Meet Amal Elsana Alh’jooj. Thirty five, petite and bright-eyed, she sat in front of an intimate crowd last week at The ASSOCIATED: Jewish Community Federation of Baltimore. Alh’jooj was brought by the ASSOCIATED's women department for a typical lunch-and-learn, but her story as an Arab Israeli Bedouin – the first Bedouin feminist – was anything but ordinary.
Alh’jooj told the story of the plight of Bedouin women in Israel through her own tale of trial and triumph. Born the fifth of five girls in the Bedouin town of Laqiya, located in the northeastern Negev, she said her birth was somewhat of a tragedy to her parents. They wanted – needed – a boy and her birth brought her mother to tears, fearing her father would take second wife, one who would give him boys.
“After me, my father became known as ‘the father of the daughters,’ said Alh’jooj. “This is a low status. He could not join in tribal meetings at the same level as someone who was, ‘the father of the boys.’”
She even received her name, “Amal,” which means “hope in God,” as her parents prayer that the next children would be male … and six of the next eight were in fact boys.
Alh’jooj began life like any other Bedouin, except that because her mother already had four daughters to tend to the kitchen and the cleaning, Alh’jooj was sent to the field at age five to be a shepherd. At 5:30 a.m. she rose each morning. After feeding her flocks, she would go to school and then return to the fields, only to do her homework by oil lamp. But she was always a good student, she recounted, and she asked a lot of questions.
“I remember my grandmother telling me, ‘I’ll provide you with the answers I have, but you should search,’” she said.
Search she did. As she got older, the unequal status of women in her community more acutely affected her. She did not like that her brother could travel out of the Negev for school while she, equally as smart and older, could not simply because she was a woman and women are “supposed to stay close to home.”
So she started teaching the women of her community. She launched reading and writing programs, cultural activities to empower Bedouin females. Finally, she enrolled in Ben Gurion University to study social work. There, she said, a whole new world was opened to her.
She recounted the following story:
“One day, a Jewish woman from [the newspaper] Kol HaNegev came to interview me because I was one of the first two Bedouins at the university. She asked me, ‘Are you a feminist?’ I said, ‘What is a feminist?’ She said it was someone who believes in equality for women, so I said, ‘Yes!’
“My father came home from work the next Friday afternoon. His face was all red and he had Kol Hangev in his hand. On the cover was a picture of me. The headline read, ‘First Bedouin Feminist.’”
Her father had also not known the definition of the word feminist, but when he asked a colleague at work, he was told feminists were man-hating lesbians in America who like to burn their bras in public.
“I was shocked,” Alh’jooj recalled. “I told him my feminist view was that I shouldn’t be stopped from doing thing because I am a woman. I guess that calmed him down," she said laughinig.
But nothing quelled Alh’jooj's fire for change. She continued to push the envelope, marrying a man she chose and started organizations that rallied women around her in support of their rights. Today she directs the Negev Institute for Strategies of Peace Development and the Arab Jewish Center for Equality, Empowerment and Cooperation. She trains Bedouin women to be photographers and DJs. She helped open an Arab/Jewish bilingual school in Beer Sheva, where she now lives. She has taken her story on the road to spread the word about the need for women empowerment among the Bedouin community.
There is progress, she said, there are now 482 Bedouin students at BGU. Today, there are more than 200 Bedouin doctors, including one female doctor. However, there are two issues that have a long way to go and it is those she is now focusing on: polygamy and arranged marriages. She steps softly in these arenas.
“We don’t want to simply modernize the Bedouins,” she said. “We just want to be a part of the global village, to keep our culture, but accept new knowledge and understandings.”
She said, “It’s a process,” and she knows that whatever strides she makes for her people in this generation, the next generation will have different challenges that it, too, will have to confront.
BEDOUIN FACTS
Did you know?
- Bedouin simply means “person that lives in the desert.” A Bedouin could be of any religion.
- There are around 180,000 Bedouins living in the Negev region of Israel. They make up 25 percent of the Negev population.
- Sixty percent of Bedouins live under the poverty line.
- There is a 43 percent unemployment rate among Bedouin men.
- Sixty percent of Bedouin youth still don’t receive a formal education.
Source: Alh'jooj
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