Transformative incrementalism: Palestinian women’s strategies of resistance and resilience amid gendered insecurity and neoliberal co-optation

Abstract

Palestinian women have envisioned and enacted resistance and resilience in different ways throughout the long-running Palestinian resistance movement. Strategies have ranged from direct collective actions to the resolute maintenance of everyday life in the face of ongoing occupation, settler-colonialism, displacement and violence. Palestinian women in the occupied West Bank have begun to develop tactics that attempt to negotiate a widespread aversion to ‘illegitimate’ and aid donor-prescribed actions, as well as to the gendered risks with which politically active women must contend. While this approach once encompassed the principle of resilience, recent times have seen the growing rejection of neoliberal resilience narratives in the belief that they normalize and entrench an oppressive status quo. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in the West Bank, this article explores how women’s search for legitimate and feasible modes of resistance and resilience has generated tactics characterized by incrementalism, but which form part of a transformative social change strategy. In so doing, it reveals the dynamic ways in which women constantly renegotiate resistance to violence in Palestine. It also demonstrates how development models based upon neoliberal understandings of resilience exacerbate gendered impacts of insecurity while eroding women’s capacities to withstand them.