Righteous Transgressions: Women's Activism on the Israeli and Palestinian Religious Right by Lihi Ben Shitrit

Author:Lihi Ben Shitrit [Shitrit, Lihi Ben]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Women in Politics, Political Advocacy, Religion; Politics & State, Religion, Political Ideologies, Comparative Politics, Middle Eastern, Social Science, Political Science, World, Political Process, Political Freedom, Jewish Studies, Islamic Studies, General
ISBN: 9781400873845
Google: zUjuCQAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 27168407
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2015-12-08T00:00:00+00:00

Figure 4.2. Nadia Matar (right) at an outpost support tour.

They kept us for one night in the Russian Compound jail…. Then they moved us to another jail. And there I saw the way they [the young women] work. First, on the bus over there they almost toppled the bus by going wild, they shook it from side to side. Then in jail they were completely unruly but their rebelliousness was genuine, each small one stood up courageously, they made a mess of that place, these young and soft and fresh girls threw chairs on the door when the guard came over without blinking. They took all the mattresses off the beds and screamed, and the guards just didn’t know what to do with them. When they took us back to Jerusalem the girls got hold of all the arrest files and tore them to pieces and threw them out of the window, they were uncontrollable.

Several rabbis and settlement leaders criticized such acts by women during the disengagement and later in physical clashes in the Amona illegal settlement outpost in 2006, declaring these immodest and inappropriate for religious women. But Hanna explained to me Orthodox women’s participation in unruly confrontations using an allegory:

There is a story about the way the Maccabean rebellion against the Greeks started [in the second century BC]. One of the stories is that there was a law that the right to a bride’s first night was reserved for the [foreign] ruler. And Matityahu’s daughter was about to get married and they found some halachic ways to justify this practice, to accommodate. So everybody was out celebrating and she came out and tore up her clothes and stood there naked. Everyone was outraged and said, “What is this behavior?!” But she said, “How can you sit here and eat and drink, when you know what is about to happen tonight?! How can you talk with me about modesty and then give me to that villain?! And that is what caused the rebellion. Men can philosophize and find halachic maneuvers to justify things but [the woman] sees the larger picture, she sees the humiliation. I don’t know if this really happened or not, but in legend and tradition it is the woman who sees the truth and rebels. And that later awakens the men, because they are the ones who physically carry out the war.

While in peaceful, routine times, women might be quiet and modest, in exceptional times, according to this narrative, they are the ones who lead the struggle. Hannah does not describe the women’s behavior during the disengagement as “immodest.” On the contrary, acts that may be immodest in normal times—like Matityahu’s daughter appearing naked in front of a party of men—are in fact the most feminine of actions in unusual times. “Of course [settler women] are brought up to be obedient (tsaitaniyot),” Hanna told me, “it is not a contradiction. But with this fact you are also more aware of these unusual times,” she said, “times that are out of the ordinary.

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