omen novelists, on the other hand, use the love plot as an indirect critique of patriarchy and the nation. They idealize the Arab lover by attributing to him characteristics that their Israeli Jewish counterparts sorely lack: a refreshing innocence, idealism, an appreciation for beauty, and above all the ability to love a woman. Berlovitz suggests that the romanticized representation of the Arab character functions as a critique of the Israeli–Zionist man and his arrogation to himself of the authority of shaping and representing the nation. The feminist critique traced here suggests that a greater participation of women in state policies would have subverted the segregationist ethos between Jews and Arabs. The love plot and its doomed denouement carries with it a critique of separatist national policies, and opens up possibilities for border crossings between dichotomized gendered and ethnic identities. The authors often use the heroines’ voice as explicit critiques of nationalistic and misogynous attitudes.
In “Wasteland Revisited: An Ecofeminist Strategy” Hannah Naveh examines relationships between Zionist constructions of gender, geography, and economics. Her close reading of a Hebrew short story by a contemporary woman writer develops an ecofeminist approach to a much broader ideological text. Naveh notes that on the one hand, romantic representations of nomadic culture in Hebrew literature tend to focus on the desert as an image of freedom and link it to biblical myths of origins. On the other hand, mainstream representations tended to demonize the desert as a threatening space, an attitude that is common to Western discourses about the desert. The desert was imagined as requiring cultivation, rather than as a contact zone where hybrid transactions take place, including the ability to give up and let go of the capitalist impulse to striate and exploit the desert. The Western patriarchal ideology of domination is often embedded in a related ideology of mastery over nature and the environment. Naveh notes that women are suspect in the desert, yet women’s art and writing suggest that the desert often provided an occasion for shedding civilized restrictions of conventional femininity and going nomad or native. The dual process of loss as acquisition and the alliance of women and desert spaces are two major themes in the rereading of Savyon Liebrecht’s short story “Apples from the Desert.” The essay suggests that the heroine, Victoria, a submissive Sephardic wife and mother, is liberated by her trip to a desert kibbutz. The traditional Jerusalemite who sets out to reclaim her rebellious daughter reinvents herself through her contact with the desert kibbutz. The story is read as a progressively unfolding mutual dialogue between traditional and modern, urban and agricultural, civilized and desert cultures which reverses the roles of mother and daughter and redefines their relationship as a political alliance against conventionality and hierarchy.
“Tensions in Israeli Feminism: The Mizrahi Ashkenazi Rift” by Henriette Dahan-Kalev traces the historical development of a Mizrahi feminist consciousness. Drawing on black feminist theory she examines the historical manifestations of ethnic discrimination and marginalization within the Israeli feminist movement. As a national movement with roots in European culture, Zionist projects of modernization and development discriminated against Mizrahi immigrants from Middle Eastern countries, who were perceived as uncivilized and backward. Modernization policies rationalized economic exploitation, unequal educational opportunities, and exclusionary practices that produced Mizrahi Jews as second-class citizens. Despite the state’s commitment to ethnic equality in theory, as in other democracies, ethnic, national, class, and gender inequities emerged as systematic problems in Israeli society. Dahan-Kalev argues that the ethnic difference was reproduced in the feminist movement, despite the rhetoric of sisterhood and solidarity. Not only was the leadership dominated by Ashkenazi women, the 