Trigger Alert: Killings of Palestinian women during the First Intifada under the colonial gaze

This paper engages with a 13 pages document that was accidently found in the Israel State Archives as part of a research project on “Feminist Archives as a Source of Data about Women and Violence: Records of Sexual Violence and Peace Activism in Israel”. The document, which is the first finding of its kind, is an internal memo produced by Israeli security forces in February 1991, in Hebrew, and is titled “women’s murders during the uprising”. It includes a detailed list of 43 cases of violent killings of Palestinian women by Palestinian armed groups from December 1987 to January 1991 with various statistics. The document was found inside an official file deposited by an administrative unit which operated until 1997, known as the Prime Minister Advisor to Women’s Status. Predating the Oslo Peace Process, it was used by the Israeli diplomatic delegation to the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) held in Vienna in early March 1991 (immediately after the end of the first Gulf War). Building on feminist approaches to the study of colonial archives, the paper explores the domestic political circumstances that may explain the creation of this list of dead women—the increased violent targeting of so-called collaborators inside the Occupied Territories, including women, during the Intifada. In addition, this case highlights the international discursive and affective contexts in which these cases were publicized and used as a diplomatic instrument. I argue that the document tells a story about ‘immoral witnessing’. I claim that Israeli women officials used such lists intentionally as part of a shock diplomacy meant to portray Palestinian men as barbaric, violent and inhumane, in order to minimize the consensus on a proposal draft that called for international protection of Palestinian women and girls. Broader implications of this case will be discussed in relation to the call to decolonize women’s diplomatic history and understanding of security.