This paper analyzes the failure of Israel's Ashkenazi (Jewish, of European, Yiddish-speaking origin) feminist peace movement to work within the context of Middle East demographics, cultures, and histories and, alternately, the inabilities of the Mizrahi (Oriental) feminist movement to weave itself into the feminist fabric of the Arab world. Although Ashkenazi elite feminists in Israel are known for their peace activism and human rights work, from the Mizrahi perspective their critique and activism are limited, if not counterproductive. The Ashkenazi feminists have strategically chosen to focus on what Edward Said called the Question of Palestine-a well funded agenda that enables them to avoid addressing the community-based concerns of the disenfranchised Mizrahim. Mizrahi communities, however, silence their own feminists as these activists attempt to challenge the regime or engage in discourse on the Question of Palestine. Despite historical changes, the Ashkenazi-Mizrahi distinction is a racialized formation so resilient it manages to sustain itself through challenges rather than remain a frozen dichotomy.

2012

In this dissertation I examine the contemporary breakdown of critical feminist dialogues so ubiquitous in the 1990s between Israeli and Palestinian women. Building on interviews with Palestinian women that identify a-top-down approach‖ in dialogues with Israeli anti-occupation feminist activists, this dissertation examines the role of-power inequities,‖ Orientalism, and-white feminist authority‖ (Lâm) in forming the discursive environment for even the most critical feminist dialogues. Conducting various discursive

Politics and Religion Journal, 2024

Religion-based personal status laws and religious courts are an intrinsic component of the Jewish character of the State of Israel. The association between one's religious affiliation and the law governing one's personal status issues is longstanding. However, the significance and dynamics of this association cannot be analyzed in isolation from the context of the identity of the state, or the identity of the local subjects in terms of their nationality, religious affiliation, and gender. In the case of Palestinian citizens of Israel, the personal state laws that govern them bear the imprint of the state's hierarchical and discriminatory citizenship regime. This article examines the struggles of Palestinian feminist activists, citizens of Israel, in their attempts to improve their personal status issues, which began in the 1990s and were led by secular as well as religious Palestinian feminists. In doing so, it reveals the complexity of feminist politics at the juncture of religion, gender and colonialism. It identifies similarities and differences in feminist discourses and activities, while delineating the boundaries of these politics. It argues that, in many instances, activists had to choose between 'collaboration' with a colonial regime and 'complicity' with a patriarchal establishment. The paper is based on a variety of sources, including media articles, archival documents, protocols of parliamentary committees, and personal interviews conducted with leading feminist activists.

The continuation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has undoubtedly had an impact on Israeli and Palestinian feminist formulations that developed in parallel, as mirror images of each other, often in opposition and sometimes in dialogue. A crossover study of those movements makes it possible to re-examine the development of anti-colonial and anti-hegemonic feminists, revealing not only the interlocking but also the overturn of dominant/dominated positions between feminist movements rooted in national liberation struggles. This comparative approach aims at analyzing how coextensivity between power relations are captured by feminist collective action, including limiting the forms of solidarity across borders.

This dissertation was submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the MA Israeli Studies, SOAS, University of London. This dissertation analyses the relationship between young Jewish intellectuals and activists of Middle Eastern and North African descent (mizraḥim) and broader Israeli society. In particular, it seeks to understand the ways in which younger mizraḥim think about their relationship(s) with Zionism, with Israel’s geographical neighbours and, especially, with what it means to be mizraḥi and Israeli in contemporary Israel. Intertwined with these questions are a number of historical, socio-political and cultural issues; consequently, this dissertation draws upon a theoretical framework integrating both the literature on ‘Arab Jews’ in relation to modern mizrahi identity and older visions of a more inclusive Israeli Levantine polity. It explores the above through an ethnographic exposition of components of a young mizraḥi (or, as the dissertation will argue, Levantine) identity. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with mizraḥi activists young and old, the paper will discuss activism through cultural production, the use of Arabic, the relationship with Zionism and efforts to engage with Israel’s immediate environs.

The Arab-Israeli conflict is not only an international conflict between Israel and Arab states and political entities. It also takes places within the borders of Israel between the regime and the Palestinian minority. The Arab-Israeli women experience this struggle disproportionately. They have to deal with discrimination on two fronts: with regards to their ethnicity and their gender. Furthermore, they are discriminated against by three different structures: the state, the national community and the family. In recent times, a link between activism for Palestinian minority rights and for women’s rights is developing. The thesis explores this issue. It examines the question to what extent and to what effect Palestinian minority rights activism and women's rights activism inside Israel complement each other in bringing about a more equal society. The results of the examination indicate that the Palestinian political activists in Israel indeed link their grievances and combine their powers in their struggle for a more equal society. This link is especially pronounced in the Israeli civil society. Nevertheless, in some ways, the two goals of minority rights and women’s rights clash and the latter usually have to yield in favour of Palestinian minority rights. Both political activism for women’s rights and for Palestinian minority rights have had little success so far. The main reasons for their failure can be traced to the structural constraints imposed on them by the Israeli state and society.

Die Welt des Islams

From the public profile and media reporting on the Islamic Movement in Israel (al-Ḥaraka al-islāmiyya fī Isrā’īl), the impression given is that this movement is run by men, and that women are, if visible, in the background. However, when looking behind the façade it becomes clear that women are not only active, but are at the forefront of Islamist activism, spearheading change in their community. In their organizations for women, and through informal channels, they educate women, and indirectly men, about the role and position of women in Islam. Their activism also contributes to creating awareness about their Palestinian Arab Muslim history and predicament, thus also empowering women vis-à-vis Israeli domination. The women interviewed for this article all studied or study at Israeli universities, and as educated women they are reshaping the ideal of the traditional Muslim mother into that of a Muslim professional working mother. Based on the logic behind and content of their Islami...

Sociological Research Online, 2004

This paper employs social theory and empirical observation, juxtaposing Israel as a ‘racial state’ (Goldberg, 2002) and the concept of femina sacra, a female version of Agamben's homo sacer or ‘bare life’ (Agamben, 1998), to think about some aspects of Israeli feminist peace activism since the onset of the second Intifada. Although Israeli feminist peace activism seems to discursively vacillate between essentialist motherhood narratives and subversive draft resistance practices, reading draft resistance narratives of young Israeli women conscripts, the paper tentatively suggests that where the state positions itself above morality, while evoking morality in its defence, feminist ‘peace activism’ in Israel/Palestine, though providing a potent counter-narrative to the Zionist narration of nation, does not destabilise the racial state, which is apparently gradually destroying itself while wilfully destroying its Others. I conclude by asking whether morally positioning itself in con...

2014

Grounded in my own position as a Palestinian feminist born and raised in Haifa, this paper delves into the nature of feminism for Palestinian women in the Jewish settler colonial state by asking three main questions: How does the complex socio-political reality of settler colonialism reflect itself in the lives and status of Palestinian women living in Israel? What kind of critical feminist theorizing is needed from Palestinian feminists in Israel? How can we analyze and confront the racism of the historical silence of the majority of Israeli feminists towards the historical injustice and current violence faced by Palestinian feminists? The paper underlines the importance of widening the critical feminist lens to account for the physics of power and calls for (a) the deconstruction of feminisms that have refused to regard the Nakba as a focal analytical and actual source of feminist theorization and (b) defiance in the face of global, regional, and local amnesia towards the Palesti...

This chapter is not only a scholarly attempt to understand the different expressions of women’s voice in Occupied Palestine, but also the record of an activist from inside the movement who has engaged with and participated in its different stages and who offers here some critical observations and conclusions that need to be shared with feminists and the current and future women’s leadership. Understanding the transformation that took place in the women’s movement and reflecting on the lessons learnt is an important task, because it contextualizes and theorizes women’s experience and voice under colonial occupation. Palestinian women’s voices have been presented mostly by women outside the movement – researchers from local or international communities – or by men who have interpreted women’s activism through their own interests and instrumentalist framework. Rarely have women activists conveyed their own experiences directly to wider audiences. This chapter aims to reclaim this space...

PoLar: Political and Legal Anthropology Review , 2019

What is the relationship between Mizraḥi feminism and Israeli ultra-nationalism? What is the relevance of gender justice activism to Operation Protective Edge (the 2014 Gaza War) and Israel’s foreign policy? Mizraḥi protests dissipate and disappear when the Israel-Palestine conflict dominates the headlines. This essay connects intra-Jewish racial and gendered dynamics to the 2014 Gaza War. It tracks sequences that began with social protest and ended with elections that bolstered Israel’s political right wing. In between came bloodletting between the Israeli Defense Forces, the Palestinian Authority, and Israel’s neighboring Arab states. The 2014 Gaza War was a watershed not only for the Israel-Palestine conflict; under the smokescreen of war, Israel accelerated neoliberal economic reforms. The first victims of this restructuring were Mizraḥi single mothers. Palestinians, however, would pay the highest price for Israel’s Mizraḥi-Ashkenazi rift. Corrigendum: Please note the following reference was inadvertently omitted from Smadar Lavie’s “Gaza 2014 and Mizrahi Feminism” PoLar 22(1) 85-109. The reference that should have been 2014b is: Knesset of the State of Israel. 2014b. Plenum no. 157. Second Session Meetings 157-159 [in Hebrew]. no. 35: 14-16, July 14, 16:01. https://main.knesset.gov.il/Activity/plenum/Pages/SessionItem.aspx?itemID=555497 The omission impacted the sequence of references in the bibliography. The previous “Knesset of the State of Israel 2014b” is now “Knesset of Israel 2014c”: Knesset of the State of Israel. 2014c. “Ratification of Amendment to Ḥok HaHesderim” [in Hebrew] The Book of Laws 2461: 638, July 27. http://fs.knesset.gov.il//19/law/19_lsr_303825.PDF Page numbers are from the final PoLar printed version of the article.

AI

When News from Within asked me to contribute an article on the upcoming first Mizrahi Women's Conference, I was absolutely delighted. As someone who had been involved in establishing the Mizrahi Feminist Forum in the wake of the fiasco at the Tenth Women's Conference in , and as a moderator of a session on Mizrahi feminism at the upcoming conference, I thought it would be a wonderful occasion for us as Mizrahim to represent ourselves in terms of the background, the agenda, and the analysis of multicultural Mizrahi feminism. I also wanted to share an under-represented political vision with the magazine's international Left readership. As someone who has attempted, through writing, lecturing, and organizing, to link Mizrahi, Palestinian, and feminist concerns as part of a broad critique of Euro-Zionist discourse and practice, I have felt frustrated, over the years, with diverse Left-progressive constituencies: with the radical Ashkenazi Left and their reductionist view of the Mizrahi struggle as merely "class;" with the simplistic Palestinian dismissal of Mizrahim as "right-winger" Zionists; with Ashkenazi feminism's contemptuous approach to the problems faced by Mizrahi women as solely the result of gender/sexual oppression; and with Mizrahi men's fears that feminist Mizrahi assertiveness destroys ethnic-based organizing by caving in to an Ashkenazi agenda. (There are of course moving exceptions within every constituency.) Most progressive outlets in Israel and abroad have, for the most part, systematically and patronizingly refused to engage with the Mizrahi perspective, let alone with one that tried to bring gender into the debate. One alliance of this kind began in , when News from Within translated the plenary speeches, "Breaking the Silence: My Oppression as a Mizrahi Woman," given by Mira Eliezer, Tikva Levi, and myself at the Published in English translation in News from Within (Alternative Information Center), vol. , no. , April .

+972 Magazine: Independent Journalism from Palestine-Israel, 2023

Prof. Smadar Lavie discusses the possibilities and contradictions of the 2023 Ashkenazi-dominated protests against the Israeli regime, and traces the efforts of a small cohort of Mizrahi activists to make their voices heard. She reviews the emergence of Israel's alt-Right on the Mizrahi majority vote and its turn toward fascism based on charismatic leaders. Emphasized as well are Israel's feminist struggles and achievements that the present regime now plans to nullify.

Social Politics, 2020

This study examines the growth of a progressive religious Muslim activism among Palestinian women in Israel and the challenges it poses to the religious patriarchy and colonial power structures. Based on semistructured interviews with a religious feminist organization’s activists, the study revealed that feminist Islamic activism addresses an alliance between state officials and patriarchal–religious establishment gatekeepers that interlock to block Muslim feminist reform. Unlike other Muslim activists in former settler colonial states where state and religion are separate and unlike progressive Muslim women in Muslim states who struggle to escape the religious–patriarchal trap, in Israel, these activists face a religious–colonial–patriarchal trap.

Journal of Israeli History, 2002

Breaking the Silence Good evening everyone! Masa' el-kher! Ismi Ella, bas ismi el-asli Habiba. [My name is Ella but my original name is Habiba]. Hiyya Mira, bas isma el-asli Rima. [Her name is Mira, but her original name is Rima.] Wa-hiyya Tikva, bas isma el-asli Amal. [She is Tikva, but her original name is Amal]. For those in the audience who do not speak Arabic, I began by introducing our names, followed by our original Arabic names of Habiba, Rima, and Amal. Our Hebrew names were registered on our identity cards by our parents. They did not register our Arabic names. In my case, I was named Habiba after my mother's grandmother, yet my mother did not put down this name on my identity card. After her bitter experience in Israel because of her Arab name Aziza-she knew that in a society where our names were associated with "the Arab enemy," anything related to the Middle East was considered a lifelong stigma. In a society where an Arab name triggered shame and failure, it was preferable to give a sabra-sounding Hebrew name. Thus, our identity crisis as Mizrahi women begins already with our very names. The core of the problem has to do with a country that sees itself as Western while denying its location in the Middle East, one with a majority population-Mizrahim and Palestinians-originating from the region. Although the matter of naming is only one small component of our oppression, it carries symbolic importance. Having been "stamped" with our sabra Hebrew names, we learned that it was illegitimate for us to maintain our culture, that we must erase our Middle Eastern identity in order to give birth to a sabra, i.e. Ashkenazi-Israeli identity. In fact, our mothers, whose names were changed by immigration clerks without so much as a second thought, An opening speech delivered at the plenary session of the th Annual Women's Conference, Givat Haviva, Israel, June-, (alongside speeches by Mira Eliezer and Tikva Levi-all under the same rubric: "Breaking the Silence: My Oppression as a Mizrahi Woman"), sections of which were published in Hebrew, "Le-Hafer et ha-Shtikot," HILA News, Issue (July,). The English translation included here, slightly edited, is taken from the publication of the speech, "Breaking the Silence," in a Special Section, "Mizrahi Oppression and Struggle," in News from Within (Alternative Information Center), Vol. , no. , August .

Israel Studies Review, 2016

Over the last two decades, the liberal democratic form of governance has been facing a major challenge. This challenge is manifested in varying ways around the globe, with crises erupting in diverse geopolitical contexts, including democratization in Eastern Europe, objections to the human rights discourse in East Asia, disillusionment following the Arab Spring, and the decline of the liberal left in Israel. The modernist secular utopia is far from sight. The porous borders of Western liberal democracies, open to global migration in post-Cold War Western Europe, have allowed the challenge to internal social and political order to become pressing and even acute, in some cases. The question of how to accommodate new ethnic and religious groups that hold profoundly different views about social justice and the 'common good' yet share the same political space has become critical. In this special issue, we delve into the Israeli case in order to take a glimpse into the crisis of liberalism in a particular setting, without losing sight of the global context and its deep historiosophical roots. The 2015 Israeli election results left little doubt as to the place of the liberal left in Israel's political arena: it has failed politically to win over the electorate. Meretz, the Jewish leftist-liberal party, obtained votes barely sufficient to allow it to remain in the Knesset. The votes won by the Labor Party failed to lift it out of its middling size or to spread it beyond the middle class. These results came as no surprise to those following the gradual decline of the liberal camp in politics, civil society, culture, the press, the media, and academia. Since the elections, Israel's Jewish population appears to be torn more than ever between two poles: those who wish to fight for democracy and civil rights, on the one side, and those who prefer communitarian, traditionalist, and religious values, on the other-a division that highly

2017

Abdulhadi spoke of a "browning of the organization," a demographic change within the largest Global North mainstream academic association dedicated to scholarship on gender (qtd. in Redden, 2015, para. 7). That demographic change, Abdulhadi suggests, is behind the vote that not only acknowledges the oppression of the Palestinian people, but also approves of and endorses a strategy they have proposed to end this oppression. BDS is the Palestinian call for global solidarity in the form of boycott of, divestment from, and sanctions on Israel until it abides by international law, and ends its violations of the human rights of the Palestinian people. The call for BDS was issued in July 2005, and ten years later, what was once a soft whisper limited to the margins of various progressive groups had become a chorus of voices clamoring for an end to Israel's egregious treatment of the Indigenous people whose land it is occupying. This discursive change, due in large part to the debates occasioned by BDS resolutions, represents a shattering of the Zionist mythology of Israeli "democracy" and frailty-its supposed vulnerability to a hostile and aggressive regional environment. And with the growing awareness amongst various communities that Israel is not an embattled democracy, but a violently racist settler-colonial state, comes a widespread desire to hold it accountable for its crimes. Indeed, arguably the most significant success of the BDS campaign so far has been the open discussion of Israeli violations of international law and of the human rights of the Palestinian people, a discussion which necessarily precedes every boycott and divestment vote by a city council, a coop, a church, or a professional association. These discussions, debates, and open forums have torn asunder the Zionist narrative, which could only be maintained through silencing, the censorship of counter-histories. The NWSA vote came on the heels of similar votes (preceded by lengthy discussions), by the Asian American Studies Association (AASA), the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association (NAISA), and the American Studies Association (ASA), to name a few of the national professional academic associations. Other such groups have since also passed resolutions in favor of BDS, and many, such as the Modern Language Association, are in some stage of organizing for a resolution. Yet while the NWSA membership has indeed changed since the group was established in 1977, one cannot assume that "brown feminism" is a monolith, nor that it has always been on board with anti-colonial struggles, at least not as far as Palestine is involved. Nadine Naber's plea for consistency, cited in the epigraph to this essay, is proof that the plight of Palestinians has often been dismissed even in radical feminist circles. Yes, there are some long-standing alliances between Palestinian and other communities-of-color radicals. The San Francisco-based Women of Color Resource Center, for example, has historically been consistent in its denunciation of colonialism and racism and, under the able leadership of executive director Linda Burnham, identified Zionism as a form of racism as early as 2000. INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence issued its "Palestine Points of Unity" shortly after it was formed, albeit after much internal debate, proving that alliances are forged, earned, not spontaneous. However, there are few Palestinian feminists who have not experienced some degree of suspicion, misunderstanding, or outright hostility, within communities of color, even feminist

Canadian Woman Studies, 1995

Cet artick met m vakur k dk des flmmes pakstiniennes &m ka crkation a2 h r propre histoire ainsi qw comme agentes de cbangemena. Lhutnrre aamine k contnctc p a r t i d e r dirngrand nombre ~m e s p a k s t i n i m t u s tout Western feminists have ten& to construct women fiom an "orientulistnpoint of view, and as a result, have treated all Arab and Muslim women as an undfferentiated monolithic group. m critiquant I'aorientaLisme~ et k colonialisme, cesparam2tres occ&tauw qui nstreignmt une rCcUr comprChmion a% ka vie h f t m m e s arabes. In this article I will focus on Palestinian women as real subjects with a decisive role in the making of their history and society, women as primary agents for change. But since I am conscious of my positionllodity, namely, as a Palestinian feminist living, working, and active in the west, I must first contextualize our struggles within the western construct.

This paper seeks to examine and deconstruct two groups and the relationships between them: the Israeli national-religious settler movement and the Israeli Jews of Middle Eastern and North African descent, or mizraḥim. In academic, journalistic and popular literature, these groups are rarely placed in the same discursive space. Rather, they frequently find themselves implicated at divergent ends of the relationships of power that define the Israeli Jewish polity and socioeconomic structures. How has the image of the settler as white, ashkenazi, middle-class, religiously and ideologically driven been produced? Conversely, how has the critical scholarship on mizraḥim in Israel, which locates mizraḥim both spatially and economically at the periphery of Israeli Jewish society, constructed an imagined mizraḥi subject with no relationship to the image of the settler above? This essay will seek to understand the real overlap between these two contrasting pictures and discuss the participation of mizraḥim in the neo-Zionist project. While these questions demand a much fuller theoretical discussion than this short piece will be able to detail, I seek to propose in this paper a new way of ‘thinking’ mizraḥim and neo-Zionists, and, by extension, mizraḥi participation in and reproduction of ashkenazi hegemony.

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