What roles are Palestinian women playing in the building of the state?

How can women voice their concerns and opinions on afuture Palestinian state and develop an agenda for actions to be taken in thecoming months? What is women’s role in political parties? What is women’s rolein the upcoming electoral process?

These were some of the topics discussed on 5-6 July2011 in Ramallah and Gaza City during a UNDP Programme of Assistance to thePalestinian People (PAPP) workshop on the topic of Palestinian statehood andwomen’s involvement to which GPECS has contributed.

Formally recognized Palestinian statehood may beforthcoming, and questions on citizen inclusion have become more sharplyfocused. What such questioning reveals is a striking absence of women from thecurrent Statehood discourse and their invisibility in the public politicalspace that produces it, despite their important contributions over manygenerations. Also clear is the fact that the male political elite, whetherPalestinian or international, fails to consider or reference women’s organizingor to engage with international instruments intended to advance women’sparticipation.

With GPECS support,participants at the workshop benefited from the contribution of two renownedexperts on state building and female participation. Professor Shireen Hassim, aSouth African expert on post-conflict state building and female participation,offered a public lecture titled ‘Genderand the Making of a New Democracy: Some Contentious Issues from the SouthAfrican Experience’, and Spanish expert Clare Castillejo, author of aworking paper titled ‘Building a statethat works for women: Integrating gender into post-conflict state building’,presented her paper’s findings and discussed their relevance forPalestinians. Both speakers offered overviews of the latest comparativeknowledge on gender, statehood and women’s organizing for democraticparticipation, in order to share lessons learned from other transitional andpost-conflict states.

The workshop waschallenging for many participants, but it was also highly successful because itraised Palestinian women’s awareness of the need for immediate and effectiveaction to ensure their visible participation in the statehood process.Participants are preparing recommendations to donors and a publication on Palestinian women and statehood willbe published to mark the 11^th anniversary of UN Security CouncilResolution (UNSCR) 1325 on women, peace and security in October 2011.

Palestinian women arealso revitalising their organizing structures to i) renew a decades-oldcommitments to writing a constitution that includes a clause on equality, ii)consider how they can contribute to inter-Palestinian reconciliation, and iii)consider media and awareness campaigns on a socially inclusive state-buildingprocess. Substantial work still lies ahead, but Palestinian women now feel betterequipped to undertake it.