Go North, Young Woman: Bedouin Women Inspired by Older Peers

March 16, 2008

On March 12th and 13th, young Bedouin women from the Negev spent a day in Nazareth. Meeting with veteran Israeli Arab women activists, the young women were able to learn and acquire information along with a dose of optimism from their experiences.

Amera, a social worker from Rahat who coordinates women’s events; Amal, an educator and founder of the new NGO Bedouin Women for Ourselves, from the unrecognized village of Wadi Na'am; Wafa, a 23-year-old volunteer and nursing student from Laqia; and ten others sang and clapped their way north on the back of the bus that picked them up at SHATIL’s Be’er Sheva office. Their spirited choruses, "I love you, do you love me? I value you, do you value me?", were punctuated by bursts of laughter and their speech peppered with the words "women," "advance," "progress," and "change."

These are Bedouin women working for change and the 20-session SHATIL course, Bedouin Women for our Rights, is giving them the tools to do so. The trip to Nazareth exposed course participants to organizations outside the Negev that work for women’s rights.

"Each of these women had to fight to study at university, to act outside the home, to be in this course," said Arabiyeh Mansour, the course facilitator. Safa Shehade, head of Ma'an, the Forum of Arab Women’s Organizations in the Negev, which is co-sponsoring the course with SHATIL, hopes that a crop of much-needed activists savvy about social change will emerge from the course for the 14 member organizations of Ma’an.

In the course, the women, who grew up in traditional homes and all cover their hair, learn about women's rights, human rights, democracy, feminism, social change and more. But as in all of SHATIL’s Bedouin women's courses, the women also take advantage of the rare opportunity to meet with women from other Bedouin communities, to talk about their shared personal struggles.

“This course is a framework where you can say what you feel,” said 24-year-old student of literature and education and youth worker Khitam, from Laqia. “There are no places to do this in Bedouin society. I'm not used to speaking with my mother or anyone else about my feelings. No. I'm quiet,” Khitam added, making a motion as if closing a zipper across her lips.

In Nazareth, the women met NIF board member Nabila Espanioli, founder of Al-Tufula, an early childhood and women’s center, who spoke about their strategy of using a combination of tradition and modernity to pass on messages of gender equality. At Women Against Violence, another veteran feminist organization, Fidaa Taba’oni spoke about the effects on women of living in a patriarchal society. Both organizations are successful feminist groups and NIF grantees. The speakers stressed the connection between the work they do and social change on a larger scale.

After the meetings, the women were given an hour to browse through a Nazareth book store and to shop for sweets at Israel's best known Arab sweet shop.

"You can't find good books in Arabic in the south," explained Warda ElKranawi, the course coordinator for SHATIL.

Boarding the bus home, happy, tired and laden with packages, the young women said they felt encouraged by their visit to the established northern organizations.

“I want women to have possibilities, to live in a world in which one gender doesn’t rule the other but where they work cooperatively for the common good,” said 25-year-old Basma, a Bedouin women’s activist from Segev Shalom and student of Hebrew literature and fashion design. “This day and this course opened a door for me. They give me tools for the road.”