No abstract

No abstract

The article engages with feminist care theories and practices of community building in the context of armed conflict. Based on an ethnographic study (2016–2018) of the security concerns of Israeli citizens living in the Gaza Envelope and their positions regarding the siege on Gaza, we find that in this region, vernacular security is closely linked with care, social reproduction and communitarianism. Communitarian ethics is intertwined with separatist, state-centred discourses on national ‘trauma and resilience’. In this context, Jewish-Israeli women care for their own communities as a way to ensure survival and civilian resilience. They generally disengage from moral dilemmas concerning the suffering of Palestinians. On a deeper level, the practice of security as care combines the hegemonic Israeli security paradigm of women’s soldierhood with an institutional and cultural obsession with trauma-oriented activities. Showing strong ethno-nationalist identifications, these women tend to overlook and even support the state’s violent siege on Gaza, which is seen as a zero-sum game. We conclude that the gendered dimensions of communitarian ethics in Israel are relevant for understanding the limitations and challenges of contemporary cosmopolitan feminism and a global politics of care.

This research presents an initial documentation of Israeli women's sense of insecurity during the Second Intifada (2001)(2002)(2003)(2004)(2005). Drawing on feminist security theory and the intersectional approach to gender, we hypothesized that women's familiar tendency to develop high levels of stress following political violence would be related to previous sexual and domestic victimization, to economic distress and ethnic discrimination among minority women, and to the cultural role of care workers among women of all socio-economic backgrounds. A sample of 552 women self-completed a cluster of questionnaires addressing a broad array of topics, and results confirmed most of the research hypotheses. The discussion highlights the multiple articulations of gender, militarism, and security and their possible implications for policies of conflict resolution.

Unlike earlier attempts to theorize Israeli women's peace activism in civil society, this article examines the involvement of women in backstage roles of formal negotiations during the Oslo Process. On the basis of a qualitative analysis of the organizational structure and gender division of labor in Israeli negotiating bodies, I find that women were placed as midlevel negotiators and professional and legal advisors, and also served as spokeswomen and secretaries. This pattern of participation reveals 1) that the "security logic," developed by Israeli negotiators led to, and reinforced, a structured gendered division of labor, providing a rational justification for gender inequality; 2) that the ability to control administrative capacities and women workers generated symbolic masculine power and assisted in maintaining asymmetries between Israeli and Palestinian delegations; 3) and that midlevel Israeli negotiators' narratives reveal the extent to which conceptual confusion and self-contradictory approaches toward the Oslo Accords reinforced women's overall invisibility. I conclude that patterns of rigid gender roles in official negotiating structures not only minimize women's meaningful inclusion in peace negotiations but also affect the production of public historical narratives about gender, peace, and war.