Introduction

Occupied Jerusalem is often narrated through maps, military operations, diplomatic failures, or religious contestation (Qadir and Smith, 2025). We are told stories of borders, security, sovereignty, and conflict. Rarely are we invited into the quieter, stubborn realities of survival, the women documenting arrests from their balconies, preparing food during raids, teaching children histories that official curricula erase, planting herbs in courtyards threatened by demolition, or carrying family memory across generations under conditions designed to fragment it (Voss, 2024). To understand occupied Jerusalem only through violence is to misunderstand what keeps Palestinian life alive.

This is not because violence is absent. Palestinian women in Jerusalem navigate an architecture of restriction that reaches into every corner of ordinary life (e.g., checkpoints, military incursions, settler violence, surveillance systems, precarious residency laws, home demolitions, and the bureaucratic fragmentation of family life) (Abusultan, 2025; Saliba and Kattan, 2014). Yet, to stop at suffering risks reproducing another form of erasure. It reduces Palestinian women to symbols of victimhood rather than recognising them as political actors actively sustaining community under extraordinary conditions.

What Palestinian women do with these realities is the story that needs telling. To tell that story, I turn to an unlikely companion, writer and theorist Ursula K. Le Guin and her famous essay, The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction.

The Carrier Bag and the checkpoint

In 1986, Le Guin proposed a challenge to dominant stories about civilisation. Drawing from anthropological arguments that questioned hunter-centric histories of humanity, she suggested that perhaps the first human technology was not a weapon but a container, something used to gather berries, seeds, roots, medicines, and the materials necessary for collective survival (James, 2025).

The story of humanity, she argued, has too often been written as the story of the spear, conquest, domination, exceptional heroes, battles won. But perhaps survival depended just as much, if not more, on the vessel that carried food home. The carrier bag. Crucially, Le Guin did not assign these practices to women, nor did she naturalise caregiving as feminine destiny. Her intervention was not biological essentialism but narrative disruption. She challenged the assumption that meaningful political life emerges only through heroic acts of conquest or singular protagonists. What if the real story of survival is collaborative, repetitive, relational? What if history belongs not only to those who conquer, but to those who carry?

This essay uses Le Guin’s framework as an analogy, not as a fixed gendered theory. Palestinian women are not inherently more caring, peaceful, or sacrificial. Rather, the analogy helps highlight something already unfolding in occupied Jerusalem, communities are writing an alternative story of resistance, one grounded not only in confrontation, but in care, continuity, mutual dependence, and persistence. And this matters politically. Because freedom often begins with recognition that what appears ordinary is already resistance.

Martial ecologies: living under occupation

And women frequently stand at the centre of navigating that daily reality.¹ This labour rarely resembles the triumphant imagery through which resistance is usually imagined. It is repetitive. Exhausting. Often invisible. Women accompany children through militarised checkpoints to school. They organise neighbourhood kitchens during periods of heightened violence (Shalhūb , 2009). They coordinate legal support for detained relatives, preserve family archives threatened by confiscation, document settler harassment through WhatsApp networks, and livestream forced evictions when traditional media turns away. During threatened expulsions in Sheikh Jarrah, women transformed domestic spaces into political frontlines. Front porches became spaces of witnessing. Kitchen tables became organising hubs. Mobile phones became tools of testimony.

Occupied Jerusalem is not simply militarised space. It is what might be called a martial ecology, an environment where violence is woven into the rhythms of everyday life (Sharif, 2014). Movement is regulated through checkpoints. Residency rights are precarious. Family unification is obstructed. Homes can be demolished under administrative orders. Entire neighbourhoods live under constant threat of displacement (Islam et.al., 2025). Places such as Sheikh Jarrah and Silwan have become global symbols of this struggle, but for those who live there, occupation is not episodic. It is daily (Phoenix, 2016; Stagni, 2025).

Resistance here is not separate from ordinary life. It happens while preparing meals, checking homework, caring for elders, tending gardens, comforting frightened children. This does not make it apolitical. On the contrary, it reveals politics at its most fundamental level, the collective struggle to sustain life when systems are designed to make life impossible. In many liberal democracies, participation is imagined through voting booths, parliamentary debate, or legal institutions (Warren, 2022). Under occupation, democratic practice often takes another form, like public witnessing, collective care, mutual aid, and refusal. Showing up becomes political. Remaining becomes political. Living becomes political.

Land remembers what maps erase

For many Palestinian women, feminism cannot be disentangled from decolonisation. Land is not just a resource (Elia, 2017). It is memory, livelihood, home (Shihab, 2007). When a woman plants za’atar in her courtyard, she is making a political and cultural claim to existence. In occupied Palestine, where land is contested and Palestinian presence is criminalised or erased, even the most routine actions, like gardening or cooking, can become forms of resistance. Planting za’atar in one’s courtyard defies settler colonial logic that seeks to sever Palestinians from their land and history. When she rebuilds a demolished room, or hangs a child’s drawing where a window used to be, she is asserting the right to remain (Bleibleh and Awad, 2024). Under military occupation, where gardens can be bulldozed, homes demolished, and agricultural practices criminalised, cultivating a herb like za’atar is not merely domestic, it’s political. It asserts the right to remain, to nourish, and to sustain a way of life targeted for erasure.

These practices keep alive forms of participatory, collective decision-making that are foundational to democratic culture. This is a feminism of place, where caring for olive trees, defending wells, and teaching children the names of valleys and hills becomes a form of resistance (Wesselius, 2017). The land remembers what maps erase. The land, as a living archive, holds truths that settler narratives attempt to silence. Feminist resistance here is rooted in continuity, survival, and the refusal to forget.

In contrast to the nationalist spectacle of “Jerusalem Day” parades, with their settler chants and supremacist flags, Palestinian women practice a slow, deliberate care for land and community (Shalhoub, 2021). In a world driven by acceleration, this refusal to abandon ancestral rhythms is its own form of subversion and an insistence on a democratic rhythm of life against authoritarian speed. When women rebuild a damaged room, continue harvesting olives despite settler violence, or teach children the names of valleys erased from official maps, they are asserting something profound: we are still here. Against accelerated militarism and nationalist spectacle, this slower politics of care becomes quietly radical. The land remembers what maps erase. And women often become the keepers of that memory.

Storytelling against erasure

Le Guin’s “Carrier Bag Theory” reminds us that the oldest stories are not about heroes who kill, but about people who gather, who tend, who hold together what conquest tries to tear apart. Palestinian women’s stories are full of this kind of gathering. They gather children, herbs, photographs, recipes, resistance songs, grief, joy (Kassem, 2011).

These stories are not linear. They loop, return, and echo. A grandmother’s story of being expelled in 1948 lives again in her granddaughter’s Instagram post about evictions in Sheikh Jarrah. The songs sung in prison are whispered to newborns in refugee camps. This is an intergenerational feminism that values memory over monument (Urban, 2023). The occupation seeks to control not just land, but narrative. That’s why storytelling becomes revolutionary. Every time a Palestinian woman speaks her truth, about home, about fear, about love, she interrupts the colonial script that says she does not exist. Storytelling here becomes a democratic act: refusing the erasure of voice, reclaiming the right to narrate one’s own reality.

Recipes become archives. Family photographs survive demolition. Stories loop across generations. This is not nostalgia. It is political continuity. Palestinian storytelling resists the colonial script that insists Palestinian life is temporary, disposable, or invisible. Every testimony of home, fear, joy, longing, humour, and survival disrupts that script. Importantly, these stories are not always spectacular. They are often ordinary. A mother packing school lunches under bombardment. Neighbours exchanging food during closures. Families celebrating weddings despite curfews. Young people documenting military incursions on social media.

Such acts are frequently dismissed as resilience, as if resilience were passive. But resilience here is active refusal. An insistence that life will continue despite systems designed to break it.

Digital colonialism and the new Architecture of violence

Today, the colonisation of Palestine is not only territorial. It is digital. Corporations like Google, Microsoft and Amazon have partnered with Israeli military infrastructure to deliver advanced surveillance capabilities (Abdelnour, 2023). One of the most chilling examples is the Israeli military’s reported use of “Where’s Daddy?”, an AI-powered tool that tracks Palestinian men based on facial recognition, with particular attention to when and where they visit their children/families.

This technology turns fatherhood itself into suspicion. It targets intimacy. It makes a child’s bedtime visit or school drop-off into a data point of national security (Shay, 2025). And it leaves women -mothers, grandmothers, caregivers- with the impossible burden of parenting under constant surveillance. In this sense, even love is policed (Gray, 2024).

The name itself is devastating. Fatherhood becomes suspicion. Intimacy becomes surveillance. A school pickup, a family dinner, a child’s bedtime visit becomes data. And women, mothers, sisters, grandmothers, caregivers, are left navigating the impossible emotional terrain of sustaining family life under constant threat. Care itself becomes securitised. This raises urgent feminist questions about AI warfare. Where is the human in the loop? Who remains accountable when targeting decisions become increasingly automated? Who bears ethical responsibility when violence is mediated through algorithmic systems? Debates around autonomous weapons systems, sometimes called “killer robots” (Umbrello, 2022), often sound abstract until viewed through Palestine, where experimental forms of militarised technology increasingly shape lived reality.

Feminist scholars call this techno-patriarchal surveillance (Sebastián, 2022; Firsova, 2020): the weaponisation of AI and big data to fragment families, criminalise caregiving, and control women through the control of their communities. The gendered impact of tools like “Where’s Daddy?” is rarely discussed in mainstream discourse, yet it is central to understanding how digital colonialism operates through the body, the family, and the home. Still, Palestinian women push back. They document, archive, and speak. Platforms like Instagram, TikTok, and grassroots newsletters become modern-day carrier bags, holding memory and dissent (Khamis, 2025). This pushback is not only resistance. It is a reclamation of democratic space within the digital sphere.

Why Palestine is a feminist issue

Writers and scholars including Mariam Barghouti and Nadia Elia have argued powerfully that Palestine is a feminist issue because occupation restructures intimate life itself. Who can move. Who can parent. Who can return home. Who can marry. Who gets healthcare. Who survives. Feminism that ignores militarised domination risks becoming selective: loudly opposing gender violence in some contexts while remaining silent in others. Selective anti-racism fractures solidarity. It reinforces hierarchies over whose suffering is politically legible. Justice demands complexity.

Western feminism often idolises the individual heroine, breaking glass ceilings, winning in court, being seen (Ang, 2020). But Palestinian women offer another model, one of collective survival over individual triumph. Their feminism is not about who wins the spotlight but about how the community endures. They understand, deeply, that freedom is not given. It is made together, in kitchens, in clinics, in marches, in mourning tents. Their work is rarely recognised by those in power, but it is the work that sustains their people.

In this way, Palestinian feminist praxis aligns with Le Guin’s idea that “the novel as a carrier bag holds all the things we need to live, not just to kill”. Their resistance is not only about saying no to oppression, but saying yes to life, to food, to family, to imagination. This collective practice is, at its core, democratic: power shared, decisions made together, survival sustained through mutual care.

The story of Palestinian women is not a plea for saviors. It is a demand for solidarity. If feminism is to mean anything, it must mean standing with those who are most dispossessed. It must mean opposing all systems -colonial, capitalist, theological- that deny people their full humanity. It must mean naming the occupation, naming apartheid, naming structural gendered violence when we see it. Solidarity means listening more than speaking. It means amplifying Palestinian voices rather than speaking over them. It means recognising that feminist liberation must extend beyond borders, checkpoints, and passport control.

In other words, it means defending the possibility of democracy where it has been structurally denied.

A Carrier Bag big enough for everyone

A meaningful feminist engagement with Palestine must also refuse exclusions around gender and sexuality. Gendered violence under occupation does not affect only cisgender women. Queer, trans, and gender non-conforming Palestinians often experience layered marginalisation, from occupation, patriarchal norms, precarity, and global narratives that either erase them entirely or instrumentalise them politically (Humrichous , 2025).

Yet,  they too organise. They care for chosen families. Create underground networks. Produce art. Build spaces of belonging. Carry memory. Resistance expands when democracy expands. A democratic future worthy of the name must hold all bodies and identities. A carrier bag feminism must be capacious enough to carry everyone.

The carrier bag is not only metaphorical. The body itself becomes a carrier bag. It carries trauma. Fear. Exhaustion. Memory. Loss. The body remembers checkpoints. Interrupted sleep. Waiting. Grief. Hypervigilance. Names of the dead. Palestinian bodies carry what politics often refuses to acknowledge. But bodies also carry tenderness. Humour. Language. Songs. Recipes. Touch. The ability to rise again after devastation. To survive under occupation often means carrying what should have been unbearable and getting up anyway. Not untouched. Not unbroken. But alive.

Put your soul on the bag, and walk. This is not romanticisation. It is recognition.

In the ruins of demolished homes, in classrooms, kitchens, refugee camps, neighbourhood committees, digital archives, and occupied streets, Palestinian women continue gathering what remains. Stories. Seeds. Recipes. Witness. Language. Memory. Hope.

They are not waiting for liberation to arrive from above. They are practicing fragments of it now, collectively, daily. In a world obsessed with weapons, domination, and heroes, Palestinian women remind us that survival itself can be political. That democracy begins not only in institutions but in shared care. That resistance may look less like conquest and more like carrying.

And perhaps this is Le Guin’s deepest lesson. The future does not belong only to those holding weapons.

It also belongs to those carrying what communities need to survive.

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1See also, Ayesh, A., & Ben Hagai, E. (2025). Everyday Palestinian resistance, resilience, and recovery to violent Israeli occupation: An interview study. Journal of Health Psychology, 30(12), 3194-3208.