Battering States: The Politics of Domestic Violence in Israel
304
Battering States: The Politics of Domestic Violence in Israel
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Overview
The politics of domestic violence create novel entry points to understanding how, although women may be vulnerable to gender-based violence, they do not necessarily share the same kind of belonging to the state. This means that markers of identity and power, such as gender, nationality, ethnicity, religion and religiosity, and socio-economic and geographic location, matter when it comes to safety and pathways to justice.
The study centers on Israel, where a number of factors bring connections between the cultural politics of the state and domestic violence into stark relief: the presence of a contentious multinational and multiethnic population; competing and overlapping sets of religious and civil laws; a growing gap between the wealthy and the poor; and the dominant presence of a security state in people's everyday lives. The exact combination of these factors is unique to Israel, but they are typical of states with a diverse population in a time of globalization. In this way, the example of Israel offers insights wherever the political and personal impinge on one another.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780826521316 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Vanderbilt University Press |
| Publication date: | 03/28/2017 |
| Pages: | 304 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.80(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Battering States
The Politics of Domestic Violence in Israel
By Madelaine Adelman
Vanderbilt University Press
Copyright © 2017 Vanderbilt University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8265-2130-9
CHAPTER 1
The Politics of Domestic Violence
After we graduated, a friend from college invited me to join her at an orientation session for Rape Crisis of Durham, North Carolina, a nonprofit organization that provides 24/7 support to victims and survivors of sexual violence and prevention education to the community. Without giving it much thought — I was a feminist and pretty good in a crisis — I joined the organization. Over the next four years, I responded to women's calls to the hotline, which came mostly in the evening and late night hours. I once met with a young woman at a hospital emergency room. I met with another woman down at the courthouse so she could take a look at a courtroom in anticipation of a hearing. Mostly, I spoke to women on the phone, sometimes for a few minutes and sometimes for more than two hours. As a counterbalance to direct service with victims and survivors, I also participated in policy advocacy: I was one of many voices demanding that the state's marital rape exemption (one of the last two in the country) be overturned, for example, and I helped my university, inspired by the Anita Hill hearings, to update its sexual harassment policy. Eventually, I turned this advocacy work on violence against women into my research focus, but only after a serendipitous encounter in a Jerusalem bathroom.
During the summer of 1990, I conducted preliminary fieldwork in Jerusalem. It entailed studying Hebrew in the mornings with new Israeli immigrants, mostly from the former Soviet Union, a few Palestinian Arabs wishing to improve their language skills and market potential, and a handful of Christians from Denmark living in Jerusalem who hoped to obtain permanent resident status. Once a week in the evening, I studied colloquial Palestinian Arabic with a teacher from Beit Safafa at the Jerusalem-stone YMCA building, along with a small group of primarily left-wing, middle-aged Israeli Jews. In the afternoons, I interviewed people or took advantage of the Hebrew University's library to learn more about the education system in Israel (then the focus of my research).
By July of that summer, it was hot in Jerusalem. Middle East hot. Wearing a T-shirt, khakis, and sandals, I walked from my apartment building on Reuven Street in Bak'a, leaving the mild breeze that swirled through its fourth-floor windows, and made my way to the (Jewish) center of town overlooking the walled Old City. The sloping streets were crowded with groups of young people wearing jeans and colorful tank tops; the girls, often linked arm-in-arm, sporting dangerously high-heeled chunky black sandals and talking loudly, click-clacked toward their destinations. Sharing the sidewalk were older haredi Jewish women pushing baby carriages loaded down with small children and plastic bags bulging with food. They wore full-length dresses with long sleeves, heads covered with a dark scarf or a wig. Older children, also dressed with dark stockings or pants and long sleeves, walked alongside the carriages, following their mothers' shopping routes. I reached King George Street and watched for bus number no. 9 or no. 4a, either of which would take me to the main campus of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
I planned to escape from the oppressive heat in the university's air-conditioned library. After passing through a perfunctory security-guard search of my backpack at the entrance to the university, and another to enter the library, I went directly to the women's restroom to ring myself out from the unairconditioned bus ride. There I came upon what ultimately changed the focus of my research: strategically placed on the mirror above the sinks with the half-broken faucets, and at eye-l evel on the inside of the stall doors pockmarked by etched graffiti, were stickers with the message "You are not alone." These stickers from the Jerusalem Rape Crisis Center hotline sparked for me links between my then home in North Carolina and my prospective research in Israel. Over the next two years, I mulled the intellectual and logistical possibility of shifting my research to the relationship between gender violence and the state. When I returned to Israel in 1992 for another summer of language study and fieldwork, this brief encounter had transformed my research agenda into what has become a lifelong study of the politics of domestic violence. This book represents the culmination of my research.
Battering States is an interdisciplinary, ethnographic study of the politics of domestic violence — an analysis of when and how intimate partner violence intersects with cultural politics of the state. The book examines this intersection in Israel, where a number of factors bring the connections between the state and domestic violence into stark relief: the presence of a contentious multinational and multiethnic population; competing and overlapping sets of religious and civil family law; state securitism and political violence that permeate people's everyday lives; and a growing gap between the wealthy and the poor. The exact combination of these factors is unique to Israel, but they are typical of states with a diverse population in a time of globalization. In this way the example of Israel offers insights wherever the political and personal impinge on one another.
The book addresses how the business of nation- and state-building — what political scientists refer to as "statecraft" — informs the enactment, experience, and explanation of violence within intimate relationships. Specifically, I analyze how the family is configured through cultural difference by the state, how political violence shapes domestic violence, and how the political-economic context engenders domestic violence.
Battering States counts among the first long-term ethnographic analyses of domestic violence inside or outside of the United States (Adelman 2010). It serves as an example of social research that conjointly considers the everyday lives of Jewish and Palestinian Israelis. As an "engaged anthropologist" (Low and Merry 2010), I conducted ethnographic research in Israel over the course of two decades, 1992–2012. This time horizon is meaningful because it tracks with the grassroots development and subsequent state adoption of domestic violence as a social problem in Israel. It also coincides with the state's transformation from the presumption of relatively robust social welfare supports to a market-based global economy. And it parallels the growing critique of its personal-status law system and the cyclical rise and fall of political violence and the peace process in the region. The book captures these significant shifts through a cultural analysis of the relationship between the state and domestic violence.
ETHNOGRAPHIC PERSPECTIVES ON DOMESTIC VIOLENCE
Ethnographic research is a continual process that comprises a number of methods of data collection and production (Dewalt, Dewalt, and Wayland 1998). Cultural immersion is accomplished through participation in and observation of everyday life, ranging from personal conversations to media coverage of extraordinary events. Although its foundational practices remain, the logistical nature of ethnographic research has been transformed by technology over the past two decades.
The first time I visited Israel, it was 1988, and I was a junior in a study-abroad program for undergraduates at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. I walked from the noisy dorms down Churchill Boulevard, passing a British military cemetery along the way, to the much quieter Hyatt Hotel, where I used tokens in their payphones to initiate a collect call to my family; during the same semester, a friend from high school sent me a (decidedly retro but the only near-instant form of communication) telegram to congratulate me: "Duke in Final Four." I used prepaid cards to call the United States when using public phones, exchanged airmail letters with friends, and relied on my apartment phone (no voice mail) to coordinate my research schedule in Jerusalem during the summers of 1990 and 1992. When I spent the summer of 1991 in an Arabic-language immersion program at Middlebury College, no technology other than flashcards was allowed at all. In Haifa conducting fieldwork between July 1993 and June 1994, I was able to secure an e-mail address because I was enrolled in a language immersion program at the University of Haifa. This was a less-than-instant form of communication because I could use it only on a set of computers on campus, and few people I knew had e-mail addresses at the time.
When I returned to Haifa between November 1994 and March 1995, I signed a contract with NetVision in order to access a dial-up Internet connection at home. This enabled me to exchange updates with a few friends and mentors. To manage research logistics during the summer of 1999 in Haifa, I purchased a local cellphone with prepaid minutes. When I returned to Israel for fieldwork during winter break in 2005, I added wireless Internet connections to my repertoire. By 2011 I was using FaceTime to stay in touch with friends and family, and e-mail, texts, and a rented international phone with a local number to make research plans. In between research trips, the Internet made it possible to follow up on research leads and continue to collect data.
Ethnographic research on domestic violence, which has the potential for much personal resonance, conducted within a contested state such as Israel requires cultural vigilance, social empathy, and emotional reflexivity during every step of the process, from developing a research question to disseminating research findings (Lee and Renzetti 1990). Before I developed substantive components of the study, I formulated several of its key parameters. I was committed to posing locally relevant research questions (see Chapter 2); I was keen to avoid further jeopardizing participant safety during the research process, and to avoid maternalistic approaches to their safety and well-being; and I envisioned integrating various forms of advocacy and activism into my fieldwork. Underlying these parameters was my goal to generate an inclusive research sample reflecting the complexity of the state's population in order to collect and produce diverse stories about domestic violence.
Research Design
Ultimately, I concentrated my work in the Israeli port city of Haifa and the rural region of the Western Galilee, although I also conducted research in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, and Be'er Sheva, visiting NGOs, interviewing frontline workers, and attending workshops and conferences. These spaces reflect the variety and intersection of social identities in Israel, including ethnic (e.g., "western" Ashkenazi to "eastern" Mizrahi Jews), national (e.g., Palestinian to Israeli), religious (e.g., secular Muslim to fundamentalist Jewish), migration (1948 Palestinians to new Israelis), and regional class (rural poverty to urban elites). Because social distinctions structure everyday life and battered women's experiences of and responses to domestic violence, the Haifa region enabled me to observe life along a geographical continuum and to seek out a diverse group of battered women to interview.
I volunteered within a number of NGOs for extended periods of time in order to learn about the local advocacy landscape, to establish trust with key community leaders, and to pursue my own commitments to social change. At the local shelter, for example, I volunteered with the residents' children; at the regional hotline for battered women, I underwent training and answered the phone along with a team of experienced advocates, and participated in a new grassroots court-watch program, in addition to observing in a legal advocacy clinic and women's center. It was through daily and weekly contact with these individuals and organizations that I was able to locate, reach, and gain the confidence of experts such as lawyers, religious leaders, and private psychologists — some of whom arranged meetings for me and their clients. Few of the women I interviewed had requested police assistance; none had pending criminal cases; and many of them were exposed to the legal system only via their advocate or divorce lawyer. The resulting study is thus a unique, culturally contextualized perspective on the politics of domestic violence in Israel.
The book is based on interview-generated narratives, a collection of cultural texts, and local engagement in domestic violence advocacy and everyday life. First, the core of the analysis is based on narratives gathered from forty-nine women from various social locations in Haifa and the Galilee region about their experiences of domestic violence; the majority of these women had never entered a shelter or contacted the police. Between 1993 and 1995, I interviewed twenty women who were currently or had been previously assisted via hotline, the women's center, or other NGO staff members for needs related to domestic violence and/or divorce. Of these women, three were Muslim, three were Catholic, two were Ethiopian, two were recent Russian Jewish immigrants, seven were Mizrahi Jews, and three were Ashkenazi Jews. Five other women (one upper-class Ashkenazi Jewish mother, three working-poor Mizrahi Jewish women with children, and one working-poor Russian immigrant who identified as Christian) were referred to me by a social worker as women who had recently left the local shelter for battered women. I also interviewed three hotline volunteers, two women's activists, and a neighborhood friend, all of whom had struggled with divorce-related domestic violence. Local friends identified and arranged for me to speak with four additional women, including a Druze woman, two Ashkenazi Jews from kibbutz, and a Mizrahi woman.
In the summer of 1999, I interviewed an additional fourteen women. I spoke with one working class Ashkenazi mother referred to me by the new local emergency shelter for battered women and a young Muslim mother of three referred to me by the original local shelter. I interviewed four additional Jewish women from Haifa and towns in northern Israel who responded to my ad in a women's center newsletter. An Islamic court judge arranged for me to speak with five Muslim women from the Haifa area; a team of social workers organized a meeting with me and two Muslim women from villages near Nazareth; and a local friend invited me to speak with another Muslim woman from a town in the Galilee region. Women discussed how multiple identities and social locations (e.g., being religious and a mother, being a new immigrant and unemployed, being both a member of the national minority as well as a feminist) informed their pathways to safety and justice.
I also conducted interviews with about twenty "front- line workers" (Wies and Haldane 2011), such as lawyers, social workers, scholar-advocates, and activists in Haifa, Tel Aviv, and Jerusalem, who reflected on the state of their respective fields and their work on domestic violence. I also spoke with paid staff and volunteers of domestic violence service organizations as well as psychologists, community religious leaders, lawyers, family court and religious court staff and judges, and members of the Israeli parliament. To grasp the history of Israel's complicated family law system from the Ottoman Empire to contemporary times, I read primary sources such as parliamentary debates, proposed and accepted legislation, and High Court of Justice rulings as well as secondary legal history sources. I also consulted sociolegal scholars, university law school librarians, and a high school history teacher. Regional nongovernmental organizations in Haifa as well as statewide NGOs served as critical resources for my research.
A second set of data is a collection of cultural texts tied to domestic violence. This set of data includes official policies and regulations, legislative debates and associated legislation, court rulings, state and international reports, and NGO-generated reports and related ephemera such as press releases, posters, pamphlets, stickers, and signs. These texts represent a range of perspectives on domestic violence as a social problem and how they have changed over time. Other texts include local university and nongovernmental organization-based research on domestic violence in Israel, which has helped shape statewide public policy. I systematically reviewed several Israeli newspapers from 1993 to 1999 and then kept on top of relevant media coverage using online searchers and alerts of key public events such as the peace process, elections, political violence, as well as domestic violence-related topics considered newsworthy, such as domestic violence homicides, which have informed popular understandings of domestic violence. I also collected materials such as intake files, newsletters, and annual reports from these and other organizations.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Battering States by Madelaine Adelman. Copyright © 2017 Vanderbilt University Press. Excerpted by permission of Vanderbilt University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Note on the Cover Illustration xiii
1 The Politics of Domestic Violence 1
2 Moving from Personal Trouble to Social Problem 39
3 The Domestic Politics of Just Leaving 88
4 States of Insecurity 125
5 A Political Economy of Domestic Violence 160
6 Reframing Domestic Violence and the State 201
Notes 211
References 229
Index 273