By Rawan Yousef
Amid rubble, checkpoints, and militarized, occupied skies, Palestinian women continue to resist with a quiet, fierce determination rooted in Sumoud —Arabic for steadfastness. But this isn’t just a cultural trait or national slogan. It is a feminist act. It is survival as resistance, the political embedded in the personal.
The world often imagines resistance in images of protest and confrontation. Yet in Palestine, resistance lives in the mundane: women conducting surgeries in militarized hospitals, enrolling in universities despite a network of checkpoints, women feeding their families under siege, or rebuilding homes demolished by occupation forces, again and again.
This blog draws from testimonies gathered during the Nobel Women’s Initiative (NWI) delegation to Palestine and Jordan in April 2025. The delegation met with over 100 Palestinian women activists, lawyers, caregivers, farmers, artists, and community leaders, each demonstrating that in the face of systematic violence and erasure, they are here.
When we speak of Palestinian women’s resistance, we must break free from the frameworks that seek to make their actions legible only through Western feminist tropes. Resistance here is not always loud. It is sometimes grieving and soft. It is holding one’s ground. One Palestinian feminist in the West Bank told us: “I wake up every day knowing I may be displaced again. My presence on this land, as a woman, is my defiance.” This is reflected by scholars too. For example, Caitlin Ryan argues that Palestinian women’s everyday care work is a deliberate form of political resistance through Sumoud.[1].
This quiet insistence on existence — on caring for others, preserving heritage, and claiming joy despite colonial violence, building a career, trying beekeeping to generate income for a family of ten, or selling vegetables on a blanket in the markets — all these actions are profoundly political. The women we met are not passive victims of conflict. They are deliberate actors navigating a matrix of militarism, patriarchy, and shrinking civic space. Shalhoub-Kevorkian’s work on how daily life in Palestine is securitized, and how women’s ordinary acts are criminalized, reinforces that this quiet resistance is strategic[2].
Since October 2023, the situation has intensified. The deliberate targeting of aid systems, from restrictions on UNRWA to the criminalization of grassroots women's centers, has turned humanitarian assistance into a tool of war. The delegation heard how settler violence, surveillance, and movement restrictions converge with donor conditionalities to undermine feminist organizing. And yet, women adapt. In Shu‘fat refugee camp, a youth worker restructured their entire education program to operate from homes when community centers were raided.
What we witnessed is more than resilience. It is feminist Sumoud: a refusal to be broken or invisibilized. This concept pushes back against the humanitarian gaze that renders Palestinian women as either powerless victims or exceptional heroines. Feminist Sumoud demands we see Palestinian women as whole — political, messy, powerful, and ordinary all at once. Abu-Lughod’s critique of the savior complex in Western feminist discourse helps frame this accurately[3].
This requires a shift in how international feminists show solidarity. It is not enough to center Palestinian voices — we must also challenge the structures that silence them: funding systems that exclude feminist groups, donor frameworks that punish political speech, and media narratives that erase context and history. Daoud’s research on Palestinian women's exclusion from decision-making spaces within Israel underlines the systematic erasure they face even when they resist[4].
The NWI delegation was not about witnessing from a distance. It was about connections. Shared struggles. Mutual learning. The women we met do not need saving. They need the world to listen and act. NWI delegation learned that Sumoud has different meanings for men and women in Palestine, with women, it’s the quite practice of life, no matter what. As Swan argues: “Palestinian men and women interpret and practice sumud differently, with women’s roles in caregiving and community maintenance being central to grassroots peacebuilding, while men’s expressions often align with public resistance and breadwinning, highlighting the necessity of gender-inclusive approaches to peacebuilding[5].
Feminist movements globally must name and resist the systems of apartheid, settler colonialism, and patriarchal violence that underpin the Palestinian reality. This includes pushing back against the co-optation of feminist language by states and institutions that justify militarism in the name of "women’s empowerment."
Palestinian women have long been at the forefront of decolonial feminist thought and practice. They teach us that to resist is to live, to nurture, to remember, and to dream beyond borders, not through grand gestures, but through the defiant persistence of everyday life.
References
[1] Ryan, Caitlin. “Everyday Resilience as Resistance: Palestinian Women Practicing Sumud.” International Political Sociology 9, no. 4 (2015): 299–315
[2] Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, Security Theology, Surveillance and the Politics of Fear (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015).
[3] Lila Abu-Lughod, “Do Muslim Women Need Saving?” (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013).
[4] Suheir Abu Oksa Daoud, *Palestinian Women and Politics in Israel* (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2009).
[5] Swan, Emma. “An Exploration into the Gendered Interpretation of Sumud and Its Subsequent Manifestation in Palestinian Peacebuilding: Towards a Gender Inclusive Model of Peacebuilding.” IPRA Foundation, 2014.
Rawan Yousef is a Palestinian human rights advocate. She has a PhD in Public Policy and an M.A in Political Economy/Development. Rawan has worked in a number of international organizations and United Nations agencies in the past 15 years.