The women in this focus group identified early marriage as the greatest obstacle to achieving their dreams. There is no unified family law in Palestine; such matters as marriage, divorce and child custody are dealt with not by civil courts but by Shari'a courts, which adopt different versions of Shar’ia law (شريعة). While the West Bank still employs Jordanian codifications of the Hanafi fiqh (فقه حنفي) tradition of Shari'a interpretation, courts in Gaza employ Egyptian versions of that law [1], although these have been adapted somewhat over the years. Currently, the minimum legal age for marriage in the West Bank is 16 for boys and 15 for girls, while in Gaza it is 12 and 9 respectively [2]. These are calculated in lunar, not solar years; 15 lunar years for girls in the West Bank is in fact 14 years and 7 months in solar years. In practice, however, these laws are applied at the discretion of individual judges, and so there is no guarantee that even these limits will be upheld. In a recent opinion poll, 76.3% of respondents stated that early marriage was an important problem affecting the status of Palestinian women, while 78.7% said it was important to increase the age of marriage. Many women (but not men) must also get their parents' approval of their choice of husband, and one man told the group that he would rather kill his daughter than let her marry someone he did not approve of. Family law is one of the issues that WATC continues to campaign most actively on, and the testimonies of these women confirm that this priority is not misplaced.

WATC-trained women run their first focus group

The mixed-sex focus group in the afternoon had an entirely different atmosphere and highlighted very different issues. Many of the younger, unmarried women felt they could not stay for the focus group if men would be present, and left before the men arrived (in another village it was decided that a mixed-sex focus group could not be held at all). While the women’s concerns had focused largely on their status within the family and lack of access to education, the greatest concern for most of the men who attended was the political situation, and they felt the greatest obstacle to achieving their goals was the occupation. The effects of the occupation can be found in all aspects of life here, and the women did refer to it implicitly – for example, lamenting that they only had enough running water to last for 2 or 3 days each week (a result of the water quota system) – but it was only in the mixed group that it was mentioned by name. It is not that these women are not affected by the occupation, but simply that they feel some of the most pressing problems for them originate from within Palestinian society itself. One woman mentioned that women’s organisations had been more helpful to her than the local council, but that women cannot always take advantage of the services offered, for example if they were invited to the city for a training workshop their families would not let them go.

It is notoriously difficult in the context of national liberation struggles for women to aim criticisms at the national community to which they belong. The perception tends to be that when facing an external oppressor, internal dissent only serves to undermine and weaken the nation. However, Palestine is currently in a state of political disarray in which its internal problems must be confronted before the external ones can be solved. Is it not possible, even probable, that improving the status of women in society will play an important role in securing peace, justice, equality and human rights in the Middle East?