women, usually along ethnic (Ashkenazi/Mizrahi,
that is, European/Oriental) or national (Palesti-
nian/Jewish) lines obscure how class, colonialism,
and state categorization affect both women’s lives
and their experiences of the state (Shohat 1989).
Kanaaneh (2001) illustrates how Palestinian women
situate themselves and are situated as sites of power
where demographic conflict, Palestinian national-
ism, family planning, and the politics of gender
within Israel play out. Similarly, Kahn (2000) ex-
plores reproductive technologies among unmarried
Jewish women, drawing out the complicated ways
fertility and reproductive debates invoke Jewish
law as well as democratic access to state health
services. According to Torstrick (2000), coexis-
tence groups that desire social and cultural integra-
tion between Jews and Palestinians but not changes
in Israel’s political structure reinterpret the ideals of
democracy along cultural idioms rather than risk
exposing contradictions within the state’s demo-
cratic fabric. Emmett (1996) shows that while
female coexistence activists attempt to subsume
politics within the personal, larger political con-
flicts seep into and infuse the interpersonal, chal-
lenging distinctions between public and private as
well as self and nation.
Democracy in Israel is a hotly contested political
ideology. Democracy ideologies interchange with
larger conversations about civil society, national-
ism, religion, and identity, opening up possibilities
for revealing and perhaps benefiting from contra-
dictions and inconsistencies within the state. Clearly,
other concerns – namely the maintenance or con-
testation of the Jewish character of the state and the
protracted Israeli-Palestinian conflict – temper the
definition, articulation, and practice of democracy
in Israel. Given these parameters, women face the
doubly difficult task of interjecting their voices
within state discourses and in turn, negotiating the
form and substance of gendered ideologies of
democracy and citizenship.
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