An American Feminist in Palestine: The Intifada Years

By Sherna Berger Gluck. Temple University Press, 1994, 237 pp. List: $16.95; AET: $13.50.

Reviewed by Pat McDonnell Twair

"It seems difficult for us Jews to shed the mantle of history that has convinced us that we are always the victims, always the just," writes Sherna Berger Gluck in the introduction to her candid report on four personal visits to Israel/Palestine. The daughter of a rabbi, Gluck was an activist on the University of California Berkeley campus in the 1950s. Although her progressive political perspective prompted her to question Israel's role after the 1967 war, it was only after the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon and the subsequent massacre at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps that she spoke out publicly against Israeli policies, and wrote a letter of protest to the Los Angeles Times.

Gluck, who teaches women's studies at California State University at Long Beach, where she established an oral history program, was fascinated after the onset of the intifada on Dec. 9, 1987 by TV images of Palestinian women defying armed Israeli soldiers. Scenes of Palestinian women bringing buckets of stones to rock-throwers or pitching the missiles themselves reminded Gluck of Algerian women fighting for independence a quarter of a century earlier.

Her book is divided into four parts. Each deals with a separate visit Gluck made to Israel/Palestine to visit Palestinian women's institutions and collect the views of women on their roles in the intifada.

On her first visit, from Dec. 25, 1988 to Jan. 8, 1989, Gluck came away outraged over Israeli brutality toward the Palestinians. In this brief first encounter with the Palestinians, however, she was impressed by the network of alternative institutions Palestinians were building, ranging from gardens and agricultural cooperatives to health committees, literacy campaigns and underground schools.

On her second visit, June 3 to June 26, 1989, she explored the possibility that the intifada represented a new model of a nationalist movement in which a vital women's movement was being nurtured simultaneously.

Her third visit, Dec. 27, 1989 to Jan. 24, 1990, included being teargassed during the Hands Across Jerusalem demonstration in which Palestinians, Israelis and peace activists from many nations formed a chain surrounding the disputed city. She concluded: "Whether or not this assault had been planned in advance, as charged, the Israeli authorities had made their point: do not cross the boundary between occupied and occupier; do not harbor the illusion of hope."

She concentrated on living with and interviewing village women, who sometimes challenged her not to impose a Western feminist model on them. She encountered peasant women who proudly described their new sense of empowerment after learning to read and write in six-month literacy courses offered by university students. It was the latter who served as her interpreters, and she later learned they had sometimes coached village women on what to say. For example, one interpreter changed a peasant mother's comments on her aspirations for her daughter's future to a statement that she hoped to educate her daughter to become an engineer. On the other hand, Gluck was surprised to learn for herself that not all women wanted babies, and that the majority of young women vowed they would only marry a man of their choice.

The chapter titles summarize many of Gluck's observations. In "Inside the Greenline: Palestinians Without Hope," she despairs over the lot of Palestinians forced out of their homes in Lydda in 1948 who now live in squatters' camps on the outskirts of Lod, which houses Israel's Ben- Gurion Airport. She describes the misery of these estimated 12,000 Palestinians who have been ignored by Israeli municipal authorities and survive in shanty towns lacking water, electricity or medical clinics. One woman beseeched Gluck: "Write about us in the newspaper...We don't have the same rights [as Israeli Jews]...we want a solution for us." Pointing to a child, she said: "Go see one of the girls there. The rats, they ate her eye."

On the other hand, in the chapter entitled "Kufr Nameh: From Symbol to Concrete Reality," Gluck guides readers through a "liberated village" on the West Bank to meet women who operate cooperatives, sewing and gardening projects and who have hopes for the future.

In the account of her fourth visit in the summer of 1991, Gluck discusses the "Post-Gulf War Era." She revisits Palestinians her readers already have come to know, and are pleased to meet again. She also describes the economic penalties Palestinians paid for allegedly cheering Saddam Hussain's Scud missiles.

This is an exciting, and depressing, book that anyone interested in Palestinians certainly should read.

Gluck personally experienced threats, Israeli soldiers' insolence, freezing weather and blazing summers. She slept in crude huts and shared sparse meals with refugees. Doing so enabled her to produce a book that brings to its readers uniquely personal insight into the intifada experience.

Pat McDonnell Twair is a free-lance writer based in Los Angeles.