but concentrates on breaking down symbols of gender oppression, for example the dowry.

Indeed, Sabbagh's recognition of and compassion for the situation faced by Palestinian men is an integral part of her understanding of life in occupied Palestine. Particularly since 1967, the authority of Palestinian men has been systematically usurped. The Israeli occupiers have made "every effort to break them. " In order to feed their families, fathers have had to work in degrading circumstances, lining up in "slave markets" to seek work. Caught between their economic situation and the cause of Palestinian nationalism, these men are ashamed in front of their children. "There is nothing worse than that," Sabbagh says.

"But," she notes, "the Israelis did not count on the children," who, seemingly faced with the choice of being humiliated like their fathers or emigrating to other parts of the Arab world, realized that a third alternative was to resist.

While Western feminists often view the family—and certainly the Arab family—as an institution which confines and oppresses woman, Sabbagh maintains that the " traditional family system made the intifada possible, with the whole family and society pulling together to meet the onslaught" of Israeli occupation. Unlike the US, where the individual is the basic social unit, Middle Eastern society is based on the family. Thus the woman's importance in the family extends to the society as a whole.

Moreover, with so many Palestinian men imprisoned, households headed by women are no longer uncommon. The ability of these women to sacrifice their own wishes and raise their children in a hostile environment is not lost upon the men: Sabbagh cites the many poems written by men in prison speaking of their admiration and appreciation of the struggles of Palestinian women.

When asked what Western women can learn from their Third World and Palestinian counterparts, Sabbagh immediately answers, "Respect for the word ,sacrifice,"' adding that it need not be synonymous with "male-dominated," but can be a sign of strength. Indeed, the sacrifices Palestinian women have made on behalf of the intifada have pulled the society together and resulted in a tremendous decrease in domestic violence and divorce.

As they are fighting for their nation, however, Palestinian women also are working to ensure that their gains are permanent. Sabbagh believes their future will be different from that of Algerian women, whose involvement in their revolution, while important, was more symbolic. In the occupied territories, women are building the infrastructures of the new government—today's clandestine educational activities becoming the future Department of Education—and working to change the civil law to reflect and guarantee the new status of women.

A "Natural Direction"

With the many changes in the lives of Palestinian women, and the growing concern on the part of Arab women with how they are perceived by Western feminists and nonfeminists alike, Sabbagh describes the establishment of the Institute of Arab Women's Studies as a "natural direction to take." The IAWS was born in 1989 when 15 women got together for a one-day workshop to make available publications on Palestinian women and "instigate a discussion that makes sense, " as well as an "unlearning process."

Initially, the IAWS plans to focus on the role of women in the intifada. After its first two years, the institute Will study women in other Arab countries as well. To date, it has published one monograph, Images and Reality: Palestinian Women Under Occupation and in the Diaspora*, and will be publishing a study on women, literature and language, and on the poetry of the intifada. Sabbagh describes the IAWS as a "product of hindsight, " and regrets that it was not established earlier, so "an unlearning process would not be necessary. " But the intifada, in addition to its impact on the lives of women in the occupied territories, also forced Arab women to question their role as academic women in the US.

As a feminist and scholar, Suha Sabbagh wants to reach academic as well as popular audiences. She lectures frequently, especially to groups traveling to the West Bank, and wrote a monthly column for The Return magazine. An active member of the Middle East Studies Association (MESA), she hub been involved in debates over the role of Arab women, but is critical of academia's tendency to "isolate itself from real life and the concerns of everyday people," and for not having "an impact on larger society."

In her own case, she has integrated her real-life experience and her academic pursuits. As a result, she is a woman whose ideas are based in reality, and who is committed to putting those ideas at the service of women and men alike.

Janet McMahon is managing editor of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs

*This IAWS publication is available through the AE Book Club Catalog.