Our Sisters' Promised Land: Women, Politics, and Israeli-Palestinian Coexistence

Introduction

Introduction In 1990, when I went to Israel to do an ethnographic project on women's peace activism, words like peace, coexistence, and Palestinians were silenced in official public discourse. Three years later, after the display of two internationally legitimated Middle East peace agreements, it was hard to recall just how much official resistance to coexistence there had been in Israel only three years earlier. The audience present at the White House for the two ceremonies in Washington in 1993 and 1994-and the rest of the world-linked to the center of international power via television, all could see the handshakes between former enemies, as a reluctant Rabin took Arafat's hand or enthusiastically shook hands with King Hussein. Reluctant or joyous, the official agreements were a turning point from the Likud government 's view that the state of Israel is destined to live on the sword and the Middle East is doomed to exist in perpetual conflict. During the Likud government, from 1977 until 1992, it was difficult to pierce the wall of silence for those who, like women peace activists, held a coexistence position . Consequently, local and international media paid little attention to struggles for peace and focused instead on the center of political power. Attention to the margins-in this case women peace activists-is indispensable to a comprehension of the changes that swept the region and altered official politics, of Israelis, Palestinians, and Jordanians, from conflict to coexistence. When I started my fieldwork in Israel in 1990, the Likud Party was in power. In June 1992 Israel experienced a major political transformation, when Labor won the elections after fifteen years of political exile. In September 1993 Israelis and Palestinians made a historic gesture of mutual recognition; in July 1994 another agreement was made between Israel and Jordan. The peace politics of the margins have become the legitimate politics of the state: the Labor government embraced an official policy of coexistence with the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and with Arab countries. The 1992 change in the Israeli government was vital in shaping the transformation from a state policy that denied Palestinian nationhood to one of coexistence with Palestinians. Because women peace activists had advocated coexistence with Palestinians during the Likud government, they were regarded as outside the 2 Our Sisters' Promised Land national consensus. Until 1992 the women's peace and coexistence position seemed utopian, if not simply politically foolish and naive. Women were seen by their more benign opponents as bleeding hearts, in Hebrew yefei nefesh, "beautiful souls," and by the extreme right wing as traitors and whores. At the time their peace politics was seen as nothing more than a fringe protest, a minuscule dot on what the government portrayed as a broad national consensus. Local and outside observers of Israeli politics mirrored the official position and ignored or marginalized the peace movement. During my initial fieldwork in 1990, political predictions made by various experts about the Middle East in 1990-91 did not include agreements between Israelis and the PLO. The Israeli official position was one of an ongoing conflict with Palestinians and Arab countries, a conflict endless and eternal as far as the eye of the Right could see. The Margins Illuminate Political Life Much has been written about women's marginalization in political systems all over the world. This book, however, is not about the global phenomenon of women's inequality in organized politics, nor does it argue that the Israeli case is different in this regard. Instead, it shows that to place women peace activists at the center of a discussion is to illuminate Significantly Israel's political life itself. Most studies on politics are silent about women, and those that do focus on women are either concerned with their marginalization or argue that women have more power than is acknowledged by researchers or by local men. In turning the spotlight on women, I show instead how attention to the margins-where women peace activists arereveals aspects of political life that, despite their significance, have been ignored. Moreover, to spotlight the margins exposes political issues that the center would like to conceal. To attend to the margins is more than a mere shift in focus: the margins in fact reveal what, after Freud, I call political denials by those in power, who would like to conceal or suppress what is at odds with their ideas and actions.1 Studies on politics often focus on the center and ignore the margins...