Hope is a Woman's Name
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ISBN: 9781990823770

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Hope is a Woman’s Name

The fifth daughter in a patriarchal society and an indigenous Bedouin in a Jewish state, Amal Elsana came into this world fighting for her right to exist. A shepherd at the age of five, she led her flock across the green mountains of Laqiya, her village in the Negev in southern Israel, and later ran literacy classes for the women in her tribe in her early teens, the beginning of a lifelong career organizing people to promote policy change for Israel’s Bedouin, a minority within the Palestinian minority. She later established economic empowerment programs for marginalized women, helping to found an Arab-Jewish school, and creating organizations to promote shared society.

Contributors

Amal Elsana Alh'jooj

Amal Elsana Alh'jooj is a founder of several NGOs, including the Arab-Jewish Centre for Equality, Economic Empowerment and Cooperation, and the recipient of many international prizes. Nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize (2006), she was included in Genius 100 Visionaries of the Future (2017); and awarded the New Israel Fund's Human Rights Award (2013). Amal has a PhD in Social Work from McGill University and a post-doctorate from the Harvard Kennedy School of Public Policy in the Women Public Policy program. She is currently a professor at McGill School of Social Work, and is the founder and executive director of the Canadian non-profit organization PLEDJ (Promoting Leadership, Empowerment, Development and Justice).

Chapter Contributors Pages Year Price
In this chapter, Alh’jooj describes the events following the C-section delivery of twins, Moad and Adan, at a hospital where she had worked as a social worker for Bedouin children.
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In this chapter, Alh’jooj discusses her mother, Ummi, a Bedouin woman in an Israeli hospital. Set within the Bedouin communities of Israel, the narrative examines the weight of patriarchal …
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In this chapter, Alh’jooj traces Ummi’s struggle against her mother-in-law, Jidatee, in the Bedouin village of Tel Arad.
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In this chapter, Alh’jooj describes her experiences as a little girl in a Bedouin tribe in the Naqab as she navigated the rigid gender boundaries of the communal tent.
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In this chapter, Alh’jooj traces the oral history of the Naqab Bedouin, affirming their presence in historic Palestine from the Bronze Age through the Ottoman and British periods.
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In this chapter, Alh’jooj discusses her father, Abouee, as he recounts life within a Bedouin tribe in Laqiya, Palestine, during the British Mandate era or early statehood period.
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In this chapter, Alh’jooj describes her memories of a Friday in mid-twentieth-century Israel, when the day suspended work, school, and commerce for the entire community. verdict to herd …
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In this chapter, Alh’jooj recounts childhood mornings in the Bedouin village of Laqiya, where daily life revolves around milking sheep and rigid gender roles.
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In this chapter, Alh’jooj describes her experiences tending sheep in the mountains of Laqiya, where she found freedom from the strict social codes imposed by her mother, Ummi.
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In this chapter, Alh’jooj traces the constrained lives of Palestinian Bedouin women in a village shaped by the Nakba of 1948 and the Six-Day War of 1967.
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In this chapter, Alh’jooj describes her experiences as a ten- year-old sheepherder in a rural Arab village,and how a man assaulted her while chasing a runaway cow.
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In this chapter, Alh’jooj describes her father, Abouee’s, fierce defence of his daughter Basma’s right to attend teachers’ college in Beer a-Saba during the late 1940s.
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In this chapter, Alh’jooj describes her experiences in the Bedouin village of Laqiya, Naqab, during the 1980s, as Israeli authorities escalate repression and the community protests the …
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In this chapter, Alh’jooj describes her experiences after having to give up schooling to support her family.
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In this chapter, Alh’jooj describes her experienes secretly riding a bicycle in defiance of her tribe’s rigid norms.
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In this chapter, Alh’jooj traces her political awakening at a government-built Bedouin high school in Tel a-Saba, a planned Naqab town.
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In this chapter, Alh’jooj describes her experiences during the intifada, as she returned to school and secretly organized a flag-waving protest on the bus.
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In this chapter, Alh’jooj describes what it was like to watch her eldest sister, Basma, be coerced into a Bedouin cousin marriage.
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In this chapter, Alh’jooj describes what it was like to defy her mother to work at her father’s store in Hebron.
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In this chapter, Alh’jooj describes her experiences navigating educational inequality, a dramatic snake encounter at her family’s barley mill in Beer a-Saba, and the rejection of her …
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In this chapter, Alh’jooj describes her experiences teaching in the unrecognized village of Um Mitnan near Dimona in the 1990s.
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In this chapter, Alh’jooj describes how she challenged the suppression of Palestinian identity in her school during the Oslo peace process.
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In this chapter, Alh’jooj describes how she confronted an age-based rejection from Ben Gurion University’s social work programme.
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In this chapter, Alh’jooj describes her first day at a university in Israel, roughly seventeen kilometres from her village of Laqiya.
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In this chapter, Alh’jooj describes her experiences where her community work in Laqiya was reduced by a journalist to the label "The First Bedouin Feminist."
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In this chapter, Alh’jooj discuses her experience at a nursing home in Omer, Israel, where she met Hannah, an eighty-six-year-old Holocaust survivor.
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In this chapter,Alh’jooj discusses her experiences balanacing university life with family expectations in the Negev.
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In this chapter, Alh’jooj discusses how she organized a Friday evening literacy program for Bedouin women in Umm Bateen, Israel’s Negev region.
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In this chapter, Alh’jooj discusses her experiences with headscarfs, stalking, and family advice.
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In this chapter, Alh’jooj discusses her experiences as she navigates between her a-Sana Bedouin heritage and her identity as a feminist activist at Ben Gurion University.
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In this chapter, Alh’jooj discusses a community education project in the Naqab desert, where a cohort of young people from Bedouin villages built a mobile library for the unrecognized …
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In this chapter, Alh’jooj recounts the 1994 Cave of the Patriarchs massacre in Hebron, carried out by Baruch Goldstein, and the fierce protests that followed in the Bedouin village of Laqiya.
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In this chapter, Alh’jooj discusses her experiences at Soroka Hospital in Israel, where Bedouin children stayed months or years due to a lack of basic resources at home.
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In this chapter, Alh’jooj discusses her experiences confronting repressed feelings for Anwar, a boy from the unrecognized village of Awajian.
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In this chapter, Alh’jooj discusses her experiences confronting the collision between Western professional ethics and Bedouin relational culture.
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In this chapter, Alh’jooj discusses her 1996 graduation at Ben-Gurion University, and cultural tensions between her Bedouin family and the Israeli campus.
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In this chapter, Alh’jooj discusses her experiences working as a social worker in unrecognized Bedouin villages.
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In this chapter, Alh’jooj discusses her experiences traveling to Turin for an academic conference and rekindling her childhood bond with Anwar.
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In this chapter, Alh’jooj discusses her experiences defying tribal custom to marry Anwar, a man outside her clan.
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In this chapter, Alh’jooj discusses her experiences preparing for for her Bedouin wedding.
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In this chapter, Alh’jooj describes the final days before her wedding to Anwar in late July and early August.
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In this chapter, Alh’jooj traces her experiences after her marriage to Anwar, enrolling in a master’s programme in social work at McGill University, and building bonds across ethnic …
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In this chapter, Alh’jooj describes her experiences navigating daily encounters that challenge the boundaries between ethnic identity and shared humanity.
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In this chapter, Alh’jooj describes her experiences in al-Grin, an unrecognized Bedouin village in Israel, as she navigated Bedouin social customs to address genetic deafness caused by …
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In this chapter, Alh’jooj describes her experiences during the second intifada and her campaign for equitable Bedouin children’s education in Israel.
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In this chapter, Alh’jooj traces her social activist’s tension between her public advocacy and the domestic expectations imposed by family.
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In this chapter, Alh’jooj traces the birth of AJEEC, an Arab-Jewish organisation for equality and partnership, founded in the aftermath of the second intifada when conventional coexistence …
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In this chapter, Alh’jooj traces a gatherer-based strategy for social change in which Bedouin women in Rahat were trained as photographers and videographers beginning in 2004, with support …
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In this chapter, Alh’jooj traces the 2006 effort by a Bedouin activist and the AJEEC organization to build a community-run kitchen in Hura, a Negev town, so that single mothers could …
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In this chapter, Alh’jooj discusses her experiences with IVF treatment at Soroka Hospital and the February birth of twins, Adan and Moad.
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In this chapter, Alh’jooj traces the bond in contemporary Israel between a Palestinian Arab family in Beer a-Saba and their Polish-Jewish nanny, Paulina, who became a mother figure to the twins.
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In this chapter, Alh’jooj recounts the arson of the Desert Embroidery Centre in Laqiya.
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In this chapter, Alh’jooj traces the founding of Ma’an in 2002 and the 2005 Laqiya village election, where the author confronted a scheme in which men controlled women’s votes …
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In this chapter, Alh’jooj discusses her experiences with polygamy within the Bedouin community in Israel.
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In this chapter, Alh’jooj discusses the murder of Ghazaale, an eighteen-year-old girl killed by family members in Beer a-Saba in what they frame as an honour defence.
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In this chapter, Alh’jooj centres on Jidatee, her grandmother whose wisdom embodied the Arabic principle that a free woman has nothing to fear.
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In this chapter, Alh’jooj traces the tension between Palestinian identity and Israeli civic life in Beer a-Saba, where the author raises her twin sons within a predominantly Jewish community.
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In this chapter, Alh’jooj discusses her experiences travelling on her speaking tour.
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In this chapter, Alh’jooj discusses her experiences navigating public speaking and confronting hostility from Jewish and Palestinian.
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In this chapter, Alh’jooj traces the evolving bond between her and her mother, Ummi.
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In this chapter, Alh’jooj traces the formation of a joint Jewish and Bedouin civil society body in the Naqab and its visit to a military airbase built on land where the Bedouin were …
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In this chapter, Alh’jooj describes her experiences building the Bedouin Volunteer Tent in Beer a-Saba, reimagining traditional mutual aid into structured youth engagement.
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In this chapter, Alh’jooj recounts a Bedouin woman’s experience during the December 2008 war on Gaza, set in Beer a-Saba.
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In this chapter, Alh’jooj follows a Bedouin family’s 2009–2011 retreat at the Dead Sea, where thirteen siblings gathered to honour their parents’ decades of devotion.
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The Prawer Plan, published in 2011, proposed relocating thirty-eight thousand Bedouin residents from unrecognized Negev villages to seven planned towns.
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In this chapter, Alh’jooj discusses her experience wtih a crisis in 2011 sparked by the Prawer Plan and the ongoing undervaluing of her work within community political structures.
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