rential 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. Women 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