Ayelet Harel-Shalev

Gendering Conflict Analysis: Analysing Israeli Female Combatants’ Experiences

Catharine MacKinnon, in her oft-cited article,1 portrays an imaginary heavenly encounter between a female combat soldier and a feminist activist — … ‘a dialogue between women in the after-life: The feminist says to the [female] soldier, “we fought for your equality.” The soldier says to the feminist, “oh, no, we fought for your equality”…’ In their dialogue, both fight for acknowledgement of their relative contribution to promoting women in society. As Barak-Erez pointed out,2 “military service has traditionally been considered one of the most distinctive signs of full citizenship, and the exclusion of women from military service has been inseparable from their lower civic status”. Nevertheless, women’s struggle for equal participation in the military and for equality is often criticized. Scholars have indicated that this process has many negative side effects, including reinforcing militarism, encouraging the militarization of women’s lives and even legitimizing the use of force.3

The “Double-Battle”: women combatants and their embodied experiences in war zones

ABSTRACT Our study contributes to the ongoing debate about women in combat by exploring women combatants’ experiences of war through interviews with women soldiers in the Israel Defense Forces who served as combatants or in combat-support roles in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. We proffer that the bodily experiences of women combatants disturb conventional international relations and hegemonic masculine war metanarratives that either abstract or glorify combat. These otherwise silenced narratives reveal juxtapositions of feelings of competence and vulnerability and shed light on the women’s struggle for gender integration in the military. We conclude the article with a reflection on the challenges facing researchers investigating war and terrorism.

Drawing (on) women’s military experiences and narratives – Israeli women soldiers’ challenges in the military environment

Abstract This article utilizes arts-based methods as a feminist methodology for understanding women’s experiences in military service, according to theories of feminist security studies. It explores how non-combatant women in the army retrospectively narrate stressful situations that happened during their military service. Using arts-based methods, we examine how they derive meaning from their experiences in a masculine, military environment, affected by ongoing conflict. This article analyzes twenty images drawn by Israeli women who served in the army in the previous 2–4 years. The women drew a stressful event from their military service, explained the image, and elaborated on how they coped with the situation. A content analysis of the pictures and the narratives produced three themes: the responsibility for others in life threatening situations, the military as a first professional work experience and the interaction between military and gender hierarchies. In general, women soldiers experienced the army as complex as they encountered their first adult work space in which they learned responsibility and skills of the ‘adults’ world’. However, they were also exposed to a rigid hierarchy and to stressful security situations typical of army contexts. While non-combat women soldiers were allegedly protected from the violence of the army, they are also indirectly exposed to the danger inherent in an army context. This analysis goes beyond the hero narrative, and moves into taboo territories of young women’s narratives and experiences in the military.

The Status of Minority Languages in Deeply Divided Societies: Urdu in India and Arabic in Israel—a Comparative Perspective

Determination of an official language is one of the most complex and important tasks befalling every multilinguistic state. This decision is political in nature. Its impact for members of linguistic minorities is fateful due to its effect on these groups socioeconomic status, as well as their collective identity. This article analyzes how two deeply divided democracies India and Israel determined and implemented language policies with respect to two major minority languages Urdu and Arabic, respectively. The policy of secular democratic India regarding Urdu, a language of its Muslims minority, is compared with that of Israel, an ethnic democracy, regarding Arabic, the language of its Arabic Palestinian minority. The findings indicate that both states have consigned the minority language to a marginal position on the public stage. In addition, significant differences are found between formal policy and political practices in linguistic matters, especially true in the case of Israel.

Gendering ethnic conflicts: minority women in divided societies – the case of Muslim women in India

ABSTRACT This article explores the practical and theoretical significance and long-term consequences of the failure to incorporate women’s interests in post-conflict negotiations by examining the case of Muslim women in India. Analyses of deeply divided societies must recognize that political competition and political violence do not affect all citizens equally. Also, the “larger picture” depicted by inter-community conflicts should not overshadow the effects of intra-community conflicts, which are no less important. Evident within each community conflict are the winners and the losers of the political accommodation process, in which the marginalized and weaker sections of each “side” of the conflict may be the real “losers”. Gendered analysis of ethnic conflicts and ethnic conflict resolution demands a reorientation of the concepts of conflict and security – Whose conflict is being solved and who is being secured?

Beyond binaries: analysing violent state actors in Critical Studies

ABSTRACT This article discusses the importance of including the voices of violent state actors in critical research about security and terrorism. Critical Studies tend to avoid narrative research about such actors or to give them “face” and place. However, to understand violence, scholars should listen to, and explore, the narratives of those who are committing violence. The article seeks ways to produce emancipatory knowledge and to be critical without being exclusionary. It discusses the difficulties in deciding who merits the researchers’ listening and research focus, and who does not. These issues are explored and contested by presenting an analysis of women combatants’ experiences.

‘Where am I in this story?’ – listening to activist women writers

Abstract This study discusses the dynamic roles of activist women in militarized societies. It offers an analysis of the perspectives of Israeli activist women regarding their roles as women activists and writers. In their non-fiction writings, these activist women voice their resistance and document both their everyday lives and political perspectives about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and their socio-political activism and resistance to the Israeli occupation. These women were interviewed regarding their perspectives and struggles. The interviews were analysed by applying narrative analysis – the ‘Listening Guide’ methodology – to explore their various voices and narratives. By using this methodology, this study sought to uncover additional knowledge regarding women’s forms of resistance in militarized societies. We emphasize the importance of women citizens’ voices, narratives and points of view by presenting activist women’s critical insights on activism, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and literature. Their curiosity, agency, critical perspectives, and resistance can be viewed as counter-narratives that de-centre Israeli hegemonic masculinity and demand a critique of the national and militarized ideology. Our article seeks to demonstrate the importance of women’s perspectives, everyday life experiences, dilemmas and struggles in a reality of conflict and war.

A room of one’s own(?) in battlespace – women soldiers in war rooms

At present, women serve in a variety of combat roles and combat support positions in various militaries around the globe. In parallel, new technologies of warfare are transferring more and more sol...

Ancestral and instrumental in the politics of ethnic and religious conflict

ABSTRACT Ethnicity, like race, religion, and nationality, is a feature of group identity that is contested. There are literatures devoted to each, and in each there are those who see the origins of identity and affiliation in ancestry and deeply rooted affect and those who see these as socially constructed and instrumentally used by elites. Yet all recognize that the ancestral is socially constructed and that social constructions make use of existing cultural features, and that the vertical cleavages of race, religion, ethnicity, and nationality dominate the horizontal ones of class. This generates implications for institutional changes, for the pursuit of extraterritorial interests, for the selection of explanatory narratives for conflict when multiple attributions are possible, for intra-communal conflict, and for policies for ethnic conflict regulation.

Media, war, and terrorism: responses from the Middle East and Asia

aspirations of the dissenting voices but also exerts terror to those dissenting voices. Writings by Mahashweta Devi (63–70), Bani Basu (74–9) and others highlight the postcolonial experiences in South Asia, showing the unseen forms of terror that go on in the name of governance and security where helpless victims are left to fend for themselves. Such stories of human suffering and protest throw open the Pandora’s box of terrorism. The book engages in a debate with a mainstream global conception on terrorism that targets a particular religion and its followers. This collection is an innovative way to counter the idea of methodological universalism in understanding social reality. The social realities associated with terror, one of the most original emotions, are far more complex than can be described with a singular discourse. While the effort made in the book is certainly welcome, the wide range of writings with different themes and issues make it difficult to have a connecting thread even if the effort is to counter universalism of certain terror. It seems that these difficulties are bound to appear in such collections.