What Do Settler Women and Female Suicide Attackers Have in Common? - Books - Haaretz -
Israeli and Palestinian women will ‘transgress’ by suspending religious beliefs if it serves a political cause, discovers political scientist Lihi Ben Shitrit.
“Righteous Transgressions: Women’s Activism on the Israeli and Palestinian Religious Right,” by Lihi Ben Shitrit, Princeton University Press, 304 pp., $22.95
In late January, Israeli settlers tussled with Israel Defense Forces soldiers charged with evicting them from two homes in Hebron. In a familiar sight on the Israeli news, settler women balanced small children on their hips as they berated and harangued the soldiers. The very next day, a 13-year-old Palestinian girl attempted to stab a security guard in the West Bank and was shot dead – joining numerous Palestinian women and youngsters who have participated in such attacks since October.
Israelis tend to seek personal explanations for female Palestinian violence, as if political extremism is understood when it comes to men, but contradicts typically “feminine” qualities. Activism among women in conservative Jewish religious movements may seem counterintuitive as well, since traditional “feminine” behavior is not thought to include political activism or leadership.
In “Righteous Transgressions: Women’s Activism on the Israeli and Palestinian Religious Right,” Lihi Ben Shitrit, an assistant professor at the School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Georgia in Athens, probes women’s activism in four conservative religious or religious-nationalist movements in Israel and its environs – Jewish settlers, the ultra-Orthodox Israeli political party Shas, the Islamic Movement in Israel and Hamas – in a search for shared ways of thinking. It’s unlikely that her research subjects would appreciate being categorized together, but social scientists who question gender, religious extremism, nationalism or social movements will.
While Ben Shitrit’s academic discourse of contestation, intentionality, performatives, diagnostic and prognostic frames will at times alienate the average reader, it would be unfortunate to forgo the book by this Israeli-born author for that reason. Interested observers could learn much from the rare, up-close look at hugely influential political movements, beyond the subject of women’s roles within them.
The political scientist and women’s studies expert conducted a formidable amount of research and displayed substantial tenacity in reaching her subjects. She spent several years winning the personal trust of leaders and members of the first three groups, who represent tight-knit and often highly suspicious social communities. She built relationships, attended events, transcribed extensive conversations and pored over media sources – especially in the case of Hamas where, as an Israeli, she could not forge personal ties. She read both Hebrew and Arabic texts, and when researching Shas, her Moroccan background prompted openness among some of the party’s figures.
Ben Shitrit observes that gender and feminist researchers typically presume that women naturally seek greater empowerment and liberation. That leads such academics to puzzle over why some women work to advance conservative political movements that constrain them within gender roles. She believes these questions reflect a Western liberal feminist bias and mislead the inquiry.
Instead, Ben Shitrit accepts as a given that women take part prominently and often enthusiastically in religiously conservative or religious-nationalist movements. In all four movements she examines, women have become active as participants, organizers or sometimes leaders. The question for the author is: How do these women justify activism and participation sometimes in front-line struggles that contradict traditional gender norms of Orthodox Judaism or conservative Islam? And could these justifications ultimately, or unwittingly, aid in shifting traditional roles?
Thus, Jewish women settlers sometimes physically struggle with male IDF soldiers, although Orthodox Jewish law strictly proscribes touching a male stranger. On the Palestinian side, a woman suicide bomber abandons her role as mother (or future mother) and becomes a supporter of male fighters to advance a political-religious goal.
