Women in Israel

Most of the studies on Israeli-Palestinian relations tend to focus on historical, political and related subjects with searchlight on dispossession, warfare, dislocation, resistance amidst a politics of claims and counterclaims on territory, history and nationhood. The politics of gender, intra-Jewish hierarchies, ethno-cultural diversities and the multiple roles of a new state with most of its people transplanted from elsewhere do not tend to receive an equivalent level of scholarly investigation. For the outside world, and also for many Israelis, its Jewish citizenry looks and works alike as a monolithic community except for some occasional references to secular-orthodox divide, and in the same vein, all the Palestinian are Arab and predominantly perceived as Muslims per se, who abhor the Jewish. The studies on Arabs/Palestinians within Israel and in post-1967 occupied territories are certainly fewer though over the past few years sociologists and human right activists, especially from amongst Palestinian women, have been significantly adding to a rapidly growing historiography on the issues of nationalism, resistance, gender, economic and political marginalization and related sociological themes. In the same vein, autobiographical works by some of them, soaked in nostalgia and angst, have made this erstwhile ‘invisible world’ into a concrete factuality, away from all too- familiar masculanized works. Despite dislocations and dispersals, Palestinians for a long time have held on to an enduring tradition of scholarship, which owing to turbulent Middle Eastern politics and a continued marginalization of their own community has helped them retain stronger bonds with their land and history. Nahla Abdo is one of those Palestinian academics, who taught in Israel before moving to the West and with her first-hand knowledge as a woman teacher of those ‘invisible’ and marginalized voices, she surely writes with maturity and passion.