Feminist identifications across the ethnic-national divide: Jewish and Palestinian students in Israel

ABSTRACT

This study explores young Israeli Jewish and Palestinian women’s gender ideology and their readiness to endorse the label ‘feminist’. Using data from a large-scale survey among students in the northern periphery of Israel, we found that feminism has become a source of identification for both Jewish and Palestinian young women in Israel, and that Palestinians are more inclined to endorse the self-label ‘feminist’ than Jews. We also found that each group invests the term with different meanings. Jewish students who identify as feminists tend to hold a relatively egalitarian gender ideology whereas Palestinian students who are more readily inclined to identify as feminists hold a more conservative gender ideology. These findings challenge both the liberal-modernistic perspective that perceives a correlation between feminist saliency and egalitarian gender ideology and the post-colonial perspective’s expectation that women from ethnic/racial minority groups will be disinclined to identify as feminists.

KEYWORDS:

• Gender
• feminism
• identity
• ethnicity
• young women
• Israel

Acknowledgments

We thank Yahel Kurlander for her assistance in the data collection, and Yael Levanon and Ludmila Garmash for their assistance in the statistical analysis. We would also like to thank our feminist friends in the academia and in grassroots activism for providing a significant reference group, and our students for challenging our preconceived assumptions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Ethics committee authorization # 103/08, University of Haifa.

2. We used the direct local translations of feminism – ‘feminizem’ (Hebrew) and ‘al-nasawiyya’ (Arabic).

3. Attending university in Jordan is relatively new for Palestinian-Israelis, whose numbers have grown from about 500 in 2004–05 to over 5,000 in 2008–09, practically now almost matching the number of Palestinian students in Israeli universities and colleges. According to Arar and Haj-Yehia (2010), studying in Jordan has unique advantages for Palestinian-Israeli women, who are attracted by the familiar language and cultural setting.