Gender and Diversity in the Middle East and North Africa

Zahia Smail Salhi

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781317989066
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

The images of women in chadors or burqas as contrasted with images of belly dancers which circulate today as representations of Muslim/Middle Eastern women do not fluctuate from the images propagated by Orientalist paintings and colonial photographs which also offer contrasting representations of the veiled thus secluded and the naked or semi-naked thus eroticised Muslim/Oriental woman.

As well as challenging the prevailing stereotypes of the Middle Eastern and North African women, the book aims to highlight the element of diversity which characterises the lives of these women and the regions to which they belong. The sense that most of the Middle Eastern and North African countries are Muslim does confer a common identity, a distinction from others that may serve to bridge wide social, cultural, and economic differences among them. However, it is also important to stress that significant elements other than Islam contribute to the making of MENA societies and women's cultural identities.

This book was published as a special issue of the British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies.

Masculinity in Crisis: The Case of Palestinians in Israel

AMALIA SA'AR AND TAGHREED YAHIA-YOUNIS

ABSTRACT This paper argues that the Palestinians in Israel are undergoing a deep crisis of masculinity that is at once a reaction to, and a reflection of, their collective situation. Notwithstanding some important benefits that accrue to them as citizens, they are subjected to structural violence, which includes policing, racism, and discrimination. Their socio-economic conditions are poor, and their sense of identity and cultural vitality are on the defense. The paper describes several coexisting scripts of hegemonic masculinity and their inbuilt tensions and reads the seemingly inward-turned wave of violence as emanating from blocked paths to masculine performance.

Despite the abundant literature on Palestinian women, the discussion of Palestinians as a national collective tends to be blind to the double role of gender, and particularly of masculinity, as a model of and model for the production of cultural meaning. Masculinity therefore is an apt site for a critical reading of the situation of Israeli Palestinians, whence to view the vulnerable side of what is usually considered the hub of power and control.

I. Introduction

Over the past decade, and increasingly since the outbreak of the second Palestinian uprising (intifada) in October 2000, the Palestinian Arab citizens of Israel seem anxious about growing violence inside their localities.¹ Violence erupts over boundaries of plots of land, due to shared ownership, or over municipal politics. But increasingly it just breaks out during quarrels between youngsters, sometimes even children, which then create a factional dynamic that quickly draws entire extended families or even clans into circles of ongoing attacks and counter attacks. In this paper we document a cumulative sense of moral predicament that is created by numerous stories of aggression in the local press. We examine what seems to be a discourse on crisis and interpret it, paying close attention to language and symbolism, as a discourse on masculinity in crisis. Although we could find some statistical support to the local impression of increasing violence,² we do not attempt to engage in ‘objective’ assessments of whether violence in the Palestinian-Arab communities in Israel has actually been on the rise. Internal aggressions are quite common among communities all over the world that suffer poverty, marginalization, and exposure to state and racial violence. The members of such communities are frequently convinced that the scope of the violence is objectively enormous — certainly greater than in the past or in comparison with other places, although they cannot know this ‘for a fact’. As Jean and John Comaroff show for the case of South Africa, the application of statistical measurements to crime rates does not necessarily produce neutral evaluations, since the very procedures of counting and defining facts tend to be embedded in the discourse that imagines the phenomenon to be grave.³ Our focus, instead, is on the discursive construction of crisis and relapse.

In the most basic sense the discourse on violence that seems to be getting out of hand is a discourse on collective identity. Not surprisingly it is fraught with gender undertones, which only rarely are articulated explicitly. For one thing, the fact that the perpetrators tend almost invariably to be males is never remarked upon as such, yet the discourse is rich in symbols of masculinity and occasionally even includes explicit discussions of proper manhood. Emphatically, the discourse is about collective morality, not men per se. By analyzing it in terms of masculinity we use an etic⁴ term in order to bring to the surface an unmarked component that we consider to be one of the organizing schemes of collective identity. We therefore hope to contribute to ongoing scholarly efforts to unearth the underlying gender aspect of the political economy of Israeli Palestinians.

A Constructionist Approach to Masculinity

Our approach to masculinity is guided by the constructionist theory of gender. Treating masculinity as a social construction has several implications, which are by now well-established in feminist literature. We review them here stenographically, borrowing from Robert Connell's presentation merely to position our analysis.⁵ In any given cultural context masculinity is never singular. Instead, various models of masculinity coexist and inform one another.⁶ These models are hierarchical and compete for hegemony. Yet despite their self-imagined differences, in the Israeli-Palestinian context, as in many other places, they share a formidable interest in maintaining patriarchal and heterosexist principles.⁷ Thirdly, alongside the competition between various options masculinities are also divided, in the sense that masculine identities embody tensions between contradictory desires or practices. A fourth important aspect of masculinities is that they are collective. Masculinities are sustained and enacted by individuals, but also by groups, institutions, and cultural forms such as the mass media. Fifth, there is no necessary or automatic link between masculinities and men. Notwithstanding their strong exclusionary nature,⁸ masculine identities, images and ideologies may be enacted by men and women, although at the level of individual experience they are likely to affect men more acutely. Next, like gender more generally, masculinity is embodied, which opens a space for performativity. People do not ‘have’ gender. Rather, masculinities and femininities are things that people ‘do’.⁹ In this respect, Esmail Nashif argues that Palestinian men tend to overdo their gender, and he marks ‘overmanning’ as a ritualistic response to the crisis of male productivity in the Arab world.¹⁰ Another important corollary of the performative aspect is that in practical reality, any heuristic models of masculinity are translated into nuanced and located scripts of action. The notion of scripts here is borrowed from the work of Carol Stack and Linda Burton on the ways in which kinships are realized ‘on the ground’.¹¹ Masculine scripts, as opposed to models, by their very nature create ongoing tangles of subjugation and subject-making. All too often such scripts involve different forms of aggression/victimization. As Connell notes,¹² the source of violence is probably the ongoing active construction of masculinity rather than the end state. Last but not least, masculinity is created in specific historical circumstances. Along with the emphasis on performativity and scripts, this last point highlights the possibility of change, which is embedded in the very tensions and contradictions of masculinity.

Methodology

This paper is the product of an ongoing exchange between two ethnographers of Palestinian society inside the Green Line, one of whom (Taghreed Yahya Younis) is also a member of this society, while the other (Amalia Sa'ar) is a member of the dominant Jewish-Israeli society.¹³

Through our ongoing research, which actually focuses primarily on Palestinian women, we have observed a certain process that is happening to masculinity. To test what we thought was going on, we set out on a systematic reading of the most widely selling Arab newspapers over a set period of time. During September–October 2005 we sampled eight weekend editions of three newspapers: Al-Sinnārah and Kull-al-’Arab, which are independent, and Fasl-al-Maqāl, which belongs to the secular-nationalistic Tajammu' party.

To gain some sense of time-depth, and to make sure that what we found was not bound to the particular late summer season, we then sampled four winter weekend editions of the earliest year for which each of these newspapers could supply us with copies. The early issues all date back to the 1990s, which is when the Arabic printed press in Israel started flourishing. Until the mid-1980s locally printed Arabic newspapers were very limited. One prominent exception is Al-Ittihād, a daily that belongs to the Israeli Communist Party (and the subsequent DFPP coalition that came to include it). A strictly party-line newspaper, Al-Ittihād has a somewhat different character from the independent papers, and even from Fasl-al-Maqāl, which was first issued when the landscape of Arabic newspapers had changed and became more diverse, less politicized, and more ‘yellow’. We did not sample Al-Ittihād because we looked for items with a community focus and even a gossipy character. We likewise did not sample the two Islamic-party newspapers Al-Mīthāq and Sawt-al-Haq wa al-Huriyah, whose distribution is relatively smaller.

When scanning the newspapers, we left out the sections on national and international politics, sports, and economics, where masculinity is omnipresent to the point that it is largely transparent. Instead, we focused on the sections on family and community affairs, as well as on the culture section, and looked for direct and indirect comments on masculinity and on crisis. Note that at the stage of data collection we already had quite a clear idea, because of our ongoing reading of the local press, that there is a discourse on crisis, and that this discourse is imbued with images and underlying motifs of masculinity. To reiterate, we came to this idea through our ongoing involvement with Palestinian society. Our reading, accordingly, was target oriented, rather than completely open-ended. We explicitly looked for direct and indirect expressions of masculinity. In the analysis, we used the notion of interpretive package¹⁴ to identify an underlying frame and the set of condensing symbols used to invoke it.

The paper unfolds as follows. After a brief background section on the Palestinian citizens of Israel, we use ethnographic literature as well as our own research to sketch scripts of Palestinian masculinities and point out some of the tensions that they produce. We then review the local discourse on crisis, and highlight the masculine elements that inform it throughout. This section is based almost exclusively on our sampling of newspapers articles. Through the material presented in these two sections we argue that the state of masculinity among the Palestinians in Israel poignantly embodies their collective predicament. In masculine terms, the intense violence that seems to be hitting the Arab communities inside Israel is a response to blocked options. On the one hand, militaristic-heroic masculinity, which surrounds them through the practices of Palestinians in the PA and of Israeli Jews, is a path not available to them. On the other hand non-violent forms of productive patriarchal masculinity, notably the possibilities to accrue political and economic power, are also largely limited, because of class and national discrimination against them.

Background on Palestinians in Israel

The Palestinian citizens of Israel number roughly 1.3 million people, or 20% of the citizens of the state, with a majority of Muslims (82%) and two smaller groups of Christians and Druzes (9% each).¹⁵ Although their Israeli citizenship grants them certain rights and opportunities, notably through education, welfare, and the right to vote and appeal to the courts, they are nevertheless structurally discriminated against.¹⁶ Palestinian Israelis are over-represented in poverty and are concentrated in the lowest socio-economic echelons,¹⁷ with soaring rates of unemployment among men over 45 years of age.¹⁸ Their residential areas suffer from stalled urbanization,¹⁹ which entails among other things, under-developed infrastructure, unemployment, and housing shortages. Strikingly, patriarchal clans have largely retained their powerful position in municipal politics²⁰ despite far-reaching changes, such as nuclearization of households, a changing power-balance between genders and generations within families, a rise in women's education and earning power, relative entitlement to individual civil protections, and an overall shift to cash economy.

As to gender relations, the situation of Israeli-Palestinian women is complex and even contradictory. They navigate between multiple patriarchies, notably the family, the state, their ethnic or religious communities, work places and different community institutions. This potentially intensifies their oppression.²¹ However, the different power regimes often compete and conflict with each other, which drives wedges and produces tensions in the broader gender order, in turn creating constant, if fleeting opportunities for women to expand the scope of their entitlement.²² Over the past half century or so, Arab women in Israel have registered dramatic achievements. Their level of schooling has risen spectacularly, and the average number of children per woman has dropped significantly. Their freedom of movement has increased and their presence in the public sphere has become ever more salien...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• 1. Masculinity in Crisis: The Case of Palestinians in Israel
• 2. The Central Role of the Family Law in the Moroccan Feminist Movement
• 3. Steps to the Integration of Moroccan Women in Development
• 4. Gender Equality in Tunisia
• 5. Party Politics of the AKP (2002 – 2007) and the Predicaments of Women at the Intersection of the Westernist, Islamist and Feminist Discourses in Turkey
• 6. Women and Media in Saudi Arabia: Rhetoric, Reductionism and Realities
• 7. Iraqi Women and Gender Relations: Redefining Difference
• 8. The Discursive Occupation of Afghanistan
• 9. Gender, Citizenship and Political Agency in Lebanon
• 10. Gender and Violence in Algeria: Women's Resistance against the Islamist Femicide
• Bibliography
• Index