Aswat-Palestinian Gay Women

Background
Established in 2002, the virtual forum (group e-list) for Palestinian gay women became the first safe space for gay women in the Palestinian community in Israel and the Occupied Territories. The first meeting between the forum participants took place in January 2003. The meetings, along with the on-going group e-list dialogue, became the cornerstone of the organization. Aswat provided a framework that allowed Palestinian gay women opportunities to voice their feelings, opinions and articulate their needs. Throughout the meetings, the group members were able to translate those needs into action through the various activities and programs operated by Aswat. Aswat's group comprises almost 30 committed group members that attend the monthly meeting and participate in the various activities and over 70 members on Aswat's group's list. Over the past five years, Aswat has grown and became one of the sole groups dealing with the issue of LGBTQI rights within the Arab communities.

Aswat functions as an independent project within Kayan Feminist Organization (501 c-3), which serves as our fiscal agent. We now have established separate office space within the women’s coalition building.

Aswat serves as a Palestinian gay women’s organization that promotes:
Empowerment and Support: Fostering a culture and climate in which we may express ourselves, discuss gender and sexuality, define our feminism, and address the conflict between our national and gendered identities, through our support groups, empowerment courses and other social and social change initiatives for Palestinian LBTQI women.
Advocacy: Resisting the multilayered discrimination we experience and promoting Palestinian women’s rights through public and professional educational presentations, workshops and media outreach, and through cooperation with other local and international human and women rights organizations.
Service and Building Community: Pioneering a Support Line and Crisis Fund for LGBTQI women, and an Information Center that publishes materials in Arabic, we are serving as a reliable source of critical support and information for both gay women and the general Arabic-speaking public on gender and sexuality. Aswat is one of the few organizations in the world dedicated to producing and disseminating LGBTQI information in the Arabic language.

Mission and Goals
The mission of Aswat's initiative aims to allow Palestinian gay women accessibility to self-expression and provide a safe space for Palestinian women who identify themselves as lesbians, bi-sexual, transsexual, transgender or inter-sexual and to educate ourselves and each other about women's rights, lesbianism and gender and national identity issues. Raising our awareness to such issues enables us to educate our community, advocates and policymakers about multiple discrimination, and to mobilize their support as we demand the systemic changes that promote more equitable policies and laws for all women.

In order to combat the multilayered discrimination Palestinian gay women face and to promote women's rights and improve the status of all women in the Palestinian society, Aswat strives to initiate social change in order to meet the needs of one of the most silenced and oppressed communities in Israel by reaching out to Palestinian and local communities in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories.

Aswat’s strategies and activities aim to:
• Build a community and create an anonymous safe space for Palestinian LGBTQI women in order to support, educate, and empower.
• Advocate our values and vision to interested groups and individuals such as educators, service providers, the media, advocates, policy makers, community leaders and NGOs and stimulate public debate regarding gender, sexuality and minority perspectives on women’s and human rights.
• Combat the distortion of information, censorship, stereotypes and ignorance created by social taboos regarding women's sexuality and lesbianism by developing and promoting an alternative discourse of resistance.
• Increase the presence and legitimacy of women's sexuality and lesbianism in the Arabic language and culture by developing an alternative, affirming 'mother tongue'.
• Produce high quality complementary materials in Arabic that increase the accessibility of information about women's sexuality and lesbianism.
• Contribute Aswat’s unique insights and analyses to the growing feminist/gay multicultural discourse and influencing LGBTQI efforts to incorporate national/cultural/ethnic perspectives into their politics of social change.
• Cultivate alliances with other international human rights/LGBTQI/feminist organization and especially with other Arab groups all over the world and cooperate in promoting our struggle on an international level.
• Raise public awareness by promoting public dialogue in the community.
• Reach-out to other Palestinian gay women still in the closet, and to serve as a primary authentic resource for information and empowerment.

Need For Aswat:
Three circles of Oppression and struggle
Palestinian women living either inside Israel or in the Occupied Territories under Israeli occupation belong to an internally displaced population living on the margins of Israeli society. As a minority, Palestinians are neither granted equal human nor civil rights, nor are allocated budgets to support and further develop the infrastructures of their social, academic and business institutions. Consequently, Palestinians exist at the bottom of the social, educational and economic ladder and Aswat is very much part of the national struggle for recognition of our civil minority rights.

As long as women participate in the struggle for national liberation, we are welcomed and our efforts are appreciated. Some women can, in fact, leave the private sphere only if their activities serve men’s strategic and political aspirations for national liberation. The moment women want to focus their energies on establishing independent initiatives, they are often perceived as ‘enemies’. The competition between different clashing needs and struggles; puts us in complicated situations where we are required to prioritize one struggle over the other, or to choose our ideological 'loyalty' in a multi-layered reality and among potential partners. Within this already weakened minority group, Palestinian women find themselves in the midst of a feminist struggle for equal rights, freedom and opportunity in a patriarchal society.

And as Palestinian gay women, we have a triple struggle, for not only are we part of the national-civil society movement, as women we participate in multiple forms of feminist activism, and as lesbians we struggle to seek recognition for our sexual and gender identity. In this sense, Aswat offers a unique perspective on feminist social and political change in light of the conflict between identities and political struggles.

Who We Serve
Aswat group consists of Palestinian gay women, and all of our programs emerge from needs articulated by Palestinian gay women. Aswat has five major target groups in which the project aims to promote women’s and human rights:
1. Palestinian LGBTQI women and the Palestinian LGBTQI community Inside Israel and in the Palestinian Occupied Territories.
2. Palestinian community in Israel and the Occupied Territories: We reach out and educate in order to promote social change and steer community debate regarding the patriarchal dominance and values towards women's sexuality in general and lesbianism in particular;
3. Regional and International communities: We form alliances and network in order to expand the LGBTQI discourse in our specific cultural context (i.e. Arab culture); come together to expand our collective know-how, our repertoire of strategies for social change, and our activism in order to promote common goals in the international community, as well as in Arabic speaking countries.
4. Israeli community: We influence the "colorless" politics and introduce a multi national/cultural perspective to a social struggle which many times bears no relevance to indigenous minorities and we participate in and present at local conferences, academic debates, social change events and coalitions.
5. Youth or young LGBTQI women.