Summary
Arab feminist scholar whose Women in Israel: Race, Gender and Citizenship (2011) Stateless Citizenship (2013) treats as the feminist, gendered and critical-race application of the citizens without citizenship paradigm (Stateless Citizenship (2013), PDF p.198-199, p.206).
Details
- Abdo analyses Palestinian women citizens of Israel as discriminated against on three connected levels — as members of an underdeveloped minority, as women living in Israel, and as women in Palestinian society — through an anti-racist, anti-colonial feminist reading of economic disenfranchisement, legal and constitutional exclusion, geographic confinement, social inferiority and political under-representation (Stateless Citizenship (2013), PDF p.198).
- Abdo as quoted: “What actually differentiates the status of Palestinian women in Israel from their counterparts in other parts of the Middle East is the ambiguous relationship they have with the type of state imposed on them as their own. Palestinian women citizens find themselves in a unique position where the self-defined Jewish state became the only force which accorded them partial and inferior citizenship status while simultaneously removing them from the nation-state” (Abdo 2011, 39, as quoted, PDF p.198).
- On hierarchical citizenship: the differential distribution of rights “allocates more power, access and resources to Ashkenazi men and women, enabling them to control and monopolize epistemological production”, while Palestinians and Mizrahi Jews are relegated to an inferior position (Abdo 2011, 8-9, as quoted, PDF p.199).
- Molavi quotes Abdo’s framing of the settler-colonial state’s hierarchical citizenship as two simultaneous processes, “one of exclusion and racial separation which affects the Palestinian citizens at large; and another of racialized (and ethnicized) inclusion to which Palestinians and Mizrahis (especially women) are subjected” (Abdo 2011, 39-40, as quoted, PDF p.206).
Related pages
Stateless Citizenship (2013), Stateless Citizenship, Nimer Sultany