 father. Efforts by Muslim women’s organizations to increase access to a civil court system are opposed by male leaders of the community.
Nitza Berkovitch’s “Motherhood as a National Mission: The Construction of Womanhood in the Legal Discourse in Israel” approaches state law as a Zionist script, a cultural mechanism that produces the meaning of the social category of women. Specifically, the essay focuses on two early foundational laws, which do not pertain to Palestinian women: the law mandating military service, and the law promoting maternity. Berkovitch argues that despite the egalitarian emphasis in Zionist ideology its policies incorporate and mobilize women into the nation-state not as individuals and citizens but as wives and mothers. Israeli society is shaped by two interlinked gendering forces-.the public ethos of military service, and the private ethos of familial traditionalism. While Israel as a state extends citizenship privileges to all its members, as a nation it privileges ethnic, primordial identity based in the family. It also privileges the family as the primary construction of womanhood, though secondarily, women as public agents are expected to serve the state as warriors as well. Berkovitch’s reading of the legal statutes and the parliamentary discussion of them uses Foucault’s definition of discourse as rhetoric that both reflects and produces subjects, agents, and identities. The 1949 Defense Service Law is scrutinized because it exempts married and pregnant women from the military draft. This exemption was not contested in parliamentary debates, which seemed to agree that high birth rates and demographic priorities should take precedence over the right and duty of soldiering. Thus, the law both includes and excludes women from full Israeli citizenship. Motherhood is thus constructed as the highest priority, duty, and privilege of Jewish Israeli girls. The privilege of military duty is extended to Jewish Israeli girls only if it does not compete with a more urgent national mission. Differential military regulations thus produce and reproduce gendered definitions of citizenship. The 1951 Equal Rights Law, though it did moderate the discriminatory edge of prior Ottoman, Muslim, and traditional Jewish law, extended gender equality to one particular social category of women who earned their rights for having fulfilled their family duties, namely, wives and mothers. A review of litigation cases reveals that women reproduced their wifely and maternal roles in cases they brought before the court, thus participating as active agents in redefining and improving though not eroding the basic social categories that defined their national mission in the first place. The essay does not deny state law’s commitment to the ideal of gender equality, but suggests rather that this commitment is ambivalent and contingent.
In “No Home at Home: Women’s Fiction vs. Zionist Practice” Yaffah Berlovitz identifies a women’s literary tradition of protest and resistance to mainstream male-dominated representations of the nascent nation. Berlovitz highlights three types of narrative with roots in pre-state Hebrew literature: a collectivist story that complements the dominant male-Zionist narrative, a national–personal genre that provides a model of female heroism missing from the mainstream male tradition, and a feminine–critical genre spanning several generations of Hebrew literary production. The critical authors of this genre foreground the alienation and marginality of women and their futile struggles to participate meaningfully in the national enterprise. Using the metaphor of a house that fails to become a home, women authors criticized the hegemony of the masculine interpretation of nationalism by representing self-destructive female characters, or romantic narratives about love affairs between Jewish heroines and Arab men. Berlovitz argues that male-authored novels about similar relationships reveal a high level of anxiety and competitiveness with the Arab male lover over a woman who is presented as a prized object. W