Citation

Jacoby TA. Int. Fem. J. Polit. 1999; 1(3): 382-402.

Copyright

(Copyright © 1999, Informa - Taylor and Francis Group)

DOI

10.1080/146167499359808

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

The article explores Jewish women's protest in four main structures in Israel: the national collective, the military, religion, and the family. These arenas serve as primary centres for contesting and negotiating gender relations in a society fashioned by over fifty years of protracted warfare, in which national security is implicated in the construction of Jewish nationalism, and the predominant burdens of international conflict are transferred to the familial realm. Women's contradictory position in state building in Israel is a product of their compulsory conscription into the military, along with their domestication during periods of crisis. Due to the exigency of Israeli security, conflict and conflict management in Israel tend to glorify patriarchal authority while restricting women's domain to the symbolic sphere of hearth and home. Israel provides an exceptional forum through which to explore broader questions about women's status in militarized societies: how are gender relations reproduced through nation building processes? What is the relationship between feminism and nationalism? What are the material and symbolic representations of women in the nation? And importantly, how have women asserted their agency within these restricted boundaries? These issues will be explored with reference to three generations of women's protest in Israel: the pioneering women of the pre-state period, the 1970s feminist movement, and the contemporary women's peace movement. Women's protest in the Israeli context defies traditional assumptions about the natural affinity between women and pacifism, and opens a vast terrain for reconceptualizing the crosscutting cleavages of gender with nation, ethnicity, class, religion, and so on.