Fifteenth International Conference on Interdisciplinary Social Sciences

Abstract

The feminist literature on women in the Middle East considers the manner in which women cope with many different power structures that dictate the frameworks within which they live. Based on this literature, we examine the motivations of young Arab women – as a national minority in Israel – for enrolling in civic service contrary to the discourse of the Arab leadership, which repudiates their participation. To this end, 37 narrative interviews were conducted with Muslim, Christian, Bedouin, and Druze Arab women who were asked to provide an explanation of the significance of their volunteering in civic service against the consensus within their community. In this manner, we suggest viewing the substantial marginality that characterizes the volunteers in terms of gender, ethnicity, class, politics, and family as a site for the construction of agency through volunteering for civic service. They identify their limitations as women, as Arabs, and as young adults, and they regard civic service as a resource that can enable them to accumulate social power. They take advantage of spaces that are available to them in civic service, while moving between cultures, societies, and the geographical, political, and institutional spaces that are sometimes helpful and sometimes oppressive. Although they disregard the political norm of the Arab leadership (the call to boycott civic service), which they believe subjects them to additional marginality, they adopt dignified resistance (volunteering for Arab society and its institutions) and in so doing maintain their image as members of the Arab community and as women.