"Palestinian Voices: Feminist Thought As A Tool For Resistance"

First International Conference, June 28-29, 2007

Ms. Hana Hamdan

Ms. Hana Hamdan – is Urban and Regional Planner, Adalah the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel and Candidate for a Ph.D. at Tel Aviv University

The Palestinian women in globalizing city: the case of Jaffa women

Globalized cities are considered to be a site of post industrial production, which primarily includes services development, and connects between advanced services and production centers, and markets in the global network. “Globalizing” cities are undergoing various structural transformations – social, economic, political and spatial – that can have an impact on the identity and belonging of different groups in different places in the city. Today, Tel Aviv-Jaffa (it is noteworthy here that since 1950 Jaffa has been considered, administratively speaking, to be a part of the city of Tel Aviv) is a globalizing city in the process of being formed, as it is the largest employment center in Israel and the location of international companies operating in the field of financial services. By contrast, Jaffa is a neglected neighborhood on the outskirts of Tel Aviv that lost its historical, cultural, social, material and spatial content after 1948.

The various structural transformations that are occurring in Tel Aviv, as a globalizing city in the process of being formed, influence the daily spatial practices and different tactics that Palestinian women employ in their daily lives in Jaffa, and affect their sense of belonging (or of not belonging) to this space. This study regards these tactics to be part of the resistance of women in this globalized space.

New theories of geography deem space to be not just a material, fixed entity, but a dynamic and changing one. Space, according to these theories, is a product of social and power relations. In addition, according to various feminist theories, gender power relations are not composed only of the dichotomous division between women and men, but also comprise diverse, compound rules of control: gender-based, national, class, cultural, etc. Furthermore, women do not constitute a harmonious universal unit, but are members of different groups that belong to various cultural, national and class groups. On this basis, they live with and absorb the space in different ways. Thus, the space of Palestinian women in Jaffa is also a product of gender-based, cultural and national power relations; in other words, the daily spatial practices and movement of Palestinian women in Jaffa are bounded and affected by gender-based, cultural, Arab-Palestinian, and national variables, and by the fact that Tel Aviv is a globalizing city.