Being an American feminist in an Arab village

Let me tell you about being an American feminist in Arab villages in Israel. For the past two months, I’ve been interning with Kayan, an Arab feminist organization located in Haifa. In college, I studied women’s studies and co-founded a gender equality club that addressed gender issues on our conservative Christian campus. Women’s studies jolted me into life, and only since coming to Israel have I felt so alive again.
There are lots of things American women don’t understand about Palestinian women. Are they all Muslim? Why don’t some of them wear the veil? What are their daily lives like? I came to Israel with the same questions, and have yet to understand all the complexities of Palestinian women in Israel. These complexities, however, are often given too much credit. They give us excuses to ignore one another, to stick to what we know. It’s much more comfortable to discuss American feminism because I understand it, and I’d never want to pretend like I’m an expert on the Arab feminist movement.
Despite this fear of what is unfamiliar, though, my identity has often been mirrored in the face of an Arab woman here. She is caught between pleasing her community and doing what she wants; she needs time to herself to think and imagine; she gets angry when she is patronized. The resounding theme in my time here – when I learn about pay discrimination in Israel, or spurn the attention of brutish men – is that we all face similar struggles as women. Even when I can’t understand half of what a group is discussing, I feel connected to their fight for equality and for a voice. When women tell me about how they demanded a space for themselves, my life becomes intertwined with theirs. When I return to the U.S., I will take with me a greater sense of being – a feeling that our fight for equality is something much, much bigger than ourselves.