Keeping mum: The mediation of military conflict in the everyday mothering of middle-class Israeli Palestinian and Jewish women

Abstract

The article examines how Israeli Palestinian and Jewish middle-class mothers mediate military conflict to young children, through silence and talk. This mediation is underpinned by dissonance between the mandate to protect children from the adult world and to ready them for it, and between the idea of children as individuals and conflict as collective engagement. The article explores the discourses and practices used for managing this twofold dissonance, including differences in the privilege of silence for Palestinian and Jewish mothers.

Keywords

Israeli–Palestinian middle class military conflict mothering silence

Introduction

The article examines ways in which Israeli Palestinian and Jewish mothers mediate ongoing military conflict to the young children in their care, through practices of silence and talk. We compare how the women develop disparate practices in this regard and consider how these are shaped by their belonging to the middle class, as well as their different social affiliations and attendant positions in relation to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. The article emerges out of a broader study grounded in an approach that views mothering as emerging at the nexus of class, culture and social positioning. The study explored understandings of a proper education for their children among women who shared middle-class affiliation and yet who hailed from three social-cultural groups in Israel – Palestinian Israelis, Jewish Israelis and immigrants from the former Soviet Union (Golden et al., 2018). In this article, we focus on the possibilities of mothering for these women in the presence of military conflict and militarism.

The caring dimension of motherhood has been linked to the feminist debate regarding the association between mothers and war. One side of the debate suggests that mothers, by virtue of their caring nature, are predisposed to peace; thus women’s morality might serve as the basis for a better politics (Ruddick, 1995). The other side suggests that motherhood can be and has been put to use for myriad political causes including supporting war (Scheper-Hughes, 1998). The caring dimension of motherhood has also been linked to discussions of class reproduction. From this point of view, conceptions of middle-class mothering are rooted in class-based ideals about care, according to which childhood should be a protected space, in which children are nurtured as unique individuals. These ideas about children appear to clash with the basic foundation of military conflict – collective action involving hardship and violence among its members, including children. In this article, we look at how mothers manage the dissonance of military conflict and class, and at how ideas of care for children are differently shaped for mothers who share class affiliation, yet are differently positioned in relation to the conflict.

Conceptual underpinnings

Mothering, childhood and class

We view mothering as a practice that occurs in ordinary, everyday interactions in local contexts of family, community and work; these, in turn, take shape within broader cultural, economic and political circumstances (Barlow and Chapin, 2010).

Research has identified middle-class mothering as a phenomenon in its own right, shaped by resources available to these women, as well as the cultural values and expectations that go into raising children as future members of the middle class. In a landmark study, Hays (1996) coined the term ‘intensive mothering’ to describe middle-class American motherhood. Within this framework, studies of middle-class mothering reveal two tenets of pertinence to this article. The first views adults as responsible for maintaining childhood as a safe, protected world of play and innocence (Stephens, 1995); the second proposes that it is the task of parents to ensure their children’s development as unique, autonomous individuals. These two tenets are interlinked – a protected environment is necessary for the cultivating of the child’s unique self by a mother attentive to his or her qualities, needs and well-being (Kusserow, 2004; Stefansen and Aarseth, 2011).

Notwithstanding its roots in American middle-class sensibilities and values, these tenets have evolved into a dominant cultural model and benchmark for proper mothering among middle-class women across the globe (Faircloth et al., 2013), and among women who share the same middle-class affiliation but hail from different socio-cultural groups. In our broader study, we were concerned with looking at variations within the middle class outside of the context in which the model originated. In this article, we focus on the Israeli context in which childrearing takes place against the background of protracted military conflict. We examine how two groups of middle-class women – sharing middle-class affiliation, yet differently positioned vis a vis the conflict – seek to ensure the implementation of the two basic tenets of middle-class mothering described above. Specifically, we elaborate upon the everyday mothering practices through which the women sought to protect and nurture their children’s uniqueness and individuality, on the one hand, within the context of collective identities evoked by military conflict, on the other.

Mothers, motherhood and militarism in Israeli society

Israeli society is characterized by a protracted political and military conflict between Jews and Arabs. Recurrent wars, along with the unresolved conflict with the Palestinians, mean that security-related concerns frame myriad aspects of Israeli life, including relations between Jewish and Palestinian citizens of Israel. These relations are further complicated by the Jewish ethno-national dimension of the state. Israeli Palestinians suffer from discrimination of various sorts, and are located towards the lower end of measures of social, educational and economic well-being (Adalah, 2011). Yet, a burgeoning Palestinian middle class has seen far-reaching changes in women’s lives – in education, employment and mothering practices (Meler, 2017).

Against the background of military conflict, research has focused on the ways in which the military seeps into, and is propped up by, civil society (Lomsky-Feder and Ben-Ari, 1999; Sheffer and Barak, 2010). The centrality of the military has ramifications for both Jewish and Palestinian women’s standing in society – buttressing the value of familism, it elevates motherhood while reinforcing a gendered division of labour (Herzog, 2004). Most studies of the military conflict and mothers in the Israeli context focus on Jewish women. Studies examine political activism, as women recruit their identity as mothers on behalf of right-wing settlements (El-Or and Aran, 1995; Neuman, 2004) and left-wing protests (Helman, 1999; Helman and Rapoport, 1997; Lemish and Barzel, 2000). Studies of the ‘cultural construction of war’ (Lomsky-Feder and Ben-Ari, 1999: 7) examine the place of bereaved parents in national remembrance ceremonies (Bilu and Witztum, 2000), and the construction of wartime motherhood in daily newspapers (Klein, 2008) and in parents’ manuals (Stoler-Liss, 2003). Given that military service is entrenched as a vital stage in the trajectory of belonging, socialization for children and parents begins early. Studies explore how this occurs in early educational settings (Furman, 1999; Gor, 2010) and demonstrate how mothers acquiesce to militarism in the curriculum (Mazali, 1998). A few studies examine how mothering practices support their children while doing military service (Bershtling and Strier, 2018; El-Or, 2001; Katriel, 1991). Research into Palestinian mothers examines their engagement in the Palestinian national struggle (Jean-Klein, 2000) through the ‘politicizing of domesticity’ (Neugebauer, 1998), as well as the experiences of mothers and mothering under occupation (Akesson, 2015).

Studies have examined the psycho-social impacts of violence on Israeli and Palestinian young people, including the awareness of intergroup relations in areas of conflict among children as young as 3 (Bar-Tal et al., 2017; see Connolly et al., 2002 for similar findings in northern Ireland). Research also addresses contribution of the media to the political socialization of children in war (Lemish and Götz, 2007), and of educational settings (Adwan et al., 2016). It is reasonable to assume that parents also play an important role in mediating political violence to children. Indeed, a study of the acquisition of social knowledge among Israeli Jewish preschoolers regarding Jewish-Arab relations revealed that most children (81%) noted their parents (mainly mothers) as a source of information (superseded by television) (Bar-Tal and Teichman, 2005). Yet, to the best of our knowledge, there are surprisingly few studies that address communications between parents and young children about political violence in Israel, or elsewhere (cf. O’Malley et al., 2007).

The study

As noted, the original study out of which this article emerged was a comparative, ethnographically informed interview study of Israeli mothers’ understandings and modes of engagement in their children’s education (Golden et al., 2018). The 30 interviewees hailed from three social-cultural groups – Palestinian Israelis, Jewish Israelis and immigrants from the former Soviet Union. The interviewees shared attributes of middle-class affiliation: graduates of higher education, in employment (unless at home out of choice), earnings (and their partners’) at average or higher, homeowners, secular-leaning (while practicing certain aspects of their respective religions). All but two were married. Of the women’s total of 73 children, 30 were under 5 years old, 27 between 6 and 11, and 16 over the age of 11. In the process of analysis, based on the conventional constant comparative method (Ayres et al., 2003), for the purpose of this article, the meaningful comparison is between Palestinian mothers and Jewish mothers (the latter including Israeli-born and immigrants).

Silence, protecting intimacy, talk

Silence

In all the interviews, the military conflict was not brought up at all by the mothers, unless we probed. Silence in this regard is noteworthy given that some of the interviews took place in the summer of 2014, at the time of Israeli military attacks on Gaza. We begin by turning to those moments in which the women’s silence was broken by our probes. These cracks allow us a glance into the meanings of silence for mothers in their everyday interactions with their children.

Avinoam, mother of two sons aged 6 and 10 years old, spoke about mothering boys, including allowing for what she considered to be expression of their masculine sides. Absent was any discussion of their future compulsory military service, until we probed, ‘Have you thought about the future in that regard?’. Although we had not specifically referred to the military, she responded,

I think about how things will be when [hesitates and trails off] . . . They [the two brothers] talk a lot about the army together. So he [her son] said, ‘I don’t want to be on the ground, a foot-soldier, because I might die’. That sort of thing. I can’t stand hearing them talk like that.

In this story, Avinoam relates how the future presence of the military is already shaping her children’s childhood, yet, shielding her children and herself, she takes care not to let this intrude into her everyday mothering.

On probing Linor, mother to two daughters aged 4 and 6, we learned how mothers may actively practice this erasure by creating a different discourse about the state within the family sphere:

I don’t talk to them so much about values in relation to the state, but more about values in relation to other people . . . [T]hey learnt the national anthem at school, they learnt all about the national holidays, including Independence Day . . . It’s not that I don’t love the country and I try to take them on as many trips as I can. But not from the point of view of ‘we need to protect our country’. There’s not much political conversation at home.

Linor describes family practices that she sees as running counter to the dominant state discourse – promoted by school – of protecting the country, as she shapes her everyday mothering in line with values which de-emphasizes state nationalism and in which ‘national identity shrinks to a personal or familial enjoyment of national culture’ (Todd, 2005, 42).

For the Palestinian mothers in our study, differently positioned in relation to the military conflict, our probes reveal a silence that is similar in its consideration of the nature of children and its attempt at erasure, but different in the implications of this erasure for their children’s future. Rahab’s three children were aged 9, 10 and 12. When we pointedly asked her about the place of politics and Arab issues in what she does for her children’s education, she replied,

Actually I don’t spend very much time on because I myself don’t like thinking about it . . . Just this morning I wanted to listen to the news and I said to myself, no, no, I don’t want to hear frustrating things. Because it’s just frustrating. I even avoid watching the stuff about all the wars in Syria. I don’t want to. What do I have to do with Syria? Okay, it pains me from a human point of view, sure it pains me, but I don’t want my children to be exposed. It’s a beautiful world, why dirty it? From the kid’s point of view, what’s in it for him? Even what’s going on in Gaza – I don’t want to expose them to difficult images. Of blood and killing. Let them play, let them play. It’s too soon.

Like Avinoam, Rahab is protecting herself and her children with silence. But Rahab chooses silence because of feelings of frustration and ambivalence in relation to her identity as an Arab and a Palestinian. Her silence is also a means of postponing similar frustrations for her children, relying on middle-class notions about childhood as a time of play.

Lina, mother to three children under the age of 9, reveals another layer to the Palestinian mothers’ silences. Like Linor, she too prioritizes relationships, but with a variation related to the lurking issue of Palestinian belonging in a Jewish state. When asked how she coped with her children in relation to the ongoing political situation, she replied,

[T]his is the country where we live – do we have any other reality? I never separated the two. Because it’s very important to me that they find their place in society and live a normal life. I don’t want them to play the card about being depressed and being an Arab and this being a Jewish state. No, I don’t open it up.

Declaring that she ‘never separated the two’, Lina is referring to citizenship and national belonging. She goes on to elaborate on the ‘liberal bargain’, adopted by middle-class Palestinian Israelis, which de-emphasizes the discourse about ethno-national rights, while stressing demands for individual rights and personal advancement (Sa’ar, 2007). Lina’s care to avoid the possibility to ‘play the card about being depressed and being an Arab’ reveals that she, like Linor, is not silent about the conflict, but rather is carefully creating a different discourse that she hopes her children will adopt.

The fact that during the interviews, most mothers only referred to the impact of the military conflict at the behest of the interviewers seemed to echo their preference for avoiding the topic in their everyday lives as mothers. Yet by delving into the cracks in their silences, we learn that these have meaning for the way these mothers view care for their children: on the personal level of mothers’ hopes and concerns for their children’s futures, as a means for emphasizing alternative discourses about the state and belonging and as part of creating what they view as a proper childhood.

Protecting intimacy

All the mothers were aware of the hovering presence of military conflict in their own and their children’s lives. Their silence in interviews reflected a division they worked to draw between the conflict and their home, as they endeavoured to preserve the intimacy of the middle-class home as the proper environment for raising their children and providing emotional support. Both Jewish and Palestinian mothers also shared the practice of ‘outsourcing’ the conflict to public spheres – in school and in the media. However, as we shall hear, the Palestinian mothers were uneasy about the creation of this autonomous domestic sphere for its neglect of collective obligation.

We heard Linor above making a distinction between her daughters’ experiences at school and at home. Let’s now listen to Ilana, mother of four children under the age of 7, in her account of what happened when the military conflict, brought up at school, invaded the intimacy of home:

One day he [her five year old son] found out about Gilad Shalit [an Israeli soldier kidnapped by Hamas and released in 2011 after five years in captivity] and he was really upset. Somebody at kindergarten told him about it and he was really upset . . . He told me about it just before he went to sleep and he was really crying. I said, how’s he going to fall asleep? So one of the things I said to him is that when I light [Sabbath] candles, I ask that he be returned to his family. So he can also ask for that . . . So that sort of gave him a place. It’s really hard. There are things children don’t need to know.

The presence of the military conflict as a subject brought up in Jewish schools – both in casual conversations and by means of the commemoration of Remembrance Day – means that mothers cannot fully protect their children from learning about the military conflict, in spite of the fact that this contradicts their ideas about what children should or should not know. In response, mothers cultivate a separation that preserves the home as a place of security and attentiveness to the child’s individual needs and sensitivities, including finding ways to tend to his or her psychological well-being in the face of learning about war.

The Palestinian mothers in our study also recognized the presence of the conflict and its potential to intrude on family life. Lina elaborated on our question of how she deals with the unresolved Palestinian-Israeli conflict:

We simply live the normal life. I don’t want to think about it, it doesn’t interest me. It does interest me – the wars cause me pain, but at the moment what interests me is my day – how I’m going to manage the day. That’s more important to me than . . .whether or not there’s Occupation. I’m less interested in that than in my day.

Lina is forthright and adamant about the division she desires between ‘my day’ and wars and occupation. The latter are not what she considers ‘normal life’, which she takes pains to create in her home. We can hear, however, a nagging feeling, perhaps of guilt, that she should show some obligation to those suffering under military conflict. Samah, mother to four children ranging from ages 2–14, was explicit in this regard. Describing how her family feels ‘uneasy’ on leisure visits to Ramallah when they must cross army checkpoints, she says,

They [the children] already know that it’s a complex reality, the state, there are divisions, there’s a conflict, there are tensions. Lots of times we just gloss over it, just let it go, as they say . . . It’s a bad thing, a very bad thing that we gloss over it . . . I haven’t got the energy I’m telling you, sometimes I gloss over it, we don’t talk about it, it’s just part of the routine as they say, part of the routine . . . we’re used to seeing checkpoints, we’re used to seeing them . . . the state views these as part of protecting its citizens; and us – maybe we have to understand it.

For both Lina and Samah, there is a thin line between experiences of the conflict in daily life outside the family and inside the home. Both are ambivalent about what they think and feel regarding the conflict itself, as well as about their preference for avoiding the issue altogether in their daily lives as mothers.

For the Jewish and Palestinian women alike, while well aware that their children were exposed to the conflict, silence is a resource in structuring the intimacy of home. In the next section, we will hear about the most prominent practice for dealing with the intrusion of the conflict from outside the home – child-centred talk.

Talk

Despite their preference for silence, the women did not silence their children. When the military conflict did intrude into the children’s day, then the mothers felt duty-bound to talk to their children about what was going on. The art of talk and self-expression are hallmarks of middle-class habitus, nurtured at home between parents and children, and used by the children at school (Maier et al., 2008; Ochs and Kremer- Sadlik, 2015). As we will hear, conversations between mothers and their children became, and were turned into, opportunities for the mothers to practice what they deemed to be proper mothering, informed by their familiarity with notions of pedagogy and developmentally appropriate practice.

Linor describes her response to intrusions of the conflict from outside into the home:

I really appreciate it that they always let us know what they were telling the children at kindergarten – whether it was about the air-raid sirens going on at the moment, or the Holocaust, or Remembrance Day for the fallen soldiers. I accept whatever they tell them . . . I don’t think it needs to be hidden from them . . . like in the last war, it was impossible to hide the air-raid sirens from them . . . but I showed appreciation for the ways they coped with the air-raid sirens: ‘Good for you that you know where to go’, ‘Good for you that you know what to do’. This is our reality . . . it’s impossible to hide it from them. If they don’t hear it from me, they’ll hear it on the news, or somebody will say something. They lost their belief in the tooth fairy a long time ago – they heard that from their friends too.

Linor repeats that she cannot hide the conflict from her children but emphasizing the open communication that she maintains with her children. The ensuing talk is child-initiated and catered to their strengths and abilities, directed less towards explaining the context of the ongoing military conflict, and more to developing psychological tools for coping. In other words, the nature of the talk is shaped around ideas of childhood as a time for preparing for adulthood by practicing psychological resilience, under the watchful guidance of mother.

Anna, a Russian-born woman, relates how her 11-year-old son’s questions opened up the opportunity to engage in intellectual conversation, albeit in an age-appropriate manner:

I think he’s capable of judging things and I try to explain things to him at a level so that I explain to an eleven year old boy – the political, economic, social criticism – the criticism. I’m sure he doesn’t understand everything. Later on I’ll explain it to him again until he decides for himself what’s going on . . . If the boy asks a question, then I answer. I try at least to have a discussion with him about the topic.

Among the Palestinian women, whose daily lives brought them and their children up against the repercussions of the political conflict, we discerned specific practices designed to mediate, or mitigate, its effects on the children. Let’s listen to Khawla, mother of two children, referring to her 5-year-old son:

He knows that he is Palestinian. I didn’t drum this into him. I didn’t bring it up although I, I do want to bring it up with him, but I thought that when he’s 7 years old, then he’ll understand, he’ll be taking it in, and I’ll explain to him, simply, what happened, who we are, who is the other side. So probably [he learned about it from] other children in the school.

From Khawla, we hear a desire to practice developmentally appropriate practices of discussion with her son. Yet she is surprised to learn that he has begun to consider his own belonging before she has stepped in to manage the intrusion of the conflict. Yousra too, mother of two children under the age of 5, has difficulty managing the early intrusion of the conflict on her children’s lives:

I prefer not to go into it . . . with them and not think about it, also because it’s not so clear for me either and so I don’t know exactly how to convey it to them. Everything is complicated here. Really. When he was at my mother’s place, he watched Al Jazeera all the time . . . about Syria and Egypt and Palestine and she [my mother] used to talk about it all in front of them . . . So sometimes they say that they don’t want to go to the shopping mall because there are Jews there. I say, so what if there are Jews? ‘They’ve got a pistol’. I say no to them, and I explain and I tell my mother: ‘Mother, please don’t tell them these things’. It’s hard to explain. I prefer not to go into it with them.

Striking in Yousra’s story is that concerns about her children’s present and future relations with the Jewish majority drive her to attempt to protect her children in her own and her mother’s home. Yet she is aware of the power of talk – both in her own mother’s words and in her expectation that a mother’s care includes responding to her children, explaining what they see around them, and assuaging their fears.

In an act of what we call ‘seeing, knowing, choosing’, some mothers used the opportunity of these conversations to put into practice – for themselves and for their children – the idea of choice. In other words, they reformulated the children’s stand regarding the conflict so as to bring it in line with the aspiration to nurture personal agency and choice among children, as part of a middle-class proper education. Samah explained why she did not get involved in nurturing her children’s Palestinian identity:

I don’t do anything . . . They see, they’re smart enough children to see and comprehend things . . . And they hear things. Kids can come to their own conclusions. I don’t ram it down their throats. Actually I don’t try to influence them in any direction, like I don’t try to influence them to be religious or not, okay? You have this and you have that and you can choose . . . I let them draw their own conclusions.

We also discerned the practice whereby the political/military conflict was thinned of political connotations and framed in terms of issues of multiculturalism. Sabah made an effort on a regular basis to take her two young children (aged 2 and 4) to a range of cultural activities in public spaces, including zoos, museums, plays and concerts. There she encouraged them to speak Hebrew, taking care to tag Hebrew as just ‘another language’:

I was faced with a dilemma from the national point of view. I know that today unfortunately, even in Arab society all over the world, there are a lot of people who have inferiority complexes because of longstanding colonialism . . . I said I don’t want to bring them up with an inferiority complex in relation to Hebrew and English, but rather with an understanding of the importance of being open.

Although Sabah went on to express a critical view of Israeli society as ‘continuing colonialism’, her emphasis on language-proficiency as a means for learning to be open, blurs the issue of conflict, avoiding the political history behind the distribution of language use. There is a hidden curriculum behind her creation of proficiency in the languages of the conflict that carefully positions her children as able to move and relate to sides within and outside the conflict if need be, making a distinction between encounters with others as individuals and as members of a collective. Note too that an underlying motif is a concern for her children’s psychological well-being, devoid of feelings of inferiority.

For both Jewish and Palestinian mothers, the pedagogical dictate to take seriously children’s questions appeared to override the distaste about talking about the conflict. Rather than silencing the children or changing the subject, they engaged in conversation, trying as best as they could to provide adequate responses. The relatively young age of many of the children meant that the women shared the desire to shield them from what was deemed harmful knowledge and painful feelings. This finding fits those revealed by a study of American and Northern Irish children’s (aged 3–6 and 7–11) reported conversations with their parents about war and political violence which found that age was a stronger predictor than gender and country in determining whether or not children discuss war with their parents (O’Malley et al., 2007). Yet, the mothers were well aware (sometimes taken aback, sometimes proud) that even their very young children were not only exposed to, but could also formulate a stand regarding the military conflict. In these circumstances, under few illusions that they could shield their children from collective conflict, the women turned the conversation about the conflict into an opportunity to cultivate what they deemed to be cognitive- and emotionally appropriate modes of talk.

Discussion

Our findings reveal the practices the women in our study employed when forced to attend to issues pertaining to the presence of the military conflict in their children’s lives. As we saw, the women shared ideas and practices emanating from middle-class notions of proper mothering, including the idea of protecting young children from the possible harms of knowing too much, when still too young. However, what was included in, and excluded from the protected space of childhood was different in the case of Palestinian and Jewish mothers. On the whole, the women preferred to avoid the topic altogether; when it did arise, the women sought to manage it in such a way so as to revert back, as quickly as possible, to a ‘normal life’. Here too, our findings reveal a degree of asymmetry between the Jewish and Palestinian mothers, emerging out of their different positions in relation to the conflict. Among the Jewish mothers there seemed to be a greater degree of freedom regarding whether and how to ‘keep mum’ about the conflict. The Palestinian mothers had less choice in the matter because the ramifications of the conflict pervade almost every aspect of their and their children’s daily lives, and to which they chose to respond in terms of a civil and social struggle. From their point of view, part of this struggle is ensuring a proper middle-class upbringing for their children, including the framing of the political/military conflict in other terms altogether.

What more are we to make of the women’s preference for silence on issues relating to military conflict in Israeli society in their everyday mothering? As an integral part of social life, silences are profoundly meaningful. But how are we to know what they mean? Researchers must first divine what it is that has not been said, and then interpret the meaning of what they divine has been left unsaid (Poland and Pederson, 1998). Even if we appreciate the multiple meanings of silences and offer various interpretations (Spyrou, 2016), how can we be sure that we have not forced silences to say what we want to hear (Mazzei, 2003)? In order to get around this conundrum, we offer, not interpretations of the intentions behind the silences but their possible implications. These implications are not mutually exclusive; rather each serves as layer for the others.

One possible implication of the women’s silence is that it reenacts the classic division between public (male) and private (female) spheres. This division is ‘tailored’ to a situation of conflict, reproducing what Herzog (2005) calls a division of labour between ‘homefront’ and ‘battlefront’. In this reading, the women’s silence is complicit in an act of ‘outsourcing’ of the military conflict to other realms. Silence serves as a resource in structuring the serenity and intimacy of home, receiving its meaning and legitimacy in its opposition to talk and action that take place elsewhere. A second possible implication of the women’s silence suggests that the muting of the conflict in communications with their children is not merely a form of adaptation, but serves as a form of protest about the ways in which the political/military agenda takes over daily lives. In this reading, by remaining silent on the national agenda, women are not only providing their children with protected space, but also reasserting their own responsibility for their children’s upbringing in the face of state interference. Both implications of the women’s silence resonate with what Todd (2005), in a discussion of identity transformation in times of social change, calls ‘privatization’. In her view, privatization entails the marginalization, or narrowing down, of broad collective elements, allowing the pursuit of private happiness, even in situations of alienation from the wider regime. As we saw, privatization is a privilege more accessible to the Jewish than the Palestinian mothers. For the latter, it is difficult, if not impossible, to separate the project of nurturing the child’s self from the national project. For these women, as findings from our broader study show, intensive mothering is a kind of social activism – undertaken with a concern that their children’s individual futures as successful, properly educated middle-class children will contribute to the future of Palestinian-Israeli society. Finally, adopting the approach termed the ‘sociology of denial’ (Cohen, 2001), the women’s silence may imply the denial of the difficult, often painful realities of war. In this approach, the women’s silence is not simply a failure to notice, but rather an active disregard (Zerubavel, 2002) – serving to collude, albeit unwittingly, in the ways in which war comes to be accommodated in everyday life.

To conclude, the ways in which military conflict becomes embedded in everyday mothering emerges at the nexus of class-oriented conceptions of care, on the one hand, and social affiliation that shapes positioning vis-à-vis the conflict, on the other. Beyond the mothering instinct to protect her children, the middle-class model of proper mothering – its demands, expectations and cultural logic – steers the women to seek to absent military conflict from their children’s lives and, in so doing, from their own lives as mothers. The women endeavour to draw a special space and time around the children, not only as an act of protection, but also to ensure that they are able to cultivate the protected space for what they consider to be their children’s proper education and development. When political violence intrudes, the women do their best to frame this in line with notions of a proper middle-class upbringing, within the constraints imposed by their broader social affiliations and ensuing positioning regarding the conflict.

Cultural practices surrounding silence and speech in the ‘shadow of war’ occur in the home; yet, most studies focus on the arenas of politics and public affairs (Winter, 2010). Hence, we encourage further study of the ways in which military conflict and political violence are mediated to young children in everyday family life. A consideration of mothers’ childrearing practices, including the act of ‘keeping mum’, is a crucial perspective for understanding the interweaving of childhood and motherhood in conflict.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Deborah Golden

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