‘No Woman's Law Will Rot this State’: The Israeli Racial State and Feminist Resistance

Abstract

This paper employs social theory and empirical observation, juxtaposing Israel as a ‘racial state’ (Goldberg, 2002) and the concept of femina sacra, a female version of Agamben's homo sacer or ‘bare life’ (Agamben, 1998), to think about some aspects of Israeli feminist peace activism since the onset of the second Intifada. Although Israeli feminist peace activism seems to discursively vacillate between essentialist motherhood narratives and subversive draft resistance practices, reading draft resistance narratives of young Israeli women conscripts, the paper tentatively suggests that where the state positions itself above morality, while evoking morality in its defence, feminist ‘peace activism’ in Israel/Palestine, though providing a potent counter-narrative to the Zionist narration of nation, does not destabilise the racial state, which is apparently gradually destroying itself while wilfully destroying its Others. I conclude by asking whether morally positioning itself in contrast to the racial state, such resistance can be theorised as gendered.