Abstract
In this piece, I constructed a personal narrative as a means to reflect on my feminist thinking and organizing. These were initially molded by my lived experiences as an activist, and then later both contextualized and sharpened by the feminist theory that engaged me as an undergraduate. Though the narrative I describe here is based on my individual experiences, I am also telling a story of a larger feminist movement in Israel-Palestine of which I am proud and privileged to be a part.
It was the night I entered my second term at Women’s Military Prison 400 when I met Ruth. I had just finished the check-in process and this time I knew the drill. I signed the papers and had my photograph and fingerprints taken at the fake wooden desk in the room with low ceilings and beige walls. I gave up my backpack with my belongings and received my prison uniform – a man-sized camouflage shirt and pants that drowned me and smelled faintly of mold. I sat on the floor with my back to the wall, opposite the heavy metal door that opened into the prison courtyard. I knew I had missed dinner, since I heard the murmurs of the evening countdown before lights out. Ruth was registered right after me and was led into the room, indignant tears in her eyes. I knew how important it was for more experienced inmates to be helpful and supportive to newcomers, and so I began walking her through what she would need to know. When I asked her what she was in for, she grew infuriated. She told me that her military salary was too meager to help her single mother provide for her siblings. After her day shift in the army, she had worked nights, but her earnings did not suffice. She deserted her military post to find full-time employment, only to be arrested by the military police and sentenced to prison. Ruth’s story, among many such stories I would hear throughout my prison terms, helped me to come full circle and to understand more completely what compelled me to be there myself.
I was sentenced to prison in January 2009 for refusing to be drafted. In Israel, conscription is both legally required and socially expected of most Jewish young men and women, and so I grew up as a young feminist in a highly militarized society. As a teenager, I did not see a contradiction between my feminism and my Zionist beliefs or my desire to enlist in the military. I was raised on a feminism that idealized pioneering women such as my grandmother, who as a young member of the Zionist movement, left her parent’s house in the Ukraine to help establish a safe haven for the Jews in Palestine. Throughout high school, I prepared for service in the Israeli Defense Forces, determined to defend the Jewish homeland my grandmother built and to continue her legacy of selflessness that I so admired.
This path was interrupted after I graduated from high school, when I first came to the West Bank village of Ni’lin. The people of this village had been protesting every Friday for over a decade against the separation barrier that Israel built across their lands, annexing the olive groves their families have worked for generations into Israeli territory. I arrived on a Friday afternoon to join the residents of the village in their protest and to finally witness life in the West Bank. We had just begun marching up to the wall, waving banners and chanting songs, when army jeeps raced towards us. Soldiers jumped out and began firing tear gas canisters and rubber bullets at us, creating chaos as the crowd scattered to avoid the fire.
That afternoon in Ni’lin turned my world upside down. I had always been taught that as a historically persecuted people, we were defending our very existence with a strong army and high walls. Yet that afternoon, I realized that the walls we were building were closing in the Palestinians, not us, and that the military was not there to defend our physical lives. What was at stake and in need of protection by the military was life as it is known to us as Israelis – the safeguarding of “what is” under the current relations of power (Ahmed, 2004, p. 64). I soon began going to Palestinian villages and cities and joining Palestinians in direct actions and protests. Acts that were illegal, dangerous, and unthinkable began feeling natural, while what had always been normal began to feel absurd.
Several months later, as the date of my own draft drew near, I knew I could not join a military that denied Palestinians the rights that I myself enjoyed. Together with nine others, I formed the Shministim – the third refusal group of high school seniors in the history of the state. We published our objections to serving in a military that rules the Palestinian people and occupies their land. We circulated our petition and collected signatures of support from other high school students, sent it to the government, and published it in the media both in Israel and abroad. On the date of our draft, each of us in turn was sent to military prison for our refusal to enlist.
While physically confined and isolated from family and friends, my time in prison opened up ever more avenues of thinking. Through conversations with my fellow inmates, I learned that most were working-class women of color or of immigrant background. They were jailed predominantly for abandoning their posts because they could not afford to get by on their military salary, just like Ruth. Hearing these women’s stories profoundly impacted my understanding of the larger social and economic context within which the struggle for justice in Israel-Palestine needed to be waged.
According to the state narrative taught in Jewish public schools, the Zionist movement was formed to create a safe haven for all Jews in the state of Israel. But my time in prison, and the writings of feminist thinkers I would read later on, enabled me to reflect more deeply on the notion of “security.” In Israel, as a militarized society, there is an over-identification with the state, such that military security is conflated with national security (Enloe, 2004). Until the moment I disobeyed the law, as a middle class Ashkenazi Jew, a Jew of European descent, I had felt secure in my state, protected by its coercive apparatuses. Yet my time in prison taught me that this sense of security was not shared by all Jews living in Israel. The women of color confined with me, rendered insecure by poverty and police harassment, had never experienced the state as their benefactor or protector. Their stories led me to realize that while Zionism was perhaps a liberation movement for my European grandparents, it did not represent or liberate Jews of Middle Eastern and North African descent. Zionism presumed to speak for the Jewish “Mizrahim” (“the Eastern Ones”), but in doing so denied them the right of self-representation (Shohat, 1988, p. 1). Upon immigration, which was sometimes coerced by the Zionist movement, many Arab and North African Jews were made to engage in low-waged, physically strenuous labor under harsh conditions, and were excluded from the social benefits the Ashkenazi workers enjoyed (Shohat, 1988). During my time in prison, I came to understand the ways in which the incarceration of Israeli working class immigrants and women of color was rooted in the racial politics of the Zionist ideology, the militarism of the Israeli state, and the neoliberal government policies that rendered them economically vulnerable.
This led me to understand that our grounds for opposing our government were too narrowly construed if we addressed solely the military occupation of the Palestinian territories. The IDF is indeed an occupying force that violently rules over Palestinian men, women, and children and colonizes their lands. But the military merely serves the Zionist project, which shapes Palestinian identity as a relational category, and constructs Palestinians as “others” in the state of Israel. The Zionist project has always considered all Palestinians, “without regard to class, creed or locations, as bodies to be either removed or ignored” (Said, 1979, p. 10). Thus, not only to serve in the IDF but also to accept the premises of Zionism is to participate in the reification of difference between Arab and Jew that the Zionist ideology constructed, which would forever render us unequal.
As a feminist, I realized that I needed to oppose the larger structures that led to the incarceration of my fellow inmates in military prisons. I needed to address the root of the injustice done both to Jews and to Palestinians – the Zionist ideology.
After my release from prison, I joined New Profile, the Feminist Movement for the Demilitarization of Israeli Society, working at their Jerusalem chapter for alternative education. In these educational centers, we lead weekly teen group dialogues on a broad range of economic, social, and political issues and discuss the ways in which they are gendered and racialized. We also counsel young women and men of all backgrounds who seek exemption from service, often for economic reasons, and help them leave the military.
On Friday afternoons, I join my fellow members of the Israeli-Palestinian collective Anarchists Against the Wall. When I cross the physical and psychic borders and join Palestinian activists in their protest against Israel’s occupation, I am acting as a feminist. I am a feminist who is refusing the ideologies of human difference constructed by my state, and building relations of solidarity and friendship with those oppressed by my government. As feminists, we cannot advance a radical reimagining of gender relations, as long as other relations of power remain unquestioned. Our analysis must address the root causes of gender oppression everywhere – militarism, neoliberal capitalism, and institutionalized racism (Sudbury, 2005). Our young feminism is different than our grandmothers’ generation envisioned it. To my grandmother, feminism was confined to the narrow borders of her national Zionist identity. As a young Israeli feminist today, I seek to critically engage the psychic boundaries that uphold the notions of difference that my grandmother participated in creating. For the notions of difference along gender lines that we resist as feminists are intimately tied to those along class, national, and racial lines that serve to justify oppression everywhere. To work across borders and boundaries of constructed difference and to expand our definitions of identity and community is what we as young feminists must take on today.