Displaced at Home: Ethnicity and Gender Among Palestinians in Israel

285 Pages·2010·42.992 MB·English

by  Rhoda Ann Kanaaneh, Isis Nusair

displaced home
at
Ethnicity and Gender among
Palestinians in Israel
EDITED BY
Rhoda Ann Kanaaneh and Isis Nusair
With a Foreword by Lila Abu-Lughod
DISPLACED AT HOME
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DISPLACED AT HOME
Ethnicity and Gender
among Palestinians in Israel
Edited by
RHODA ANN KANAANEH
and
ISIS NUSAIR
State University of New York Press
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FOREWORD
iv
Cover photo: Singer Abeer in a scene from Slingshot Hip Hop, 2008, directed by
Jackie Salloum. Courtesy of the director.
Published by
State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2010 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without
written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system
or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic,
magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the
prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact
State University of New York Press, Albany, NY
www.sunypress.edu
Production, Laurie Searl
Marketing, Anne M. Valentine
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Displaced at home : ethnicity and gender among Palestinians in Israel / edited by Rhoda
Ann Kanaaneh and Isis Nusair.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4384-3269-4 (hardcover : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-1-4384-3270-0 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Palestinian Arabs—Israel—Ethnic identity. 2. Women, Palestinian Arab—Israel—
Social conditions. 3. Palestinian Arabs—Israel. 4. Israel—Ethnic relations. I. Kanaaneh,
Rhoda Ann. II. Nusair, Isis, 1967–
DS113.7.D57 2010
305.892'7405694—dc22 2010004945

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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FOREWORD
v
CONTENTS
List of Illustrations vii
Foreword ix
Lila Abu-Lughod
Acknowledgments xv
Introduction 1
Rhoda Ann Kanaaneh and Isis Nusair
I. STATE AND ETHNICITY
1 Political Mobilization of Palestinians in Israel: The al-’Ard
Movement 21
Leena Dallasheh
2 A Good Arab in a Bad House? Unrecognized Villagers in
the Israeli Military 39
Rhoda Ann Kanaaneh
3 Louder Than the Blue ID: Palestinian Hip-Hop in Israel 53
Amal Eqeiq
II. MEMORY AND ORAL HISTORY
4 Gendering the Narratives of Three Generations of
Palestinian Women in Israel 75
Isis Nusair
5 Counter-Memory: Palestinian Women Naming Historical Events 93
Fatma Kassem
6 Being a Border 109
Honaida Ghanim
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CONTENTS
vi
III. GENDERING BODIES AND SPACE
7 The Roles of Palestinian Peasant Women: The Case of
al-Birweh Village, 1930–1960 119
Lena Meari
8 Politics of Loyalty: Women’s Voting Patterns in
Municipal Elections 133
Taghreed Yahia-Younis
9 The Sexual Politics of Palestinian Women in Israel 153
Manal Shalabi
IV. MIGRATIONS
10 Palestinian Predicaments: Jewish Immigration and
Refugee Repatriation 171
Areej Sabbagh-Khoury
11 Women’s Masked Migration: Palestinian Women Explain
Their Move upon Marriage 189
Lilian Abou-Tabickh
12 Emigration Patterns among Palestinian Women in Israel 207
Ibtisam Ibrahim
Works Cited 223
About the Contributors 253
Index 257
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
vii
ILLUSTRATIONS
Figure 1 Map of the region, prepared by Maisoon Nassar. xvii
Figure 2 The unrecognized village of Arab al-Na‘im with
the city of Karmi’el in the background.
Courtesy of Nadera Abu Dubey-Saadi from
al-Tufula Center in Nazareth. 20
Figure 3 A girls’ choir with an accordionist at the celebrations
of the tenth anniversary of the State of Israel,
organized by the military government in Umm al-Fahim,
1958. Photograph courtesy of Moshe Pridan,
Government Press Offi ce. 74
Figure 4 Still of fi lmmaker’s mother on her rooftop in Ramleh,
from The Roof by Kamal Aljafari, 2006. Courtesy
of the director. 118
Table 8.1 Distribution of models of marriage in the
village studied. 139
Figure 5 Filmmaker Ibtisam Mara‘ana from Fridis and
Su‘ad George now settled in the UK discuss their
dreams, opportunities, and the state. From Paradise Lost
by Ibtisam Mara‘ana 2003. Courtesy of the director. 170
Table 11.1 Sources of increase in Arab population by region
of residence: 2001. 193
Table 11.2 A sample of internal migration balance in Israel,
by sex and locality: 2006. 193
vii
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FOREWORD
ix
FOREWORD
Lila Abu-Lughod
In 1948 when Palestinians found that, as Honaida Ghanim puts it so well,
a border had brutally crossed them, they could never have imagined how
profoundly their lives would diverge. The new border known as the Green
Line separated the minority who managed to remain in villages and cities
within the new State of Israel from the rest of the territory that had been
the home of Palestinians, and from the broader Arab region that would now
house the majority who were made homeless refugees.
News about the Palestinian-Israeli confl ict always seems to be about
those outside “the green line.” About those in the camps in Lebanon. About
the Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza, the territories occupied by
Israel in 1967. In his sad meditation on the relentless expropriation and
paving over of the hills and valleys of the beautiful countryside that illegal
Israeli settlement-building after the occupation of the West Bank entailed,
the writer Raja Shehadeh describes not just the destruction and danger that
have confi ned him and made his beloved country walks from Ramallah nearly
impossible, but also his crushed idealism. As a young man he had thought
he could use the law to halt the redrawing of borders. Over time, he has
come to feel that this cannot be done. The facts are on the ground now.
With the 1991 Oslo Accords that, in Shehadeh’s view (shared by many
others), undermined any capacity of the Palestinians to halt the settlements
and curtail Israeli control over the rest of Palestine, he began to understand
better his fellow Palestinians who grew up within the “green line.” In his
haunting book, Palestinian Walks: Forays into a Vanishing Landscape (Scribner,
2007), he describes the naive optimism of a new arrival to Ramallah who has
come in with the PLO to set up the Palestine National Authority. When he
takes her for a country walk near the Dead Sea, a walk that reveals Jewish
settlements dominating the hilltops and highways carving up Palestinian land
but forbidden to Palestinians, she seems unable to grasp the signifi cance of
what she is seeing. He fi nds himself for the fi rst time identifying with the
Palestinians he had disdained—those who had lived under Israeli military
rule from 1948–1966 and who now live as uneasy citizens within a nation-
state defi ned by its Jewishness, and thus their non-belonging. He writes:
ix
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