National Boundaries, Colonized Spaces: The Gendered Politics of Residential Life in Contemporary Jerusalem (Essay‪)‬

This article explores the gendered politics of residential in contemporary Jerusalem, a highly contested urban center that both Palestinian Arabs and Israeli Jews claim as their national capital. I concentrate on the lives of unmarried, adult Palestinian women and examine their experiences as they move away from often patriarchal family environments in their towns and villages and seek to craft futures of their own choosing in Palestine's most diverse and vibrant city. By examining the gendered dimensions of nationalist politics in Jerusalem, this article details the spatial construction of identity and difference in the context of the Palestine-Israel conflict. What do the political assumptions underlying Israeli military occupation in the city reveal about the multiple ways in which housing and land are sites of exclusion, inequality, and contest? What particular forms of authority and oppression do Palestinian women encounter under foreign rule and what spatial practices do they engage in to resist or accommodate them? The thirty-five women I interviewed in the mid to late 1990s detailed the multiple challenges they confronted as they sought to work, study, and engage in political activism in a city under sole Israeli control. Most of these women came from the roughly 1.5 million strong Palestinian community residing within Israel and holding Israeli citizenship. However, roughly 10 per cent of those I interviewed grew up partially or totally in the territories occupied in June, 1967 (the West Bank and Gaza Strip). The former group were the children and grandchildren of the first Arabs to fall under Israeli rule in 1948. Fluent in Hebrew as well as Arabic, they generally knew Israeli society to a high degree.