ABSTRACT
The chapter examines issues of equality and plural personal status laws in the occupied Palestinian territories. It focuses on the Palestinian women’s movement and the different strategies taken towards legal remedies and advocacy with the Palestinian Authority’s political and legal institutions in the West Bank, with some reference to the Gaza Strip - although this chapter was submitted just after Israel’s genocidal attacks on Gaza began. Textual sources (laws and commentaries, court submissions, and rulings, some of which are unpublished) are used alongside material from interviews and exchanges with figures in the women’s movement, human rights organizations, legal academics and lawyers in the shari’a and Christian courts, and the first woman Head of Shari’a Prosecution, also among the first female shari’a court judges. The different demands on the Palestinian Authority (from a range of domestic and external constituencies and interlocutors) and of the women’s movement mean that there is something of a consensus that while it might have been possible for previous President Yasser Arafat to issue by decree what civil society could consider a more woman-friendly personal status law, for the moment that is no longer a realistic prospect.
