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Between
a Rock and a Hard Place: Arab Women, Liberal Feminism and the Israeli
State
Lisa Hajjar
There is a bill
pending in the Israeli Knesset that would allow women the option
to use the country's civil courts for personal status matters. Liberal
Israeli feminists see this as promoting "women's rights" by loosening
the grip of religious authorities over women's personal lives. But
Israel is not a liberal state, so there is something fundamentally
problematic in assuming common gender interests, since women in
Israel have no common status or rights as citizens. In fact, as
long as Israel is a Jewish state, the Muslim, Christian and Druze
religious institutions will remain important sources of communal
identity for Israel's Arabs (women and men), since the civil state
is not really "theirs."
Israeli feminists
(both Jewish and Arab) argue correctly that women often are disadvantaged
in their dealings within conservative religious institutions. Those
who support this bill say it would help all women regardless of
religion (although it is quietly suggested that Muslim women would
benefit most). But what choice does this bill actually offer? Either
reject your community's religious institutions and take advantage
of the state's secular courts, or continue to suffer gender discrimination
at the hands of the religious authorities.
The bill holds
the secular courts out as bastions of enlightenment and means to
liberation when, in fact, these very courts have participated actively
in 50 years of discrimination against Israel's "non-Jews." There
is no apparent recognition of, let alone challenge to, the institutionalized
anti-Arab bias of Israel's secular institutions, including the courts.
Furthermore, advocates assume women will get better deals in civil
courts but there is no evidence of this. Finally, the bill's passage
would undermine the potential to change religious institutions from
within the various communities.
To use the
issue of women's rights as a means of attacking religious authorities
forces a rigid distinction between "gender interests" and "communal
interests." For Arab women in Israel, this is a spurious dichotomy,
since they have more in common with men of their community--structural
discrimination and political marginalization--than with many Jewish
women. Why should Arab women embrace a bill that generalizes about
gender interests and assumes that the Israeli state's secular institutions
can "save" them from religion, when it was the Israeli state that
made religion so significant to their status and rights (or lack
of rights) as women and as Arabs?
The shortcomings
of this bill are reminiscent of early mistakes made by leaders of
the US women's movement. In the 1960s, liberal feminists modeled
their agenda on the civil rights movement, essentially substituting
gender for race. They apparently failed to recognize that these
are not parallel forms of identity nor do they lead to comparable
forms of discrimination. In a white-dominated society like the US,
blacks are discriminated against as members of a racial collectivity
(similar to "non-Jews" in Israel), while discrimination against
women varies according to race, class, sexuality and so on. The
women's movement, dominated by white middle-class heterosexual women,
did not appeal to many women of color, poor women, lesbians and
so on because it refused to recognize and deal with the ways those
differences among women matter.
Criticizing
liberal feminism is not a rejection of feminism. Rather, it indicates
a desire to see a more comprehensive approach to rights in Israel.
To create a solid, progressive movement, the "other" Arab women's
problem--discrimination by the state against its non-Jewish citizens--must
be made integral to feminist strategies and discourse. While the
Israeli government submitted its 1996 report to the UN Commission
on Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, omitting
almost any consideration of the status of "non-Jewish" women, a
team of Arab feminists produced and submitted a counter-report to
the UN in 1997. Their data and analysis show the connections between
"personal" and "public" forms of oppression. Minority women know
that they can never find real relief from gender discrimination
as long as they are part of communities that continue to suffer
discrimination. Fighting all forms of discrimination is the real
feminist issue.
Lisa Hajjar,
an editor of this magazine, teaches sociology at Swarthmore College.

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