Hope Is a Woman’s Name is an important book, a reflective autobiography of an exceptional woman which must have been difficult to write. Dr. Amal Elsana Alh’jooj is a Bedouin, Palestinian, Arab, Israeli, Muslim, feminist and social work academic with degrees in social work from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and McGill University. She has a wealth of experience in innovative community development in the Negev among her own people, is an articulate and experienced speaker on Bedouin rights, and has been nominated for and received national and international awards.
Being positioned simultaneously as an insider and outsider as a girl growing up within a patriarchal tribal society and later as an educated professional navigating the beliefs of Palestinian, Muslim and Jewish Israeli groups and individuals, shows us how navigating these waters is complicated, contested and difficult but rewarding. The author demonstrates through this account of her life how she developed her understandings of her family, Bedouin society and the wider Israeli society and how her parents, colleagues, women and men involved in her NGOs and politicians and donors also changed their views over time. Culture and tradition are not static but have their own dynamic.
The Bedouin: Israel's disadvantaged displaced indigenous minority
Indigenous peoples are disadvantaged, displaced minorities in many parts of the globe. It is important to understand their cultures, but it is also vital to grasp that their lack of material and social advantages have been shaped by structural violence, political forces and a history of colonization.
They include First Nations peoples in Canada, Aboriginal peoples in Australia, and the Bedouin in the Negev in Israel. Emancipation through education is powerful. Among the Bedouin as among the Sami in Norway, girls and women have pursued studying more than young men.
Alh’jooj places her own life and family in the foreground, framed by the background of the political and social context, with short footnotes explaining these in more detail. She charts her changing understandings and relationships with her parents and siblings and indeed, the constraints that men and women live with, in a way that is nuanced. Her achievements are impressive as is the support from her family.
At a time when the discourse and government within Israel is dehumanizing of its minority Arab citizens and non-citizens, this book makes an important statement about who they are, what can be achieved, and how this is an ongoing vital struggle for the future well-being of both the minorities and the Israeli state. ■
Gillian Lewando Hundt is professor emeritus at University of Warwick and a medical anthropologist who lived and worked with Bedouin in the Negev in the 1970s-’90s, setting up a Bedouin Mobile Unit and conducting research in the Palestinian territories – Gaza and the West Bank, Jordan, Syria and the Negev.
Hope is a Woman’s NameAmal Elsana Alh’joojHalban Publishers Ltd, 2022£16.99, 456 pages