by Roula S.

 

Abstract

On September 26, 2019, Palestinian women took over the streets of 11 Palestinian cities in addition to Beirut and Berlin, raising the slogan “We are Stepping Out: No Free Nation without Free Women.” The event followed a devastating series of murders through domestic and partner violence, including 35 women in 2018 and 28 in 2019, the last of which, at the time of protest, was the 19-year-old Israa Ghrayeb, who suffered torture from three family members before her death (Ibrahim, 2019). While this news received Western media attention, the movement that followed it, Tala’at (meaning “We are going out”), received none. Tala’at was not merely an announcement of presence in a masculinized public sphere; its slogan fundamentally reframed the social contract: “there is no free nation without free women” (Marshoud, 2019). The lack of visibility of this unprecedented synchronized historic protest testifies to the fact that those who make history are not the ones who write it.

This paper argues that the Tala’at movement represents a profound act of praxis and transgression, functioning as a moment of collective conscientização—the achievement of critical consciousness (Freire, 1970). By disallowing the Western co-optation of feminized suffering and reframing the equation, Tala’at positioned itself as a practice of freedom (hooks 1994). Palestinian women’s positionality is complex: they firmly stand as sisters to their Palestinian brothers within national liberation while at once surviving patriarchal violence inflicted through, at times, these same men, and the systems installed by local elites, all exacerbated by Israeli occupation, legislation, and a continuous project to fragment Palestinians (Seghaier & Le Renard, 2023; Ibrahim, 2019).

This paper studies the multiple scales of solidarity among Palestinians in Palestine, Palestinian women in the diaspora, and the larger anti-colonial movement, noting the various contradictions standing against Tala’at, including the separation of national liberation from societal liberation (Abdelhamid, 2020), the reliance on a ‘single superior cause’ in decolonization discourse, and the politics of ethnic cleansing (Abdelhamid, 2020). Despite these obstacles, Tala’at succeeded: the movement produced a rupture in solidarity work in two ways, first by moving beyond the framing of national liberation as a cause of ideological primacy that obscures all other issues as secondary, and second, by allowing cross-border and transnational unorthodox comparison with the realities of other women, outside the immediate context of settler-colonialism. Rather than promoting the plight of Palestinian women as exceptional and above comparison, the movement opted to transgress those boundaries from below.   

 

Introduction

On September 26, 2019, Palestinian women took over the streets of 11 Palestinian cities in addition to Beirut and Berlin, raising the slogan “We are Stepping Out: No Free Nation without Free Women,” or, in Arabic, “طالعات: لا وطن حرّ دون نساء حرّة.” The event followed a series of murders through domestic and partner violence targeting women: In 2018, it was a devastating toll of 35 women, followed by 28 murders in 2019, the last of which at the time of the protest was the 19-year-old Israa Ghrayeb (Ibrahim, 2019). The teen had suffered torture and humiliation at the hands of three family members and was communicating her fear to her friends, eventually filming the abuse she endured. Worried for her well-being, Palestinian women and organizers circulated the news and images widely, aiming to bring it into public attention to break the silence and rescue the young woman. Yet, institutions were complicit in the violence which eventually resulted in her death: the hospital to which she was admitted ignored her outcries for help and allowed her family–her very abusers–to forcefully remove her from the healthcare facility without her consent. Other public authorities have similarly ignored the now publicly known case of Israa as a private family affair. 

It is an appealing racist trope for Western media to cover violence and abuse of women in the Middle East. Israa’s case has received wide attention. Nevertheless, the movement that followed it, Tala’at, received none except for a few Arabic-language alternative outlets aiming to archive the history of our movements. Palestinian women were not merely stepping out to break the dichotomy of the private feminized sphere and the masculine-owned public one.  This would have been no news, for Palestinian women have always been part of resistance movements in homes and on the streets. Tala’at did not only serve to denounce femicide by hijacking the public space, but also to refuse a narrative that pits women’s issues against those of national liberation (Marshoud, 2019; Zaqout, 2020).

Herein, I argue that the Tala’at movement resonates with a radical, collective act of Freirean praxis and hooksian transgression, fundamentally rupturing the nationalist discourse that historically subordinates societal liberation to the ‘single superior cause’ or ideological primacy of national liberation from settler-colonialism. Talaat understood Palestine as a feminist cause, one that is purposefully ignored in multitudes of white feminist spaces. The lack of visibility of this unprecedented, synchronized historic protest testifies to the fact that those who make history are not the ones who write it.

 

Theoretical Framework: Praxis and Transgression

The Tala’at movement was not only a political movement but also a profound educational and liberatory act. By synthesizing the core tenets of Paulo Freire and bell hooks, I argue that Tala’at represents an embodied, non-institutional pedagogy of liberation that fundamentally challenges oppressive hierarchies both external and internal to the Palestinian community. This framework demands we understand Palestinian women’s mobilization not as derivative of Western feminist thought, but as indigenous praxis emerging from the specific conditions of settler-colonial occupation and patriarchal violence. This praxis simultaneously decolonizes both nation and gender.

Prior to drawing such an analogy, I had complex feelings about explaining Tala’at’s pedagogical value through a Southern, rather than local, framework. However, Tala’at itself is a critique of exceptionalism and an invitation to solidarity across contexts, which makes the analogy ethically possible. 

 

Freirean Conscientization and the Refusal of Silence

The oppressed move from being submerged in a culture of silence to becoming critical agents of their own history through what Freire terms conscientização, or a critical consciousness. It is the deepest phase of learning, where the oppressed realize the socio-historical construction of their reality and their capacity to transform it (Freire, 1970). Tala’at translated this into its slogan and march as a collective attempt to rename and reshape reality, directly challenging what Freire identifies as the “culture of silence” that characterizes oppression. The movement’s insistence that “there is no free nation without free women” represents precisely the kind of “reading the world” that Freire argues must precede and accompany “reading the word.” 

Critically, Tala’at rejected the “banking concept of education” (Freire, 1970, p. 61), in which knowledge is deposited into passive recipients who are expected to store, file, and accept it without question. The international media’s coverage of Israa Ghrayeb’s murder exemplified this banking model: Western audiences were offered images of Palestinian women’s suffering to be consumed as evidence of cultural backwardness, deposited into existing colonial narratives without analysis of structural violence or recognition of Palestinian women’s agency. As hooks (1994) argues in her feminist engagement with Freire, this banking model is deeply gendered: women of the Global South are perpetually positioned as objects of knowledge rather than subjects who produce it. Tala’at refused this objectification by generating knowledge from below, where reality is understood as process and transformation rather than static condition. The synchronized protests across eleven cities functioned as a collective dialogical encounter, the very foundation of Freirean pedagogy, where participants named their reality together and strategized collectively for its transformation.

The movement emerged from concrete action, taking to the streets, which brought to the surface the reflection on the relationship between patriarchal violence and national fragmentation, which in turn reinforced the demand that societal liberation must be simultaneous with national liberation. This cycle directly counters Fatah’s strategy of postponement, which Freire would recognize as a form of what he calls “false generosity” (Freire, 1970, p. 45), an offer of liberation at some future date, contingent on the oppressed proving themselves worthy. As Weiler (1991) notes in her feminist critique of Freire, such postponement is particularly insidious when applied to gender liberation, as it assumes women can wait for freedom while men cannot. Tala’at’s praxis asserts that there can be no authentic national liberation that reproduces internal hierarchies of domination, a position that true liberation is not a gift bestowed by leaders but “a mutual process” requiring the transformation of all oppressive structures simultaneously.

Tala’at’s slogan and march were a collective attempt to rename and reshape reality. The multitude of interviews they have done on local and regional radio shows, where they insisted that the focus is not the mere fact of women taking to the streets, but national liberation, is evidence of their refusal to be legible through a facile and celebratory women’s rights-centric narrative. 

In the same vein, Tala’at functioned as an extraliterary, public form of education. Tala’at is a powerful pedagogy of liberation enacted outside of formal institutions. 

 

bell hooks and the Pedagogy of Transgression

If Freire (1970) provides the framework for conscientization, bell hooks (1994) offers the language of transgression: the willful crossing of boundaries imposed by interlocking systems of domination. Education is the practice of freedom, a space where boundaries can be challenged and transformed. Crucially, hooks critiques Freire’s occasional disregard of gendered dynamics while embracing his liberatory vision, modeling the very kind of critical engagement that Tala’at enacts toward Palestinian nationalist discourse. As hooks writes, she came to Freire’s work “as a young Black woman” who recognized both its revolutionary potential and its limitations, choosing to take what was useful while refusing what reinforced patriarchy. This mirrors Tala’at‘s relationship to Palestinian national liberation ideology, neither wholesale rejection nor uncritical acceptance, but rather a transformative engagement that centers women’s liberation as constitutive of, not secondary to, decolonization.

Tala’at’s act of transgression moved beyond three critical boundaries simultaneously, embodying what hooks (1984) in Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center identifies as the revolutionary potential of those who occupy multiple margins. First, they moved beyond the colonial gaze by asserting their agency and political complexity. Palestinian women rejected the “victim” narrative imposed by Western media and scholarship, thereby transgressing the boundary of othering that Mohanty (1988) critiques in “Under Western Eyes.” They refused to be what Makau Mutua (2001) terms the perpetual “victims”, requiring Western “saviors” to rescue them from their own “savage” men, as brown and as occupied as they are. This transgression rejects the colonial feminist framework that uses women’s oppression in the Global South to justify imperial intervention while ignoring Western complicity in creating conditions for that oppression. 

Second, Tala’at transgressed the patriarchal-nationalist ideological trajectory that has dominated Palestinian organizing with its official representative authority. By demanding “No Free Nation without Free Women,” Tala’at participants insisted on societal liberation now, refusing the temporal boundary set by male-dominated national movements that position women’s freedom as a luxury to be addressed after decolonization. This was a profound transgression against the accepted hierarchy of struggles, directly challenging what hooks identifies as the patriarchal tendency to rank oppressions and demand that women choose between their identities. As hooks (1984) argues, white Western feminism has historically asked women of color to choose between racial justice and gender justice, while nationalist movements ask them to choose between national liberation and women’s liberation. Tala’at refuses this false choice entirely, insisting that these struggles are inseparable. This resonates with what Lugones (2010) terms “decolonial feminism,” which understands gender itself as a colonial imposition and therefore insists that decolonization must include the dismantling of colonial gender systems.

Third, Tala’at opposed political fragmentation. By synchronizing protests across Palestinian cities, refugee camps, and the diaspora from Ramallah to Beirut to Berlin, Tala’at transgressed the physical and political boundaries imposed by the occupation, creating an engaged pedagogy that transforms fragmentation into solidarity. The Israeli occupation’s strategy of fragmenting Palestinian territory through checkpoints, walls, and separate legal regimes for different Palestinian populations aims to prevent precisely this kind of collective consciousness and coordinated action. Tala’at’s simultaneous mobilization across these manufactured divisions demonstrates what Sandoval (2000) calls “oppositional consciousness,” or the ability to perceive and resist multiple forms of oppression simultaneously while building coalitions across differences. This geographical transgression mirrors a theoretical one: refusing the boundaries between refugee women, women within the 1948 borders, women in the diaspora, or in Gaza, or in the West Bank, to assert a unified Palestinian feminist consciousness.

 

Historical Context and Framing of Palestinian Women’s Feminism

Women “of Honor” for Colonizer and Colonized

Since the 1930s, the Palestinian ideologues linked national liberation with the struggle against what is often dubbed as societal “backwardness.” This is no different than what the Algerian Front for National Liberation wanted for their society as a prerequisite to liberation (Pontecorvo et al., 1966), or what W.E.B. Du Bois had argued for in the “Philadelphia Negro” (1973). Whether they understood the needed internal societal reform as a mode of uniting the community or the constituency, or eradicating areas of weakness that invite intervention, or defensive response to accusations of criminality and perverted morality, they all agreed that the community seeking liberation must have collective norms and act on ethical standards beyond reproach. Yet, the Fatah movement took a different path: it was adamant about postponing internal social justice in favor of national liberation. (Abdelhamid, 2020, p.98) Fatah squandered opportunities to establish an infrastructure for change consistent with the socialist legacy of the Palestine Liberation Organization; it did not seek to consolidate national unity in the face of the occupation. Instead, it retained the old Jordanian and Egyptian laws, which were no longer in effect in the two countries, such as virginity as a mitigating factor in the murder of women, among other elements defining so-called crimes of passion or honor. (Abdelhamid, 2020)

Moreover, Fatah did not utilize the Palestinian educational curricula to awaken a critical sense in the students, but rather relied on memorization and regurgitation, restricting critical engagement with texts. Although Abdelhamid (2020) perceives this act as an expression of refusal of modernity, it is aligned with systems of control and docilization of a colonized subject, all while maintaining the dominance of customs over civil law. I argue that the effects of their governance choices are not coincidental, and the fragmentation of the Palestinian society it induced is rather by design: leaving the patriarchal, familial, and tribal authority unchallenged creates divisions amongst Palestinians, whether by family, local authority, custom, or among the populace at large based on gender, belonging, and other facets of identity. At the same time, it claims to stand against Western ideals and institutions, those same ideals and institutions that Israel capitalizes on in portraying itself as the only democracy in the Middle East. This means that while in discourse, Fatah might appear to have stood against foreign ideals and agendas, it has only served them by fragmenting its constituency, weakening representation, and aligning closely with the needs of the Israeli market. Furthermore, the superficial alignment with patriarchally interpreted tribal and religious ideals created a competition towards reactionary social transformation between Fatah and Hamas. It is no coincidence that the occupation authorities promote these same social norms of clannishness and patriarchy to their service. These are obvious in the speeches of the former IOF Arabic spokesperson, calling on the honor of Palestinian men to protect their land, but protect their women and their honor, and tweeting on April 5, 2018 to an Arabic speaking audience that “a virtuous woman is an honorable woman who cares about the well-being of her home and children, setting a good example for them. A wicked and dishonorable woman, however, cares nothing for this and behaves with a barbarity that has no connection to femininity, unconcerned with society’s contemptuous view of her.” The alignment of the IOF forces with Fatah’s approaches to a Palestinian “woman’s place” contributes to the fragmentation of the internal fabric of society. 

Organizing Tala’at was not without struggles. In her ethnography of the women organizers behind the initiative, Zaqout (2020) highlights a central tension shaping Palestinian feminist mobilization: initiatives often aspire to inclusivity but remain limited in representation and reach. Interviewees described the contemporary feminist scene as struggling to connect with women from rural areas, refugee camps, and less-educated backgrounds, raising concerns about credibility and trust. This gap is tied to the unresolved relationship between the personal and the political: organizing that prioritizes public resistance can overlook everyday gendered realities—household labor, caregiving, and social constraints—that shape women’s ability to participate. Bridging this divide by treating the personal as political could expand participation and make activism more responsive to women’s lived needs. At the same time, safety concerns function as a “dual threat”: activists must protect themselves from political repression and social backlash, yet this caution can produce ideological selectivity and restricted membership, limiting inclusivity. Zaqout further argues that mobilization strategies themselves deepen this challenge. Initiatives often mobilize reactively around moments of political crisis rather than through sustained grassroots organizing, which weakens constituency building and reinforces a middle-class, educated activist base that enters and exits street politics quickly. Without addressing women’s subordination across the home, family, marketplace, and state, participation in public activism remains uneven; and without broader grassroots work—including engaging men in struggles against gendered oppression—feminist organizing risks remaining fragmented, momentum-driven, and unable to consolidate a durable, mass movement.

Whose Feminism?

Across occupied societies in the Global South, feminism is frequently perceived as a Western colonial import that imposes external frameworks onto communities with distinct cultural practices, priorities, and forms of resistance. As Mutua’s (2001) proposed “savages, victims, and saviors” metaphor demonstrates, Western human rights discourse, including mainstream feminism, often positions Global South communities as backward oppressors needing salvation from enlightened Western intervention. This framing erases indigenous women’s own agency and existing forms of resistance while centering Western feminist concerns that may not align with local struggles. It is a burden that occupied and racialized women carry, as they must think twice before critiquing their own counterparts, the “savages” to their “victims,” appealing to the imperial masculinity of their self-proclaimed saviors.  Western feminism often fails to account for the entanglement of patriarchy with settler colonialism, occupation, and neoliberal governance that characterizes Palestinian women’s lived reality. By doing so, it promulgates the conception that feminism itself is a Western imposition and that aligning our demands with it equates to aligning with the oppressor. For instance, it is no secret that “settler violence is a formative factor in the Israeli feminist and queer self who is heavily invested in the promulgation of Israel’s pink image” (Alqaisiya, 2023, p. 103). The overt purple washing and pinkwashing that Israel engages in alienates indigenous women and queer people from legibility as revolutionary subjects. 

The Israeli alleged feminist propaganda intently creates false binaries between cultural authenticity and women’s rights for the occupied community, investing in local patriarchal forces to weaponize gender politics. The matter is worsened by Western-backed NGOs: while promoting gender equality, they have often operated through neoliberal frameworks that co-opt feminist language while depoliticizing resistance and fragmenting collective struggle (Kayali, 2025). When feminism arrives packaged with donor funding, professionalization, and individualist frameworks that ignore structural violence, it becomes, as Seghaier and Le Renard (2023) observe in Lebanese intersectional mobilizations, a tool that can actually undermine solidarity among oppressed groups. This type of organizing also “maintains a victim narrative, through which economic gains are attained” (Abu Assab et al., 2020, p. 7), increasing a mercantile competition that moves away from serving the actual needs of the people allegedly represented. 

Furthermore, Kayali’s (2025, p. 782) analysis of resilience in Palestine complicates its frequent use as a neutral or empowering concept by situating it within neoliberal governance. While resilience is often framed as the capacity to “bounce back” or adapt to crisis, global development institutions have operationalized it as a strategy that shifts responsibility for survival and care onto individuals and communities, particularly in contexts of protracted conflict and economic precarity. In the Palestinian case, donor-driven programs that emphasize self-reliance, entrepreneurship, and community-based service delivery risk normalizing structural hardship rather than transforming the political and economic conditions that produce it. Although resilience is sometimes framed as “transformative,” in practice, it can depoliticize struggle by prioritizing adaptation over resistance and by measuring success through technocratic indicators rather than changes in power relations. This tension highlights the need to distinguish between resilience as survival within constraint and resilience as a collective, culturally grounded process that can support political transformation. 

As in any colonial context, packaging action as feminism becomes suspect: people suffering under occupation experience it through a number of patronizing ways. For example, white savior narratives and their demand to docilize the oppressed into a perfect victim (el-Kurd, 2025), positioning feminism as yet another enemy. Similar dynamics are evident in the International Financial Institutions’ developmental plans to mainstream gender. Local communities correctly identify how certain Western feminist interventions serve imperial interests (Heinrich Böll Stiftung, 2023). This contributes to what is known today as the anti-feminist backlash, whereby, in addition to reactionary powers, legitimate anti-colonial anger is redirected toward attacking women’s liberation itself rather than distinguishing between indigenous feminist practice and colonial appropriation.

The solution, as articulated by movements like Tala’at, reimagines feminism as inherently anti-colonial and rooted in local knowledge systems. Stagni (2024) argues that Tala’at’s significance lies precisely in bringing feminism “to the core of the Palestinian national liberation struggle” rather than treating it as separate or secondary, demonstrating how indigenous feminism refuses the Western dichotomy between national and gender liberation.

Global South feminists insist that liberation must be conceived holistically—simultaneously addressing the interlocking systems of colonialism, capitalism, patriarchy, and racism. When feminism is perceived as Western, it becomes a tool of division; when reclaimed as indigenous practice emerging from communities’ own histories of resistance, it becomes essential to decolonization itself.

 

Rupture, Rearticulation, and the Reformulation of Solidarity

Rupture: the critique

This was not simply women taking to the street, which, when those women are Arab, is often celebrated as a victory in itself because it satisfies the Western gaze. Palestinian women have always taken the street; Tala’at was no precedent. Their revolts and engagement in political action, including armed struggle usually conceived as masculine, are evident and undisputed (Lucero, 2018; Carian, 2025). This time, however, was different. It was impossible to read this as a mere hijacking of public space by placing women’s bodies in a masculinized sphere. Such a reading is superficial and misses the political project of Tala’at. It co-opts a radical action by rendering it docile and palatable to the colonial gaze.

That gaze is only capable of highlighting Southern women’s struggles when those women appear as victims of their own Southern, brown, and Black men—the “savages.” It archives these struggles as evidence of Western superiority, sustaining the civilizational narrative of rescue and the duty of attending to white men and women’s burden. Tala’at disrupted this equation. Their positionality is complex: they stand as sisters to Palestinian men within national liberation while simultaneously surviving the patriarchal violence reproduced through social structures, local elites, and governing arrangements shaped under occupation and fragmentation (Ibrahim, 2019; Seghaier & Le Renard, 2023).

This very same local elite was imposed through Israeli occupation, legislation, and a continuous project to fragment Palestinians and obstruct their material and symbolic unity. Palestinian women’s freedom is not parallel to national liberation—it is constitutive of it. National liberation moves through feminist, decolonial struggle, and solidarity. To dismiss this complexity is to reproduce a racist trope that casts imperial masculinities and white feminism as morally and culturally superior. Whether one can wear a bikini in Gaza should have no bearing on the fact that all Gazans should live. To imagine that solidarity is only afforded to women so long as they remain a perfect victim of their own men at a time of colonial genocide is ludicrous and evil. To condition solidarity on women’s performance of perfect victimhood at a time of colonial genocide is not only analytically flawed—it is ethically indefensible. Such a discourse and the action that accompanies it made for a dysfunctional civil society represented by partisan local NGOs and other organizations plagued by funder restrictions (Abu-Assab et al., 2020; Ibrahim 2019). Palestinian women had no faith in such a civil society that replaced movement building and organizing by professionalized 9-to-5 activism in accordance with budget lines. Tala’at emerged from precisely this disillusionment. 

The Rearticulation 

National liberation is an endeavor far larger than the Palestinian Authority or ruling elites. However, since the 1960s, dominant political actors—including Fatah and, at times, leftist parties seeking accommodation with power—have delinked national liberation from societal transformation (Abdelhamid, 2020). Their discourse has relied on the notion of a “single superior cause,” before which all other justice claims must recede. Feminist demands were dismissed as distractions or, worse, betrayals. 

This posture was reinforced through the framing of feminism as a colonial intrusion—an argument historically mobilized to equate women’s rights with Western threat (Heinrich Böll Stiftung, 2023). At the same time, Israeli governance has institutionalized fragmentation. What we first spoke of in Arabic as a struggle of national liberation, a process in which Palestine was the last colony in a decolonizing SWANA region, had then become an Arab-Israeli conflict, and later a Palestinian-Israeli conflict, and later a Hamas-Israel war. The legal classifications of Palestinian land as a West Bank and Gaza strip further shrink down the scale of the cause. Identity regimes together strengthened sectarian and kinship hierarchies that serve both occupation and patriarchal local elites (Abdelhamid, 2020). Another piece of evidence for the latter is the Israeli policies’ inclusion of sect on ID cards and the legal classification system, to strengthen the legibility of differences amongst Palestinians. Social stratification was an ongoing project since the Zionist redesign of the Palestinian peasantry and workers, leaving a disenfranchised class and a reactionary local elite as colonial administrators (Kanafani, 1972, 2023). All of the above points to the purposeful politics of fragmentation, benefiting the occupation and the patriarchal local elite (Abdelhamid, 2020).

Against this landscape, Tala’at reformulated the Palestinian political project. Palestinian women named a reality in which they face internal forms of domination—medical patriarchy, discriminatory legislation, and gendered violence—while also confronting occupation that treats Palestinians broadly, and women specifically, as demographic and security threats (Seghaier & Le Renard, 2023). The slogan “No free nation without free women” foregrounded the indivisibility of rights and exposed the logic of postponement as a tactic of power. In particular because of what is conceived of as the biopolitical demographic threat (Le Renard, 2023). The political slogan of Tala’at puts women at the front and center of the movement, showcasing that the rights are indivisible and that the fragmentation of causes in favor of the superior cause is nothing but an old tactic of power and war. It was also an imaginative exercise of a free Palestine, one that is democratic, fosters minority rights, treats people with dignity and respect, and does not deprioritize causes but understands oppression as intersecting and liberation as intersectional.

 

Exercise in Solidarity: Specificities without Exceptionalism 

Under the occupation, Palestinians are fragmented and barred from freedom of movement. It is especially the case for women who suffer additional precarity and barriers of access to one another. Understood as security targets and threats, connecting among women is a difficult endeavor. However, Tala’at succeeded in spreading the movement across 11 cities in Palestine and an additional two (Beirut and Berlin) outside of its territory to include the Palestinian diaspora. (Marshoud et al. 2020) It was a decentralized, non-hierarchical movement that allowed each Palestinian woman and each city to specify the slogans of the protest to its context. It allowed each participant to lead and join from their “situated knowledge” (Haraway, 1988), locality, and material ability, with some of these cities being literally walled off from one another, with the path between them infested with checkpoints. Tala’at challenged the geography of occupation and the modes of resistance, and proved non-hierarchical organizing models to be viable and potent.  

Furthering the protest to countries where Palestinians suffer protracted refuge (Hanafi, 2014), a situation of continuous limbo spanning decades without hopes of “resettlement” or illusion of “permanent solutions”, Tala’at also sent an important message that, whereas grand causes have specificities, they are not incapable of finding similarities. They are not above comparison and are not stuck in a discourse of exceptionalism. It is true, Palestine is the last colony. However, Palestinians in the diaspora are concerned just the same with the decolonization of Palestine. As such, Palestinians in Lebanon adopted the slogan by saying “There is No Return without Free Women,” indicating that their right of return can only be accomplished within broader freedoms. Furthermore, Palestinian organizers in Lebanon extended their discourse to discuss the xenophobic and racist legislation and context they navigate in the country where three of their generations are born without any civil rights, being banned from 72 syndicated jobs, unable to bring building materials into the camps, facing obstetric violence and multitudes of forms of violence on every conceivable scale (Seghaier, 2024). 

Within 12 camps in Lebanon, some of which are literally walled off and besieged by Lebanese Security Forces, Palestinians are isolated from their own and from the neighboring cities. They have thus addressed isolation, an isolation they also share with migrant domestic workers, women, Black, Indigenous, Asian, migrant, impoverished, working in near-slavery conditions. These migrants are under similar nativist laws within the country of migration or refuge in order to install a “demographic sectarian balance” by keeping nationality linked to the interest of the power sharing Lebanese elite (Seghaier, 2024). So Palestinian women in the diaspora called for their liberation, too (Ibrahim, 2019). In Lebanon, Palestinians suffer from displacement from their land and the additional layer of displacement from the country of refuge, a situation of bare life and a permanent state of exception. They addressed questions of labor, migration, healthcare, and law, to mention a few. All of these are paths to liberation at home and transnationally through the solidarity of peoples and intertwinement of causes. 

 

The Pedagogy of Refusal and Radical Presence

In addition to the hooksian framework, Tala’at employed what Grande (2004) calls “Red pedagogy”—a decolonial approach grounded in indigenous knowledge and resistance. Western critical theory, even when liberatory, risks re-centering Western epistemologies as universal measures of knowledge (Smith, 1999). 

Palestinian women have long enacted forms of praxis recognizable as conscientization: sumud practiced in homes, preservation of cultural memory, and education under occupation. Generations of organizing—from the Palestinian Women’s Union in the 1920s to First Intifada committees—prefigure Tala’at’s politics. What distinguishes the movement is its explicit refusal of the nationalist bargain that subordinated gender liberation to national liberation. This refusal emerges not from imported feminist individualism but from recognizing occupation and patriarchy as co-constitutive systems (Amadiume, 1987; Oyěwùmí, 1997).

The movement’s pedagogy reflects what Darder (2002) describes as a “pedagogy of love” as revolutionary commitment rather than sentiment. Chanting “No free nation without free women,” participants articulated love for a Palestine not yet realized, a refusal of partial freedom, and a demand for full humanity. This resonates with hooks’ insistence that love is a political practice requiring transgression and risk (hooks, 1994).

Tala’at also enacted what Simpson (2014) terms a “politics of refusal.” It refused Western media’s demand for the suffering victim narrative, nationalist demands for postponement, NGO logics of professionalization, and the binary between “authentic culture” and women’s rights. This refusal itself functioned pedagogically, teaching that liberation requires rejecting the terms imposed by power.

At the same time, the movement embodied what Nnaemeka (2004) calls “nego-feminism”: negotiation rooted in strength rather than subordination. Palestinian women negotiated tactics and coalitions, but not their foundational demand. They negotiated with Palestinian society—not with occupation or patriarchy—modeling engaged pedagogy as collective transformation.

Tala’at also exemplified Freire’s notion of cultural action for freedom (Freire, 1970). Public space—traditionally masculinized—was transformed into a site of feminist pedagogy where thousands learned, debated, and imagined liberation together. These spaces existed outside formal institutions—no schools, NGOs, or parties—demonstrating the potency of popular education under conditions of fragmentation.

The slogan itself also operated pedagogically. “No free nation without free women” condensed complex political analysis into a generative phrase that invited ongoing dialogue. It functioned simultaneously as a statement, demand, and challenge—forcing confrontation with the contradiction between resisting occupation and reproducing patriarchy. In Freirean terms, it became a generative theme: language emerging from lived reality that contains within it both contradiction and possibility.

 

Conclusion

Ultimately, Tala’at represents the production of indigenous feminist knowledge through collective praxis.  They created pedagogy from resistance, and articulated liberation from the specific conditions of their multiply-occupied existence—occupied by settler colonialism, occupied by patriarchy, occupied by neoliberal governance. This knowledge production centers what the Combahee River Collective (1977) identified as the revolutionary potential of those facing interlocking oppressions: Palestinian women’s analysis emerges from experiencing simultaneously the violence of occupation, patriarchy, economic exploitation, and Western imperial feminism’s erasure.

Finally, the Palestinian cause is not singular in its trend of postponing the hierarchization of struggles within one national or historic community. In fact, the de-prioritization of minoritized justice plights is a tale as old as time. It is echoed in the “Am I not a man and a brother?” as formulated in the Wedgwood anti-slavery medallion and in “Ain’t I a woman?” the rhetorical exclamation of Sojourner Truth. It is shouted through a transnational action, there is “un violador en [nuestro] camino” on multitudes of scales, which requires the reformulation of liberation priorities and elaboration of true solidarity and sisterhood. 

The theoretical framework of praxis and transgression, then, is not imposed on Tala’at but rather emerges from it. Freire and hooks provide useful language for describing what Palestinian women enacted, but the movement itself produces theory that exceeds and challenges their frameworks. It demonstrates that indigenous feminist movements in the Global South are not derivative applications of Western critical theory, but rather sites of knowledge production that offer insights unavailable from positions of single-axis oppression or metropolitan privilege. Tala’at teaches that liberation pedagogy must be simultaneously anti-colonial, anti-patriarchal, anti-capitalist, and anti-imperialist—not as separate struggles to be coordinated, but as a singular struggle against interlocking systems of domination that can only be understood and transformed from the margins they create.

 

Work Cited

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