Excerpt:
The PFLP circulated several, likely dozens, of posters featuring combatant women. At least three include armed mothers. In 1986, it published an evocative image illustrated by Swiss artist Marc Rudin (a.k.a. Jihad Mansour) (see Figure 1). The poster depicts a mother wearing a keffiyeh, a scarf symbolizing Palestinian resistance that is popular in nationalist imagery and among Palestinian protestors and militants. She is clearly defensive, hiding her baby next to her face under the keffiyeh and pointing a rifle towards danger just off to the viewer’s left. Her baby holds out its hand, making a ‘stop’ gesture towards the unseen enemy. The placement of their hands (her cradling the baby to hide it and the baby’s visceral attempt at defense) and the use of the keffiyeh as cover emphasize the extent of their vulnerability. This image also makes unambiguous connections between, on the one hand, the mother and her child and, on the other, Palestine’s security. First, by using the keffiyeh in this way, the two figures are literally enveloped in Palestinian national survival. Second, they are set against a dark green background. Mansour, the artist, notes that he intentionally chose to color the background green in his art to symbolize Palestine’s ‘fertility’ (quoted in CUCPS, n.d.). Dark green is also a key part of the Palestinian flag, modeled on the flag from the 1916 Arab Revolt. Third, the poster reads ‘The Land’ in English and Arabic. This text explicitly links the armed mother to Palestine, suggesting that she is both representative of and protecting the nation. The image buoys mythologies of motherhood: she is transgressively armed because she is the land under siege.8 Peteet (1991: 152) makes this point eloquently: [Palestinian] women toting weapons of war signified the extent to which even the most protected members of society embodied the suffering of the community, how this suffering and resistance to it had transformed even the most conservative aspects of society, and the extent to which the community supported the resistance.
Source:
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0967010620903237