By Johann Hari in Gaza
There are many things you expect to find in the cratered, cramped heart of
Gaza City, but a group of proto-Germaine Greers and Betty Friedans would be low
on the list. Yet, I am sitting under a lush green tree with a group of tough old
ladies at the heart of the feminist hub they have built here - and where
hundreds of Gazan women are flocking to find freedom.
In 1989, the women's
rights campaigner Um Ahmad returned to her native Gaza after decades working for
women's groups across the world. "I was determined to do something about the
fact that women were in a much worse position here than even in other Arab
countries," she says.
She found that Palestinian women were trapped between
the savage Israeli occupation and a suffocatingly patriarchal Palestinian
society. She knew there was only one way to free them - by getting them jobs and
hard earning power.
Her proposal to establish an organisation providing jobs
for women was refused by the Israeli occupying authorities, but Ms Ahmad refused
to let this stop her. Risking interrogation and imprisonment, she went ahead and
set up a network for women to make jams and foods in their homes and to sell
them on. In Gaza, the Women's Institute was revolutionary, and jam-making an act
of subversion.
After four years, Ms Ahmad's organisation was finally
legalised. Today - thanks to the Welfare Association, one of
the three charities being supported in this year's Independent Christmas Appeal
- it has a permanent base.
She is sitting with me in the courtyard, watching
women sip coffee and read print-outs from the internet terminals here. If you
shut out the endless car-horns - the tinnitus of the most congested land-mass in
the world - and the simulated explosions of the Israeli sonic booms, this is as
close to tranquil as Gaza City gets.
"Women are suffering most from the
occupation and economic collapse," she explains. "When the husband is out of
work and at home all the time, he starts picking on his wife. For a lot of men,
being unemployed and humiliated by the Israelis makes them show they are still
in control somewhere - over their wives and children. Often violence breaks
out."
Ms Ahmad's priority was to give women a chance to earn money and
achieve independence. That is why she set up a women-only, non-profit clothing
factory, and today as she walks along its floor with me, the 30 women are
engaging in the usual factory-floor banter. They all have a story of how this
centre changed their lives. Leila is a 40-year-old sewing machinist, and as she
steps away from her machine she explains: "I used to live on food and money
subsidies from a local charity. I was stuck at home, staring at the walls and
thinking 'What am I doing with my life?'
"Then a charity worker told me I was
intelligent and I could be a producer, not just a passive recipient - and he put
me in touch with this charity. Now I support my husband and my seven children."
She laughs with a mixture of surprise and glee. "I am convinced that sitting at
home waiting for donations is bad. Going out, fulfilling yourself, being
independent - that is good. I want all women to be able to do this."
Fatima
is a bubbly 18-year-old who works on the knitting machines. She has always
wanted to be a teacher of deaf children, but her parents could not afford to
send her to university - so she is paying her own way as a student while
working. "It's an amazing feeling, to be able to stand on your own feet: to be
an independent woman," she says.
The Welfare Association helps to pay for
these women to make school uniforms for the poverty-wracked children, and to
maintain a bakery. Ms Ahmad says: "The most noticeable thing is that when women
first join our society, they don't speak a lot. They are silent, because that's
how they have been taught to be. But after a while they start to express their
views, and soon they are drawn out of their silence. They want to browse the
internet, see the world out there. It's like a person who has been locked in a
room; then you offer them a window and they want to see more and more."
Ms
Ahmad wants to open more windows - but she needs your money to do it. "When you
help a Palestinian woman, you help all her children," she says. "When you free a
Palestinian woman, you help to free Palestine."
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