Gender, Colonialism and Rabbinical Courts in Mandate Palestine

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Third World Quarterly, 2010

Settler Colonial Studies, 2023

This article explores the criminal prohibition against bigamy during the British colonial rule of Palestine, drawing particular attention to the exemptions it afforded to Muslims. Through archival research, the article analyses the debates that led to the legislation of the 1936 Criminal Code Ordinance through three distinct lenses – political, religious, and gendered to circumspectly explore the inconsistencies of the British approach toward Bigamy. I reveal how mandatory legislators prohibited it as a matter of public and criminal law while creating a broad exemption of its stipulations by essentially relegating the matter to the less heavily regulated ‘private’ sphere. I argue that the exemption provided for Muslims on the bigamy prohibition demonstrates the complexity of colonial law and its intrinsic paradox manifested in outlawing bigamy while accommodating it. This paradox and inconsistencies in colonial legislation are in line with colonial policies toward native populations, reflecting British colonial perception and anxiety towards colonial subjects and themselves.

The Palestinian-Israeli conflict stemmed from the clash of the loyalty of both sides to the same land, which is the Palestinian territory settled by both the Arabs and the Jews. This paper attempt to survey the role the development of the clash on the territory by elaborating the effects of Jewish immigration, the development of Zionist idea, the mandate period, political factions and the role of Religion and politics in Israel until the Oslo Accords. Thus, the beginning of the conflict and the development of the conflict will be stressed in order to understand the conflicting positions of both sides. These positions aim at helping the reader understand more clearly the deadlock in the peace process.

Israel Affairs, 2005

The article deals with the dichotomy in Israeli law between religious and secular values as regards gender equality. This dichotomy pervades the legal system at all levels. At the constitutional level, religious values have preempted the introduction of an explicit right to equality for women. However, this limit has been largely circumvented by the constitutional right to human dignity and by Supreme Court jurisprudence, which has established the right to equality as a fundamental right. The Knesset has put personal status law -license and prohibition in marriage and divorce -beyond the reach of the principle of equality and the courts have not challenged this. On the other hand, the High Court of Justice has required the religious courts to apply the principle of equality to associated issues of family law. In areas of law not directly related to religious values and norms, a strong concept of gender equality has been developed both in legislation and in the courts, combining social accommodation for maternity and parenthood, with equal opportunity guarantees for women's participation in the labour force and the military, with affirmative action in public sphere economic activities and with protection against sexual violence as an inherent part of women's right to equality and human dignity.

Constititional and Legal Avademic Studies, 2022

The purpose of this paper is to review the history of the constitutional regulation of marriage and divorce in British mandate Palestine and the state of Israel from 1918 on. Israel was subject to British rule (mostly under a mandate of the League of Nations) from 1918 to 1948, and was called Palestine at the time. In 1948 some of this territory claimed its sovereignty as an independent state called Israel. The paper will highlight the different constitutional norms and procedures that govern the field of family law in British mandate Palestine and the state of Israel from the beginning of the British mandate to this day. The paper is based upon historic scrutiny of the legislation of British Palestine and the state of Israel in the feld of family law, analyzing the law in accordance with the historic developments in the region. The results of this scrutiny are that from 1948 to the third decade of the 21 st century, the Israeli legislator has repeatedly acted to prevent the constitutional regulation of civil marriage, preserving the archaic millet system, an Ottoman system of marriage within religious communities, that was the basis of the British mandate's regulation of marriage and divorce in Palestine. But as much as the original millet arrangement was enacted by the British as a voluntary system, it was given new and compulsory features by the Israeli legislator, all the while avoiding a comprehensive constitutional regulation of Israeli family law. The paper concludes that a constitutional regulation of civil marriage is probably not possible in Israel, due to the political inability to reach an agreement between religious and secular Jews in Israel. But this did not prevent the Israeli legislature from fundamentally changing the British mandate constitutional arrangement, leaving behind a patchwork of improvised legislation that violates the basic civil rights of Israeli citizens.

2018

It has long been remarked that nothing about Israel's religion-state "status quo" is static. This is generally true, but for the exception of the laws governing marriage and divorce, which remain virtually unchanged in almost a century, even though these are some of the most unpopular laws in the State of Israel, and even though the problematic nature of the law was known at the time of its legislation. This article adds a new layer of understanding to the genesis of this law by looking at the official and unofficial role of rabbis in Diaspora communities, especially Tsarist Russia and its successor states, birthplaces of most of Israel's founding leaders, and demonstrating the continuities between those arrangements and the arrangements in the new state.

Journal of Law and Religion, 2019

This article focuses on the representations and perceptions of Muslim Palestinian women as encapsulated by early Israeli legislation. The analysis is based on a close reading of the negotiations and discussions leading up to the criminalization of bigamy by the Israeli state and, in particular, those principal discussions surrounding the legislation of the Women's Equal Rights Law of 1951. Primary materials from the Israeli State Archives are used to reconstruct the debates in the Knesset, assess the legislation's intended effects on the Muslim Palestinian family, and trace the opposition to it fielded by the Palestinian religious leadership. The legislative process is dissected to expose the implicit and explicit patriarchal and nationalized underpinnings of the image of the “ideal family” fashioned by Israeli legislators. Despite their national divide, I argue, both the Israeli Knesset and the Muslim community leadership articulated women's roles in similarly distincti...

2000

On a Monday morning at the end of December 1998, in downtown Gaza City, an articulate, professional woman from a prominent local family stood to address assembled journalists, politicians, women's rights activists, human rights workers, lawyers and other concerned (read: outraged) members of Palestinian civil society. Instead of giving me justice, the shari`a court has decided I should return in shackles... I appeal to you today, in the name of all Palestinian women who have passed through this bitter experience, to stand by our side and support us in our demand to eliminate this despicable measure and review all other legal procedures that undermine the dignity and freedom of women. 1 1 Urgent Appeal to Public Opinion by S. Saraj, reproduced in Sawt al-Nisa', no.62, 12/31/98. 2 Sawt al-Nisa' no. 62, 12/31/98.

Israel Law Review, 2000

The tension between the norms of gender equality and religious freedom is a major focus of international human rights debate. 1 States that adopt religious law contend that gender discriminatory religious practices are protected under international law guaranteeing rights of cultural autonomy and religious freedom. Others argue that only discriminatory practices that are not the product of state action but, rather, take place in the private realm of civil society should be accorded such protection. Many women's rights activists, on the other hand, urge the state to actively reform religious law and restructure cultural practices even in the private realm, "not only as a means of ending gender-based restrictions on specific human rights but also as an essential step toward dismantling systematic gender inequality" perpetuated in traditionalist cultures. 2 The larger philosophic issue underlying this debate, how to reconcile universal human rights and multiculturalism, understood as the primacy of group cultural identity as a morally and politically significant category, is complex, but not new. 3 It is the age-old one, as Joseph Raz has put it, "of how to combine the truth of universalism with the truth in particularism." 4 One major locus of this tension today is personal status law. That Jewish personal status law is a topic of intense political and legal concern in Israel is unsurprising, given the absence of a genuine civil law alternative to religious jurisdiction over marriage and divorce.