The location of Muslims within Israeli society
helps to contextualize this complex phenomenon.
Between 1948 and 1966, Palestinian Arab citizens
(including Muslims, Christians, and Druze) were
regulated under a military administration. Muslims
constitute a majority of the non-Jewish Palestinian
Arab national minority, with 1.7 million persons
making up 16 percent of the Israeli population
within the Green Line, but including East Jeru-
salem. Most Muslims live in Arab towns of fewer
than 20,000 residents. Larger towns range in size
from Taibeh (30,000), to Umm el-Fahm (38,000),
and Nazareth (41,500), where confidentiality in
social services and policing is often compromised.
Muslims in Israel are amongst the youngest and
least educated of the population, and also experi-
ence the highest levels of unemployment and
poverty (especially Beduin living in the Negev).
Socioeconomic marginalization, compounded by
weak representation in local and national politics,
intensifies battered women’s entrapment. Palesti-
nian feminists also argue that such second-class
citizenship within a militarized society inspires cri-
tiques of political violence but creates silences about
gender violence.
In this family-centered society, national tensions
link marriage and motherhood to Palestinian iden-
tity. Marriage and motherhood enforce national
and religious autonomy, evidenced, for example, in
the exclusive jurisdiction of male qà∂ìs in Sharì≠a
courts (which are exempt from Israeli legislation on
women’s equality) over marriage and divorce, and
the five-year struggle, won in 2001 by the Coalition
for Equality in Personal Status Laws, to amend the
Family Courts Law (1995), to open civil courts to
Muslims to determine maintenance and child cus-
tody. Muslim men who batter rely on the state’s lax
enforcement of the 1959 anti-polygyny law and the
legal prohibition against forced divorce, whereby a
husband unilaterally pronounces his wife divorced,
a tenet of Islamic divorce law. Threats of unilateral
divorce enforce subordination and quell battered
women’s resistance, especially for Muslim women
who, for economic reasons, fear of abandonment,
family rejection, and the loss of social status or
child custody, wish to stay married. Indeed, mar-
riage rates are high and divorce rates lowest within
the Muslim community, where living alone as a
single or divorced woman is relatively rare. Muslim
women marry on average at 21.5 years of age and
have the highest number of children, when com-
pared to Druze, Christian, and Jewish Israelis.
It was Jewish feminist activists who established
the first battered women’s shelter in 1977 in an
Arab neighborhood in the city of Haifa. However,120 domestic violence
not until the 1990s did Arab and Jewish women,
based in non-governmental organizations (NGOs)
and public agencies, successfully transform violence
against women from a personal harm into a social
problem and firmly establish violence against women
or family violence in the Israeli lexicon. As part of
the global anti-gender violence movement, women
organized centers for victims of sexual violence,
opened hotlines and shelters, called for alternatives
to violent and controlling forms of masculinity, and
demanded legal changes and funding for victim
services. Muslim women won limited recognition
of their unique living conditions and related needs.
In 1991, legislators gave victims access to restrain-
ing orders, although this option has limited utility
for the majority of Muslim women who live adja-
cent to their husband’s family. The first and only
Israeli shelter staffed by and for Arabs was founded
by Palestinian activists in 1993. Public monies par-
tially support these and other shelters and regional
prevention centers, but few are located in majority
Muslim locales. Additionally, limited Arabic lan-
guage materials on gender violence exist.
Israeli police estimate one out of every five mar-
ried women is physically battered; the ministry of
labor suggests one in four men chronically use
physical violence against wives and children. Draw-
ing on research among Palestinians that indicates
similar prevalence rates, Aida Touma-Suliman,
director of the Nazareth-based NGO Women Against
Violence (WAV), estimates that one in four Pales-
tinians in Israel beat their wives at least once a year.
Approximately one in five engaged women report
their partner’s use of physical aggression against
them. Taken together, the pervasive nature of do-
mestic violence, the tendency to consider it a family
issue, and men’s justification of wife beating con-
tributes to the normalization of physical violence
and other behaviors intended to intimidate and
control women. In concert with allied organiza-
tions, such as Kayan and Al Siwar, members of
WAV work to end the familial ideology of privacy
that upholds violence against married and unmar-
ried women, and so-called “honor killings,” where
male relatives execute and thus punish a woman for
breaking gender codes of comportment and mobil-
ity. Overall, about one third of victims of family-
based threats and violence who seek support report
the abuse to the police. In 2001, the police docu-
mented over 22,000 new cases of domestic violence
in the population at large, yet representatives of law
enforcement and the judiciary often dismiss vio-
lence against Muslim women as “cultural” and
intervene in ways that at times ultimately endangers
those seeking protection.