Israel marginalizes Jews from the Arab/Eastern world, the Mizrahim, in the Ashkenazi/Mizrahi ethnic binary. As a result, the Mizrahi community is largely pushed into the peripheries of the country. Women in the Mizrahi community are particularly oppressed by Israeli society, with both sexism and anti-Arab sentiments restricting their opportunities and ultimately dictating their class status. Mizrahi feminism uses the discourse of intersectionality, challenging these overlapping forms of oppression. Henriette Dahan Kalev, one of the pioneers of Mizrahi feminism, highlights the web of Israeli state institutional power, Mizrahi identity, class, and gender in her book, An Anatomy of Feminist Resistance. The book follows two low-income Mizrahi women, Havatzelet Ingbar and Vicki Knafo, as they navigate political terrain and forge a path towards a feminist resistance, which is new to them. As Dahan Kalev states early on, “it took occasionally a single woman's case to remind the world that feminism was an unending struggle and a business that each woman must carry out in her own turn to get liberated” (p. 4). She does not present Ingbar and Knafo as part of any feminist or Mizrahi movement, but rather as individual women who engage in personal rebellion as a form of survival. Essentially, this book is about what happens when obedient women resist the status quo (p. xvi).
Dahan Kalev frames the book as individual encounters with patriarchal gatekeepers. For Ingbar this was the textile factory owner who exploited her and the other workers, the guilds, the Histadrut (labor union), and government ministries who stifled the workers when they took control over the factory. For Knafo, the encounters consisted of challenging the welfare state when funding was cut for single mothers, specifically opposing the treasury minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, the media, and the public who followed her march towards Jerusalem and criticized her along the way for not adopting their conservative visions of the rebellion. The women's struggles occurred three years apart and they did not know each other, although their identity and class status connected them in this web of oppression and resistance. Dahan Kalev provides feminist insight as she analyzes how each woman's consciousness transformed. According to Dahan Kalev, both Ingbar and Knafo used their suppressed rage from years of existing as the “good girl,” women who acted with obedience and submission, and ultimately were transformed into rebels engaged in the political sphere with the overall aim of economic security. She used oral histories as her central research methodology, listening to the women tell their stories, often more than once. This provided the subjects with time to reflect on the significance of their process from obedience to rebellion.
Dahan Kalev focuses on the transitions the women made in what she calls the “in-between zones,” which is rooted in their ethnicity and gender. The first “in-between zone” she discusses is ethnic identity, being Jewish but of Arab/Eastern roots among the Ashkenazi Jewish majority that governs the country. As Dahan Kalev writes, they “found that Israel as a western state did not always leave space for their profound socialization as women of non-western origin” (p. xv). The second “in-between zone” these women navigated was on the way from the private sphere, where they were primarily mothers/daughters/wives, to the public sphere, where they became either a businesswoman or political figure in their quest for personal and familial economic survival. Both Ingbar and Knafo went through a two-fold transition while moving towards the in-between zone of private to public. As Dahan Kalev describes, this stemmed from the initial doubts of crossing the gender lines to the doubts of discarding “old patterns that served them as women” (p. 119).
Dahan Kalev provides fascinating detail and insights into the Israeli patriarchal systems by identifying key figures and interactions the women had while engaging with the public sphere. She depicts the various ways in which the women challenged the systems, whether they achieved success or failure. For Dahan Kalev “‘success’ and ‘failure’ must be reformulated in the light of power relations (?)[sic] in which women are involved when targeting change of social conditions and using resistance and rebellious strategies” (p. 185). This description of gender divisions supports her analysis about each woman's transformation of consciousness as she moved from the private to public realms.
Although Dahan Kalev provides comprehensive insight into the public sphere that the women navigate, the details of the initial “in-between zone” of racial/ethnic discourse lacks deep analysis. The Israeli discourse of race and ethnicity dictates the women's realities in the private sphere. What are the racial dynamics of being Mizrahi in a largely white/Jewish state? What are the traditions and expectations coming from their Arab/Eastern roots that condition them as women? How does Mizrahi feminism engage with the initial “in-between zone” of coming from an Arab/Eastern background and living in a white Ashkenazi Jewish majority? Through an intersectional analysis of race/ethnicity and gender, these questions could be explored further to allow the reader to truly understand the private sphere in which these two figures reside. Without it, the reader remains unaware of the significance of these transformations in personal consciousness and to the broader Mizrahi feminist community. The book does invoke a brief theoretical framework of intersectional/women of color feminisms, citing bell hooks, Chela Sandoval, and Gloria Anzaldua, but only in the twelfth chapter (p.191). Kimberlé Crenshaw is never directly cited when discussing intersectionality, although her foundational work could support Dahan Kalev's Mizrahi feminist analysis of Ingbar and Knafo. As Mizrahi women, they are women of color within the Israeli state, however their stories were not told from this perspective, but rather from their socio-economic standing and their location in the southern periphery of Israel.
The discourse throughout the book is of a marginalized group of people undergoing state oppression and rebelling against it, yet both Ingbar and Knafo directly support the larger system of oppression towards Palestinians carried out by the Israeli state. Throughout, the book describes signs of Israeli nationalism: the IDF uniforms that Ingbar and the women workers make in the factory, the Israeli flag Vicki Knafo wrapped around her in loyalty to the state as she marched towards Jerusalem, and the conservative gatekeepers that upheld both patriarchy and Zionism. Vicki Knafo tells the researcher “that the money that goes to the settlement in the occupied territories was at the expense of the peripheral populations in the southern desert of Israel” (p. 194). It is clear Knafo connected the state's discriminatory practices and racism, but this is where she ends the discussion. Knafo does not link the occupation of Palestinians, who are also affected by the same settlements, to the plight of the Mizrahi population inside Israel. Dahan Kalev, as the researcher, does not probe deeper, nor does she provide a deeper analysis of this connection. In Chapter 3, Dahan Kalev mentions Palestinian and Mizrahi feminist alliances, in contrast to Ashkenazi feminists, through their shared marginalized identity. Dahan Kalev discusses feminist “multi-factions” intersections, and details the emergence of Mizrahi feminism through the “understanding of discrimination not only for being a woman, but also for being of Arab and Muslim origin in a country with Western orientation” (p. 32). She is explicit about the shared roles of the Mizrahi and Palestinian feminists in the 1990s, working together as Arab counterparts in contrast to the Ashkenazi feminists. At the same time, she does not explore a deeper analysis of the relationship between the systematic discrimination of Arabness inside Israel and the individual stories of Ingbar and Knafo. To advance the insights of Mizrahi feminists, Dahan Kalev could have concluded with the intersectional nature of oppression that the Mizrahi community experience (due to their ethnic identity as people of Arab/Eastern origin), while acknowledging that the Israeli patriarchal system also oppresses the Palestinian people. A fuller discussion of the relationship between Mizrahi feminism and its Arab counterparts, which Kalev brings up in Chapter 3, necessitates a more intersectional analysis that is attentive to the larger dynamics of race in Israeli society.
Overall, the book provides the reader a narrative of low-income Mizrahi women through the framework of Mizrahi feminisms, which is not widely known in the West. It as an important example of how one does not need to be an activist to become actively engaged. Havatzelet Ingbar and Vicki Knafo were never interested in the fame or notoriety that came from their rebellion, they merely sought economic liberation. Ingbar and Knafo's stories of survival, when facing patriarchal systemic oppression, are stories of transformation that show us that when a person seems to have no choice, they will act in ways that are surprising to even themselves. While the book does highlight these important facts, it also leaves further questions: What are the racial dynamics for the Mizrahim inside Israel? Although she briefly mentions this issue, she does not provide a deeper analysis. It is necessary for this larger question to be answered for the reader to truly grasp the significance of these individual stories of a Mizrahi feminist resistance.
