The Everyday Life of the State by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Washington Press

ETHNIC POLITICS AND POLITICAL FRACTURE

During the period of the first intifada, 1987-93, the Israeli women's movement was largely run by Ashkenazi women of middle-class origin. According to interviews, many of these women joined the women's movement due to peace mobilization around the 1981 Israeli invasion of Lebanon. Some of the women who joined the women's movement during this period, such as Hanna Safran, Nabila Espanioly, and Edna Toledano-Zaretsky, have become important leaders in the women's movement nationally. Some feminist leaders were by the 1990s important leaders in Arab-Jewish coexistence programs such as Shatil and the Beit Hagefen Arab-Jewish Center in Haifa as well. Indeed, the accounts of feminist leaders joining the women's movement through peace activism have become so well known that until recently it had been assumed that most women continue to join the women's movement due to participation in peace marches and the like (Rosenwasser 1992; T. Mayer 1994; Sharoni 1995). However, more other recent studies suggest that only 1 percent of women joined the movement for that reason by 2000, when local experiences through work and other local contexts were more important (Woods 2004b). Nonetheless, in the 1980s, many women did appear to learn of and become interested in the women's movement due to peace mobilization, particularly in organizations such as Women in Black.

Simona Sharoni has detailed the response of Israeli women's movement organizations to the first intifada. A number of recently founded women's organizations began to organize together to conduct meetings and consciousness-raising sessions among Jewish and Arab women, taking Jewish women across the Green Line to the West Bank. These organizations included Women in Black, Women's Organizations for Women Political Prisoners, Israeli Women Against the Occupation, the Women and Peace Coalition, and the Israeli Women's Peace Net (Sharoni 1995, 110). Women from organizations around the country, including the Haifa Feminist Center, joined these women's peace organizations and helped organize these meetings. Because Palestinian women from the West Bank could not obtain permission to come into Israel, Israeli-Jewish women crossed the Green Line to the West Bank for the meetings. By the 1990s, Palestinian-Israelis also regularly crossed the Green Line for such discussion groups, workshops, and conferences.8

Sharoni (1995) has argued that Israeli-Jewish women in these meetings tended to emphasize what women held in common across ethnic lines as a basis for coming together. Commonality as women was raised in comparison with the masculine machismo, and a societal trend of a masculinized militarism was highlighted as holding a hegemonic status in the context of the military conflict at hand. Palestinian women in the West Bank, by contrast, tended to stress the differences in the immediate material and power contexts of Israeli-Jewish and Palestinian women. Palestinian women took exception to Israeli-Jewish attempts to perpetuate a logic of feminist standpoint, pointing out instead the very different structural constraints that faced Palestinian women. That is, the attempts of the existing Israeli women's movement to incorporate women across various lines of identification, according to the logic of standpoint theory, resulted in

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