University degree can be Palestinian bride’s biggest asset

The Associated Press

Transcribed from the clipping

“ABWEEN, West Bank — The village matchmaker described the perfect Palestinian bride: tall, slim, fair-skinned — and college-educated. Times are tough, explained Nawal Sehwel, the local cupid, and a college degree means an extra salary.

With poverty spreading after six years of fighting with Israel, that’s a mantra heard across the Palestinian territories, where marriage is a balancing act between tribal traditions and urban modernity. In the West Bank town of Ramallah, young career women increasingly pick their own mates, in defiance of tradition and sometimes their parents’ wishes.

In conservative Gaza, women still are married off by their families, often to men they have never met, and would be branded immoral if they asked to have a say.

Palestinian brides are among the youngest in the Arab world — 18 on average and one-fourth 16 or younger — in part because some parents want to get daughters out of the house quickly and have one mouth less to feed. A matchmaker is sometimes called in.

When Nawal Sehwel got her start in matchmaking four decades ago, marriage was strictly a business arrangement between families. Grooms wanted wives to bear them children and work in the fields. Sehwel, 57, follows a simple rule — match people who have something in common. The matchmaker said she has brought together roughly 200 couples, and none has split.

But business has dropped off in the past years, because women are getting out and making their own choices. Almost as many female as male students attend the 20 four-year and 20 community colleges in the Palestinian territories, according to official figures. Expectations also have changed.

‘The new generation would not agree to marry without love,’ said the matchmaker’s daughter, Nafeza, 36. Nafeza was forced into marriage at age 15 by her father and uncles, over her mother’s objections, and says it took her 10 years to accept her fate.”

Context added by this archive

Four Palestinians named in one story and not one of them is a casualty, a spokesman or an official. Nawal Sehwel, 57, a village matchmaker in Abween who has made about two hundred marriages and says none has broken.

Her daughter Nafeza, 36, who was married off at fifteen by her father and uncles over her mother’s objections and says it took her ten years to accept it — and who supplies the line the story turns on:

‘The new generation would not agree to marry without love.’ And the couple in the photograph, Bissan Zedan, 17, and Mohammed Zedan, 21. The occupation is present but as economics: poverty after six years of fighting, and a degree worth an extra salary.

Nearly as many women as men attend the territories’ forty colleges, which is why the matchmaker’s trade is dying.

Cite this item

"University degree can be Palestinian bride’s biggest asset," The Island Packet, 21 January 2007. Covering Palestine archive, CP-2007-008. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-2007-008