Resistance behind closed doors: how Palestinian women fought empire from the home

In a photograph taken in 2002 inside a Palestinian refugee camp near Ramallah, four Israeli soldiers are sitting cross-legged in a family living room. They watch a World Cup football match, snacks in hand, with no visible signs of conflict. The scene appears unremarkable, until one learns the family had been evicted from their own home so the soldiers could watch the game in comfort.

This seemingly casual act underscores a deeper truth: for many Palestinians, the home is not a sanctuary. It is a state of constant intrusion, demolition and dispossession.

The framing is central to a thought-provoking new academic study that re-examines one of the key uprisings in Palestine’s modern history, not from the trenches, but from the kitchens.

Dr Mai Taha, of LSE’s Department of Sociology, seeks to broaden our understanding of political resistance by focusing on domestic life, arguing that the home was not only a site of vulnerability but a vital theatre of revolt.

"...instead of only looking for revolutionaries in the barricades and the mountains, I look for them in the kitchens, in the bedrooms, and in the living rooms.”

Beyond the battlefield

The Arab Revolt of 1936 to 1939 is widely regarded as a pivotal moment in Palestinian political history. It was a nationwide rebellion against British rule and increasing Jewish immigration. Armed insurrection, general strikes, and rural guerrilla warfare were its hallmarks, and men have long occupied centre stage in the story.

But this new research challenges that singular narrative by tracing the role played by Palestinian women in sustaining the revolt - not on the frontlines, but at home.

Dr Taha, who has previously focused on labour movements in colonial settings, was drawn to the domestic sphere as a way of understanding how resistance persisted in daily life. “I return to the 1936 revolution,” she says, “but instead of only looking for revolutionaries in the barricades and the mountains, I look for them in the kitchens, in the bedrooms, and in the living rooms.”

It is in these everyday settings that women cooked for rebels, hid fugitives, smuggled messages and supplies, and tended to the injured. Their unpaid work, often dismissed as merely “domestic”, was essential to the survival of the revolt.

The importance of women's oral history

The study draws from oral histories, literature, and photography. These unconventional sources illuminate the experiences of women whose labour has often been overlooked in traditional accounts.

These women not only bore witness to destruction, they actively resisted it.

“It was incredible to read women’s oral history narratives about the revolution,” Dr Taha recalls, “and the persistence of one story: the British would come to the village, arrest people, smash the pots. They would mix all the food together - rice on sugar on olive oil - then leave.

“This constant invasion of the home space and the violence of wasting the food in this way was probably the most recurrent story across the oral histories, literature on the period and the available images, many of which were colonial collections.”

These women not only bore witness to destruction, they actively resisted it. Their work of feeding, sheltering, and maintaining the rhythms of life in the face of instability allowed the uprising to continue long after many had predicted its collapse, says Dr Taha.

In Marxist-feminist theory, this kind of unpaid domestic labour is known as “social reproduction”. But Dr Taha introduces a new concept, “insurgent social reproduction”, to suggest that, in the Palestinian case, this labour was not just supportive but inherently political.

“If Marxist-feminists showed that, without women’s housework, childcare, and other forms of reproductive labour, workers simply won’t go to the factory,” she explains, “then perhaps it also shows that, without women’s labour, workers won’t ‘go’ to the revolution.”

Homes as sites of tension

The paper explores the long-standing vulnerability of Palestinian homes, not only during the 1936 revolt, but right up to the present day. Since the mid-20th century, thousands of Palestinian homes have been demolished under Israeli military and administrative policies.

Today, families in the West Bank often live under the looming threat of demolition. In Gaza, entire neighbourhoods have been flattened in the course of military operations. And in refugee camps, some dating back to the 1948 exodus, tents have long since transformed into concrete shelters, yet the sense of precariousness remains.

“The Palestinian home,” Dr Taha says, “has always been a site of the most audacious forms of dispossession. But it has also been a place of care, culture, labour and resistance. I argue that the home embodies these contradictions: both a crime scene and a revolutionary space; a site of colonial surveillance and destruction, and a grounding site of labour and reconstruction.”

This research acknowledges the quiet, persistent forms of resistance carried out largely by women—often without recognition.

Who gets to be called a revolutionary?

One of the most compelling questions raised by the research is who counts as a revolutionary. The answer, it seems, is more complex than traditional narratives suggest. This research acknowledges the quiet, persistent forms of resistance carried out largely by women—often without recognition.

“I was surprised,” Dr Taha admits, “by how marginal this socially reproductive labour was seen, even by the women themselves.”

When asked about the role of women in the revolution, many peasant women said, “women did nothing”. And in the next breath they would say, “we cooked for the revolutionaries, climbed up the hills to deliver the food in hiding, we would dress the men in women’s clothes to hide them from the British and we collected donations for the revolutionaries and their families."

A living struggle

The events of the 1936 revolt may feel distant, but the dynamics explored in the study are anything but. The tension between destruction and preservation, occupation and resilience, remains at the heart of life for many Palestinians today.

Bulldozers still roll into Palestinian neighbourhoods, soldiers still enter homes without warning, and women, remain, as the paper argues, on the front lines – not with rifles, but with saucepans, bedtime stories and an unyielding will to persist.

Mai Taha was speaking to Joanna Bale, Senior Media Relations Manager at LSE.

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