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Edna Erez and Anat Berko
These conflicting demands, together with Palestinian women’s gender and political
oppression (Berko and Erez, 2007) 14 , and the masculine nature of Palestinian
terrorist organizations with which women have to interact (e.g. Hasso, 2005;
Patkin, 2004), provide the context for analyzing Palestinian women’s involvement
in terrorism and the response of the Israeli legal system, including the aftermath of
that response.
Methodology
The data for the study were derived from multiple sources which included in-depth
individual and group interviews of the parties involved in Palestinian terrorism and
responses to it; observations of the military court proceedings which try women
security offenders; and observations of detained or incarcerated women security
offenders in the Israeli prisons. Court indictments were examined to validate the
content of the women’s interviews. No disparities were discerned between the data
collected through interviews and the information documented in the participants’
files.
The interviewees included sixteen Palestinian female security prisoners who agreed
to participate in the study and who were interviewed between February 2004 and
November 2006. 15 In-depth individual interviews of the women took place in two
separate wings of the prison in which most security violators served their
sentences; two of the sixteen women were interviewed in the general prison to
which they were transferred due to disciplinary or security problems. 16 Protocols of
human subjects’ protection were followed, and participants were informed about
their right to decline participation, refuse to respond to specific questions, or
withdraw at any point from the study without adverse consequences. 17
The interviews of the female prisoners were conducted either in Arabic, Hebrew,
English, or a mixture of these languages, dependent on the interviewee’s
preference and language proficiency. Each participant was interviewed in at least
two sessions separated by a period of a few days, weeks or months. 18 Each
interviewing session lasted between two to four hours. The interviews consisted of
open-ended questions that developed into relaxed conversations addressing the
interviewees’ familial and social histories from childhood to their incarceration, as
well as their views on womanhood, the role of women in Palestinian society and its
political struggles, and their wishes for the future. In all cases, in the second or
third interviewing session the participants volunteered to describe in detail the
circumstances that led them to be involved in terrorist activities and their reasons
for participation. They described how they were recruited and deployed, how they
felt about their involvement, and their views, beliefs and expectations relative to
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