Palestinian civil society in
Israel- In the Mandate period, Palestinian society
developed social and political organizations as part
of its internal dynamics, the broader Arab national
movement, and the anticolonial movement (Kim-
merling 1993). With urbanization and the develop-
ment of the middle class, women’s organizations –
some of them explicitly feminist – began emerging
in Jaffa, Jerusalem, and other major cities (Peteet
1991, Fleischmann 2003). The war of 1948 led to
the collapse of the social structure of Palestinian
society and the women’s organizations that were a
part of that structure. - From1948 to 1966 Palestinian citizens of
Israel were under military rule. During this period,
Palestinian civil society was almost non-existent.
The only women’s organizations were branches of
the Communist Party, Israeli parties, and church-
related charity groups run by women. - From the mid-1970s, and especially in the
1990s, Palestinian NGOs in Israel grew in numbers
and their sphere of activities expanded (Payes
2004). Since 1980, nearly 1,000 Israeli-Palestinian
organizations have registered as amutot. Many of
them work for equal citizenship and social equal-
ity; 5 percent of these NGOs are women’s organi-
zations. Palestinian women are proportionally
more involved in civil society organizations than in
the formal Arab political parties in Israel (Abu
Baker 1998). Palestinian women’s associations
advocate for welfare, health, and education reform
(Mar’i 1991) and work to protect victims of do-
mestic violence and women who have been threat-
ened with honor killings by their families (Hasan
2002). These groups have also been active in peace
organizations (Sharoni 1995, Cockburn 1998,
Herzog 1999, Peteet 1991). Feminist activists stress
the link between national and feminist causes,
arguing that the oppression of Palestinian women
in Israel results not only from the oppression per-
petuated by Palestinian society, but from patriar-
chal patterns that are often inextricably linked to
official policies (Payes 2004, Rabinowitz 2002).
The “national solidarity” demanded of Palesti-
nian and Jewish women acts as an obstacle to an
understanding that women of both national groups
share similar concerns and might benefit from co-
operation and coalitions that work toward protect-
ing women’s rights and freedoms. The increasing
strength of the feminist movement has revealed the
connection between nationalism and women’s sta-
tus. In the 1990s, this approach spawned numerous
women’s peace movements and coalition building
between Israeli-Jewish and Israeli-Palestinian women
46 civil society
(Emmett 1996, Sharoni 1995, Pope 1993). The fra-
gile nature of such coalitions has been exacerbated
by the fragility and difficulty of the peace process.Bibliography
K. Abu Baker, A rocky road. Arab women as political
leaders in Israel [in Hebrew], Ra≠ananna 1999.
U. Ben Eliezer, State versus civil society. A non-binary
model of domination through the example of Israel, in
Journal of Historical Sociology11:3 (1998), 370–96.
——, New Associations or new politics? The significance
of Israeli-style post-materialism, in Hagar. International
Social Science Review4 (2003), 5–34.
C. Cockburn, The space between us. Negotiating gender
and national identities in conflict, London 1998.
T. El-Or and G. Aran, Giving birth to settlement maternal
thinking and political action of Jewish women on the
West Bank, in Gender and Society9:1 (1995), 60–78.
A. Emmett, Our sisters’ promised land. Women, politics,
and Israeli-Palestinian coexistence, Ann Arbor 1996.
E. Fleischmann, The nation and its “new” women. The
Palestinian women’s movement, 1920–1948, Berkeley
2003.
S. Fogiel-Bijaoui, Feminine organizations in Israel. Cur-
rent situation [in Hebrew], in International Problems,
Society and Politics31 (1992), 65–76.
M. Hasan, The politics of honor. Patriarchy, the state and
the murder of women in the name of the family honor,
in Journal of Israeli History21:2 (2002), 1–37.
S. Helman and T. Rapoport, Women in Black. Chal-
lenging Israel’s gender and socio-political orders, in
British Journal of Sociology48:4 (1997), 682–700.
H. Herzog, Homefront and battlefront and the status of
Jewish and Palestinian women in Israel, in Israeli
Studies3:1 (1998), 61–84.
——, A space of their own. Social-civil discourses among
Palestinian Israeli women in peace organizations, in
Social Politics. International Studies of Gender, State
and Society6:3 (1999), 344–69.
——, Women in Israeli society, in U. Rebhun and C. I.
Waxman (eds.), Jews in Israel. Contemporary social
and cultural patterns, Hanover, N.H. 2004, 195–220.
D. Izraeli, A. Friedman, H. Dahan-Kalev, S. Fogiel-Bijoui,
H. Herzog, M. Hasan, and H. Naveh, Sex, gender, pol-
itics. Women in Israel[in Hebrew], Tel Aviv 1999.
E. D. Jaffe, Giving wisely. The internet directory of Israeli
nonprofit and philanthropic organizations, 2002,
<http://givingwisely.org.il/Copyright.htm>.
R. A. Kanaaneh, Birthing the nation. Strategies of
Palestinian women in Israel, Berkeley 2002.
B. Kimmerling and J. Migdal, The Palestinian, New York
1993.
M. M. Mar’i and S. K. Mar’i, The role of women as
change agent in Arab society in Israel, in B. Swirski and
M. P. Safir,Calling the equality bluff. Women in Israel,
New York 1991, 213–21.
S. Payes, Palestinian NGOs in Israel. The politics of civil
society, I. B. Tauris (forthcoming).
J. M. Peteet, Gender in crisis. Women and the Palestinian
resistance movement, New York 1991.
J. Pope, The emergence of a joint Israeli-Palestinian
women’s peace movement during the intifada, in
H. Afshar (ed.),Women in the Middle East. Per-
ceptions, realities and struggles for liberation, London
1993, 172–83.
D. Rabinowitz and K. Abu Baker, The stand tall genera-
tion. The Palestinian citizens of Israel today [in
Hebrew], Jerusalem 2002.
M. Shilo, R. Kark, and G. Hasan-Rokem (eds.),Jewish