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Demography (ICD) and its policies, which will also have to be completely dismantled and
abandoned. The state fortunes squandered on Israel’s in-vitro fertilization procedures and
similar measures can surely be largely redirected, for instance to help empty all of the illegal
settlements on Palestinian land, to resettle the settlers elsewhere, to pull back the expensive
occupation forces, to compensate Palestinian refugees as international law demands, or to
benefit the many poor and unemployed people in Israel today.
In fact, an immediate end to Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestinian territories since
1967, i.e. an implementation of UN Security Council Resolution 242, would defuse the
demographic war, probably more dramatically than anything else. An implementation of UN
General Assembly Resolution 194, demanding the right of return of Palestinian refugees,
compensation for their losses and/or the return of their property, would improve things, as
well. These long overdue legal (in Israel) and policy changes are things that the international
community should and could more strongly encourage and pressure Israel to achieve. 291 They
would, in my opinion, do more than anything else to improve the situation, and to end the
conflict and both its conventional and demographic aspects outright.
The Palestinian National Authority (PNA) is not powerless, although it is severely
limited compared to a genuine executive state power. It could be much more active against
femicide, not only by seeking more actively to apprehend and punish perpetrators but also by
improving laws 292 and encouraging and pressuring civil society to end this gruesome tradition.
And that civil society is not completely dominated by men. I have myself witnessed
the existence of a Palestinian elite which is not entirely male, an elite that employs servants,
drivers, gardeners, and cooks, not unlike the occasional Egyptian under Greek or Roman rule
who had slaves, and the odd black South African, too, who owned slaves under white rule in
the Dutch Cape Colony. There are certainly elite indigenous women in Palestine, whereas I
have yet to find any in the other two apartheid societies. (Despite a certain elite status after the
release from jail of her husband in 1990 and the end of apartheid laws in South Africa in
1991, Winnie Mandela does not really qualify in my view as an elite Black during apartheid.)
This may be significant for female emancipation, which perhaps has a better chance in
Palestine by not having to start from zero. The flip side of this coin is that elitism may at the
same time be more entrenched in Palestinian society as a whole, enabling the supreme
apartheid elites to divide and rule Palestinians more easily than in the other two apartheid
societies.
The PNA could introduce civil marriage, too. What better way could there be to show
that the state of Palestine, as opposed to the state of Israel, is to be non-sectarian, anti-racist,
and secular? It could also probably do more to insist on justice against Israeli aggression,
especially by ending signals to the Israelis and the Americans that it is ready to agree to
injustices in order to reach a negotiated ‘peace’ accord with Israel.
291 Aside from the deep rifts in Palestinian society between men and women, one way in which Israel profits
from the Palestinian ‘honor’ killing system is the concomitant racist stereotyped depiction in the global mass
media of Palestinians and Palestinian society as ‘primitive’, ‘violent’, and ‘brutal’, thus providing a welcome
excuse for Israeli military rule and cruel policies against the subjugated Palestinian population. Another is the
use of sensitive information about Palestinian individuals’ sex-lives and the creation of such information by
Israeli secret services in order to recruit collaborators among Palestinians. Of course, the Israeli system of
oppression against Palestinians is a root cause of poverty, humiliation and despair, driving Palestinians into
activities such as collaboration, extortion rackets, prostitution, or femicide. See McGreal: Web of Betrayal,
Blackmail and Sex that Killed Two Lovers who Turned Informer, 2006; N.N.: An In-depth Look into the Dossier
on Collaborators – Palestinian Security Official: We Arrested 30 Collaborators in Two Months (in Arabic), 2004.
I am not excusing any Palestinian crimes in this footnote, but rather providing an interpretive political and
sociological context. See also N.N.: Dealing with Alleged Child Collaborators in the Occupied Palestinian
Territory in the Spirit of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, 2005. As with Palestinian perpetrators of
femicide, it is my opinion that convicted collaborators should be punished, yet treated under human rights law,
including the right to life.
292 Shalhoub-Kevorkian 2002 concludes her case study analysis of six acts of femicide in the West Bank in the
following direct way: ‘…femicide is tolerated, if not encouraged, by the existing legal code.’