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Righteous Transgressions
Women's Activism on the Israeli and Palestinian Religious Right
By Lihi Ben Shitrit PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2016 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4008-7384-5
CHAPTER 1
Introduction: Frames of Exception and Righteous Transgressions
I met Shlomit, a prominent settler activist in her early fifties, in the summer of 2008 while conducting preliminary fieldwork in several Jewish settlements in the West Bank. After a full day spent together, we moved to her office at the settlement's municipal council to continue our conversation. Shlomit had a familiar air about her, a gentle zeal that felt motherly and pious in equal parts. With her extended hand, she offered a warm and measured embrace as we stepped together into her office.
"I want to show you something on YouTube," Shlomit said when our conversation again picked up. She pressed "play" with hurried anticipation, and we watched a video recording of a violent confrontation at an illegal settlement outpost. A collage of abuse and vitriol flashed across the screen, men with ostensible markers of their allegiance provoking other men. There were settlers, their large yarmulkes and tsitsiyot swaying in an angry rhythm as they flung their bodies at their adversaries. These adversaries, Palestinians and Israeli peace activists, appeared tired at first. But they too started a shoving match once a few too many punches had been thrown.
These were not, however, just unruly men. Of all the parties to the violence, a lone woman's rage burned the brightest. There she was, Shlomit, diminutive and yet commanding all of the energies of the Israeli border police and soldiers on the scene. She screamed expletives in the face of the Palestinians and the peace activists, these "bastard leftist traitors" spreading ruin across her beloved land. She argued incessantly with the border police officer, proclaiming her religious reason and resorting to an effusive display of injured sentiment when argument failed. And she did not shy away from the physical confrontation. As the video convulsed into an all-out scuffle, Shlomit was there in the thick of it, her arms flailing alongside tightened fists and ruffled beards. At some point, the officer resorted to his final option in stemming the disruption she was causing. Three soldiers grabbed Shlomit, lifted her up in the air — two holding her from her shoulders, one at her ankles — and carried her out of the frame.
When I asked Shlomit about her conduct in the video, she did not attempt to offer a reconciliatory explanation. This was not, she said, proper behavior for an Orthodox woman concerned with female modesty. This was behavior instead that caused her and her family to suffer embarrassment. And yet she stood by each of her gestures, both physical and verbal, in those moments we had just watched on the screen. She spoke to me of an exceptional situation that warranted her to act in the way she did. She spoke of her land, the Land of Israel, and the future of her children, and of religious Redemption (ge'ula), and, perhaps of more significance, the role she had to play in securing all three. Her unrestrained limbs and her fierce tongue, lacking all measure, were a necessity in order to meet these exceptional demands. The exigencies of family, of social and religious protocol, fell to the wayside in this passionate performance.
Like Shlomit, many of my Orthodox settler interlocutors used the nationalist ideology of their movement to construct "frames of exception" that temporarily suspended, rather than challenged, some of the limiting aspects of their movement's gender ideology in favor of its broader goals. The women activists interpreted reality with a vocabulary of exceptional, urgent, and unusual temporality brought about by the nationalist struggle. They framed current events in terms of an exceptional threat that is posed to the national body and that requires exceptional, and even transgressive, responses by women. The unusual times, the context of a religious-nationalist struggle over the Land of Israel, they argued, justified, and made highly commendable women's behaviors that might not in normal, calmer times, be acceptable. Exceptional times called for exceptional measures and transformed women's transgressions from improper to righteous.
* * *
Like some Orthodox strands in the Jewish settler movement, many other contemporary religious-political movements in the Middle East and around the world advocate conservative gender politics. On the level of religious doctrine and praxis, many movements commonly promote patriarchal religious interpretations and patriarchal structures of religious practice in which women hold subordinate positions. In the public sphere, some of them advocate men and women's role-complementarity, stipulating a sexual division of labor where women's essential, primary roles are motherhood and caregiving to the community while the political public sphere is largely the domain of men. In formal politics and formal institutions, such movements at times circumscribe women's representation, again basing this on a commitment to role-complementarity. Some of these movements also support laws and legal systems that discriminate against women, especially in areas of reproductive rights and family law.
The adoption of a private/public dichotomy and the association of the private sphere with women and the public sphere with men, which is a primary feature of the Enlightenment project, is a testament to these movements' modernity. Furthermore, as Joan Wallach Scott and others have argued, the privatization and domestication of women has also historically been a distinguishing feature of the genealogy of secularism. Paradoxically, then, the conceptualization of sexual difference as upheld by many contemporary conservative religious-political movements, while articulated in religious language, is derived not so much from religious tradition as from modern secular discourses. However, more often than not, these movements assert that their religious commitment to role-complementarity comes to counteract what they see as the current corrupting effects of a secularism that undermines and muddles correct and God-given gender roles.
Yet women are important to such movements not only as targets of restrictive politics, but also as participating activists. In almost all of them, the theme of righteous women proliferates. "By the merit of righteous women [nashim tsadkaniyot], our forefathers were saved from Egypt," was a refrain that was often repeated in the Jewish movements I worked with to describe the importance of steadfast pious women's activism. Righteous women (nisa' salihat) from Islamic sacred history were touted as role models of piety and activism for women in the contemporary Muslim movements I studied. Similarly, in many other conservative religious movements around the world, righteous pious women are considered the backbone of a moral society.
But given these movements' constraining worldview regarding women's roles, we would expect patterns of women's activism within them to reflect the movements' gender doctrines. We would expect women to play what their movements construct as traditionally feminine roles such as embodying religious virtue through dress and modest behavior, opting for motherhood and childrearing, and carrying out piety work, charity, education, and other social services for the religious community as an extension of their caregiving roles. However, women attain different levels of visibility, voice, and leadership and perform different tasks within different movements. In some movements, they work strictly on piety promotion and social services provision and operate mainly within segregated women's spheres; their activism seamlessly adheres to the articulated gender norms of their movements. In others, women are involved in mixed-sex, explicitly political public action such as unruly protest, physical confrontations, and even militant action. Like Shlomit, they take part in activities that seem to contradict and transgress their professed commitment to role-complementarity, sex-segregation, and notions of female modesty. And in yet other movements, women serve in the highest leadership bodies and even run for elected office. What explains this variation, given that these movements' gender ideology is often fairly similar?
This is the central puzzle that this book addresses: How do activists in patriarchal religious-political movements, with clear notions about male and female differernt private and public roles, manage to expand spaces for political activism in ways that seem to transgress their movements' gender ideology? And why does this happen in some movements but not in others? This book examines these questions through a comparative study of four groups: the Jewish settler movement in the West Bank, the ultra-Orthodox Shas, the Islamic Movement in Israel, and the Palestinian Hamas. Using these cases, it offers a theoretical framework for understanding women's activism in conservative Middle Eastern religious-political movements more broadly. The framework is built by two interconnected means. First, I disaggregate and conceptualize the various forms of women's activities to offer a descriptive typology of their activism. In this way, I also demonstrate that women's activism includes both "compliant" and "transgressive" patterns and that whether it takes place in the private sphere, in sex-segregated publics, or in the public sphere, their work is inherently political. Second, I explain when and how women engage in types of activism that seem to transgress or overstep their movements' restrictive positions on gender roles, and outline the mechanisms that govern and make possible these "righteous transgressions."
Asking the Right Questions: Feminism and Conservative Religious Politics in the Middle East
For a long time, much of the traditional academic and popular analysis of the politics of socially conservative religious-political movements in the Middle East has paid only very little attention to women's activism within them. Several assumptions underlie this scant attention to women. The first is that women in general are not an important constituency for these movements. Why would they support and be active in frameworks that seem to limit their freedoms and opportunities? The second assumption is that women's work is less important because they usually do not play formal leadership roles in conservative religious-political movements. The argument here is that women's labor is mainly confined to the private sphere or to a separate women's sphere and therefore does not merit consideration when studying movement politics. However, women in the contemporary Middle East have been supporting conservative religious movements in great numbers, in many places more than they have been supporting feminist agendas or movements. Moreover, women's political activism in such movements has in fact been instrumental to the rise in popularity and influence of many of them.
For feminist scholars including myself, the fact of women's support for conservative religious politics has presented a challenge and generated scholarship that strives to uncover why women might be drawn to such agendas. While this line of inquiry has produced illuminating explanations that point to historical, social, economic, political, cultural, psychological, and spiritual factors, it has suffered from one major flaw. The posing of the question of why women would support religious politics that seem to go against their own interests takes for granted that there is something strange or puzzling about this support — that it is an anomaly or a peculiarity that requires explanation. This exposes an assumption about what in fact constitutes women's interests, and which political choices require explanation and which do not. Feminist scholars are far less surprised when women turn to feminist or progressive politics. This latter choice is taken as commonsensical or natural. But in many places, and particularly in the Middle East, it is the women who choose feminism who may be the anomaly, while those who adhere to conservative religious politics are arguably the contemporary norm.
In order to sidestep this feminist bias, I follow the lead of scholars such as Saba Mahmood, Lara Deeb, Sarah Bracke, and others in contending that rather than asking why women support conservative religious politics, we need to shift our inquiry to the question of how women support such agendas — what are the politics and mechanisms of women's efforts to advance socially conservative religious objectives? This will lead us to ask such questions as: What are the forms of women's engagement in conservative religious-political movements? How do women determine and shape the contours of their activism? And what are the consequences of their activism for their movements, for the activists themselves, and for women in general? Making such questions the heart of the research provides richer accounts of women's political experiences and overcomes the desire to question women's commitments that do not fit the expectations of universalized feminism, liberalism, and secularism. This refocusing also shifts our inquiry away from women as targets of the supposedly oppressive politics of contemporary conservative religious movements and toward a conception of women as effective political agents in these movements.
In the scholarship on women and conservative religion in the Middle East, there has been only limited investigation of women who are formal activists in explicitly political religious movements. For instance, groundbreaking works such as Mahmood's, Hafez's, and Deeb's about conservative piety in Egypt and Lebanon, respectively; El-Or's examinations of religious Zionist women and ultra-Orthodox Mizrahi women in Israel; and Ahmed's study of women's veiling focus on women who live and act in the general sphere of influence of certain religious-political movements (such as the Egyptian Muslim Brothers, Hezbollah, the settler movement, Shas, and so on) but that are not formally affiliated with them. Like these important works, most other studies that focus on the Middle East examine cultural trends that provide the sociological base for religious-political movements rather than engage with women who are formal political activists in them. The focus of this scholarship on women's personal engagement with patriarchal piety practices — like donning the veil, or cultivating a pious subjectivity that accepts women's subordination — may circumvent some of the challenges that formal politics pose.
For scholars in the Western academe who seek to render legible women's adherence to religious patriarchy in a nuanced and noncondemning manner, it may be useful to choose as subject the private woman who accepts and values, for example, a gender-inequitable religious system of marriage and divorce. It would be a different matter to take as the subject of inquiry the religious-political activist who strives to pass discriminatory legislation that would make it harder for women, but easier for men, to seek a divorce. This book differs from previous studies by looking at women who actively advocate formal political agendas grounded in patriarchal religious interpretations and who do not restrict their efforts only to personal, social, or cultural turns to piety. Relocating our attention to women's formal and explicitly political activism in conservative religious-political movements poses a tremendous challenge. But it also exposes a surprising and diverse reality that counters assumptions about women's religious-political engagement.
Understanding how variation becomes possible is important for several reasons pertaining to the implications of the ascendance of religious-political movements to women's equality. First, as mentioned, many of these movements promote teachings that profess complementarity between men and women rather than full equality and thus limit women's opportunities for equal religious, social, and political participation. However, the divergence of some movements in practice from their professed doctrines lessens the problems they pose to women. The actual public roles women members perform and their political leadership might signify practical flexibility (even if not ideological adaptability) on the part of religious-political movements. In addition, the visibility of women in the public sphere and in formal politics can have a symbolic effect on the movements' constituents and the general public. Descriptive representation of women symbolically demonstrates that women are fit and able to be public and political leaders. It can also bring new agendas to the table, as women leaders may introduce different perspectives on women's concerns and draw more attention to these concerns. Of course, these implications are potential rather than guaranteed. Descriptive representation does not ensure that the policies pursued and the discourses generated would promote greater equality for women. This depends to some extent on the attitudes and actions of the women activists and leaders who ascend in the ranks of the movements or gain public visibility.
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Excerpted from Righteous Transgressions by Lihi Ben Shitrit. Copyright © 2016 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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