Palestinian Women’s Resistance and Resilience Under Occupation

Introduction: Rethinking What Resistance Looks Like

When people talk about resistance in conflict, they usually imagine something visible: protests, armed struggle, or organized movements. But the more I’ve studied this topic, the more I’ve realized that resistance doesn’t always look like that.

Sometimes it’s quieter. More often than not, it’s built into everyday life.

This is what drew me to studying Palestinian women alongside women in resistance during World War II. In places shaped by occupation, restriction, and political violence, women are often talked about only in terms of suffering. While that remains true, it’s also not the whole story.

*What I’m interested in is this question: *How do Palestinian women navigate daily restrictions under occupation, and how do those experiences shape resilience and community networks?

This article is part of an ongoing research project, and it connects closely to my broader work studying women in resistance movements — especially women in World War II. Looking at both contexts together has changed how I think about resistance entirely.

Where This Interest Comes From

Like a lot of people, my starting point wasn’t academic; it was confusion.

When the events of the October 7 attacks happened, I realized pretty quickly that I didn’t fully understand the situation. I had heard about Israel and Palestine before, but not in a way that gave me real context. As the conflict continued, I started paying closer attention and trying to educate myself.

What I found was overwhelming. The more I read, the more I realized that what was happening wasn’t new but rather part of a much longer history of occupation, restriction, and violence that Palestinians have been living with for decades.

That’s when something clicked for me.

A lot of what I was learning started to remind me of the women in resistance movements during World War II. Not in a way that suggests the situations are identical, but in the sense that there were patterns I couldn’t ignore.

In both cases, women were living under extreme constraint, but still finding ways to function, support others, and push back. Often in ways that weren’t immediately recognized as resistance.

Seeing the Patterns

Once I started looking at Palestinian contexts through that lens, I began to notice similar dynamics.

Women are navigating movement restrictions, economic barriers, constant uncertainty, exposure to violence, and expectations shaped by both political conditions and cultural norms.

But at the same time, they’re still holding things together.

They’re maintaining families, building support networks, and creating stability where there often isn’t any. And a lot of what they’re doing doesn’t look like resistance at first; it just looks like everyday life.

Things like organizing community support, preserving cultural identity, finding ways to work around restrictions, and supporting others emotionally and socially.

The more I looked into it, the harder it became to separate “survival” from “resistance.”

That’s really where my research question started to take shape. Because if these everyday actions are actually central to how communities endure, then they deserve to be studied that way, not as background details, but as meaningful forms of agency.

What the Research Shows

Most of the research in this area uses qualitative methods — interviews, ethnographies, and narrative analysis.

That makes sense, because if you want to understand lived experience, you need people’s stories.

For example, some studies show how small, incremental actions — things that might seem ordinary — can actually function as long-term strategies of resistance (Kayali, 2024). Others look at how women make sense of trauma and resilience through shared narratives and community memory (Veronese et al., 2021).

This connects directly to what I saw in my World War II research. In both cases, resistance is often:

• relational
• community-based
• and embedded in everyday routines

What’s Missing

There are also quantitative studies, especially around mental health — looking at rates of anxiety, depression, and trauma.

Those are important, especially for understanding the scale of impact. But they don’t really explain how people are coping or what resilience actually looks like in practice.

One thing I’ve noticed is that mixed-methods research — combining both approaches — is pretty limited in this area.

And it’s not hard to see why. Doing research in conflict zones comes with real challenges:

• restricted access
• safety risks
• ethical concerns
• unstable conditions

But at the same time, that gap matters. Without combining methods, it’s harder to connect personal experiences to larger patterns.

How My Research Is Developing

Since this is an ongoing project, I’m still figuring out how to approach that gap.

Right now, I’m interested in building something that connects:

• qualitative insights about lived experience
• with broader social and structural patterns

Even if I can’t do a full mixed-methods study, I can still bring different types of research together.

The World War II comparison is a big part of that. It helps me step back and see patterns across contexts, not just within one case.

What I keep coming back to is this: Women’s resistance is often not recognized because it doesn’t fit traditional definitions.

Rethinking Resistance

If we only think of resistance as something visible and dramatic, we miss a lot.

We miss the ways that people support each other, maintain stability, adapt under pressure and quietly push against systems that limit them.

In both World War II and Palestine today, women’s roles often fall into these categories.

That doesn’t make their contributions smaller, but it does make them easier to overlook.

Working on this project has made me rethink what resistance actually means.

Palestinian women are often described in terms of vulnerability, but that framing leaves out a lot of what they’re actually doing. They’re not just responding to oppression — they’re actively shaping how their communities survive within it.

Looking at this alongside my research on World War II has made something really clear: there’s a continuity in how women resist, even across very different contexts.

It’s not always visible. It’s not always recognized. But it’s there — and it matters.

Sources

• Kayali, L. (2024). Transformative incrementalism: Palestinian women’s strategies of resistance and resilience amid gendered insecurity and neoliberal co-optation. Security Dialogue.
• Veronese, G., Sousa, C., & Cavazzoni, F. (2021). Survival and resilience among Palestinian women: A qualitative analysis using individual and collective life events calendars. Violence Against Women, 27(6–7), 900–917.
• Gammoh, O., et al. (2024). The prevalence and correlates of depression, anxiety, and insomnia among camp-residing Palestinian women migrants during the outbreak of the war on Gaza. Medicina, 60(8), 1228.