Inclusion or transformation? An early assessment of an empowerment project for disabled people in occupied Palestine

Abstract

Can disabled people become advocates in occupied Palestine? This article presents findings from a current three-year project. It examines the environmental, attitudinal and institutional barriers faced by disabled people and the activities being undertaken to challenge social discrimination. The article considers the project in relation to liberation theory and the struggle by young disabled Palestinians to achieve social inclusion – and eventually social transformation.

Keywords:

• Palestine
• social attitudes
• disability under occupation
• liberation theory

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the Department for International Development and Medical Aid for Palestinians for their assistance in the project. In addition, the authors recognise the invaluable contribution that both the two anonymous reviewers and Yana Zayed made through their comments to an earlier version of this article.

Notes

1. A couple of observations regarding the concept of disability and the use of language must be considered. First, disabilities have generally been portrayed in a negative light in the Arab world and occupied Palestine. The former United Nations special rapporteur for disability, Hissa Al Thani, has observed that in the Arab world ‘the words used to describe or denote disability are derogatory and pejorative; people are often identified by their disability, or their disability replaces their given name. In colloquial language, the words that denote different types of disabilities have become common swear words’ (Al Thani 2007).Second, disability activists challenged such language. Indeed, the scale of the challenge is reflected in the – relatively for the Arab world – progressive version of the 1999 Palestinian Disability Law, which uses the disempowering term ‘the disabled’ in both the original Arabic and English-language versions. Arab and Palestinian disability groups prefer to use ‘disabled people’ and ‘people with disability’. For the project presented in this article, the participants determined the choice of language used; they emphasised the importance of including the word ‘person’, as in ‘person with disability’. Some disabled people’s organisations and academic journals, particularly in countries of the north, view the term ‘people with disabilities’ as disempowering. In part this reflects national differences in relation to language; in Britain, the term ‘disabled people’ is preferred over ‘people with disability’ (Yeo 2005; Smith 2010). Given these sensitivities, the article uses the term ‘disabled people’ to conform with the language policies of Disability & Society.

2. Following the United Nations General Assembly vote to upgrade Palestinian status to non-member state in late 2012, the term ‘occupied Palestine’ is increasingly being used by commentators to describe the territory of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.