National Interests Versus Women’s Rights: The Case of Polygamy Among the Bedouin Community in Israel

Abstract

Polygamy violates the basic human rights of women involved in it. It is an institution that is usually shaped by multiple factors that are not limited to gender discrimination, such as race, ethnicity, and economic status. Within the Bedouin community in Israel, polygamy is the product of internal and State-endorsed patriarchy, and of discriminatory land policies and the forced relocation of Bedouin tribes in the Negev. This article criticizes Israel’s approach to polygamy by highlighting its two key failures: the failure to view polygamy as a form of intersectional discrimination, portraying it solely as a cultural issue; and treating polygamy primarily as a threat to demographic and other controversial interests and prioritizing the latter over the rights of the victims of polygamy.

Keywords:

• polygamy
• equality
• intersectionality
• Indigenous women

Acknowledgment

I would like to thank my colleague Nasreen Alemy-Kabha for her thoughtful comments on an early version of this manuscript.

Notes

1 On the use of progress or modernity to justify colonial policies against indigenous peoples see Bowden (2011).

2 Because the Israeli law recognizes the validity of polygamous marriages, in 1988 the National Insurance Institute (NII) adopted a policy to take into consideration the additional wives in calculating the income support benefits for the family cell by granting adding 7.5–12.5% of the basic allowance to each additional wife depending on her age; see the Report).