Falastiniyyat: A Century of Palestinian Feminisms

Women have been central to every phase of Palestinian resistance. Here Nada Elia recovers the long-suppressed story of Palestinian women’s organizing from 1929 to the present. Far from being a Western import, local feminism consistently linked personal empowerment with collective liberation, anticolonial struggle with social transformation. In the time of the Mandate, Matiel Mogannam confronted British imperialism through the Arab Women’s Congress. In the following decades, Camille Odeh built Arab American solidarity networks. Their legacy continues today in the work of contemporary activists fighting femicide and pinkwashing throughout the world.

Falastiniyyat rescues Palestinian feminism from obscurity. Furthermore, Elia argues that these activists were pioneers of a uniquely intersectional, antiimperial feminist politics.

Nada Elia is a diasporic Palestinian scholar and activist whose work, both in the classroom and the streets, focuses on exposing and redressing structural systems of oppression. She is the author of Greater Than the Sum of Our Parts: Feminism, Inter/Nationalism, and Palestine. Nada is a founding member of the Palestinian Feminist Collective, and currently serves on its Coordinating Committee.