Book Review

What these two books have in common, besides their focus on gender and Palestinians, is ‘thick’ data and sophisticated analysis. Both are historical ethnographies that combine a close-up view of women and gender in an Arab national struggle with place and time comparisons that illuminate the complex interactions between nationalism and gender. Both connect their data to broader theoretical issues. Hasso compares the experiences of women members of a single Resistance group, the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP), under two different regimes, Israeli and Jordanian, from the group’s inception in 1969 to its break-up in the late 1990s; Latte Abdallah brings multiple research approaches to bear on four generations of ‘ordinary’ refugee women in two camps in Jordan, from 1948 to 2000.