‘. . . You are a Muslim, and our village disapproves of this’: The objections of indigenous minority communities in Israel to women’s employment in the police on grounds of gender, nationality and crime

Abstract

We introduce and discuss the concept of community objection against the backdrop of the dominant scholarly tendency to attribute a shared viewpoint to residential communities. The notion of community objection arises from two dimensions of diversification among members of minority residential communities: vision of their relationship with the majority and vision of appropriate sexual behavior. We offer an analysis of the experience of Arab women who are citizens serving in the Israeli Police, who face community objection from members of their communities who endeavor to exert social control by questioning their loyalty and their sexuality. We asked which patterns of community objection are perceived as threatening by Arab policewomen, and how women explain their community’s objection to their employment. We conducted a qualitative study based on semi-structured interviews with 27 Arab policewomen employed by the Israeli Police. Grounded theory was applied, bringing to light gender-based, nationality-based and crime-based community objection. The analysis furthermore revealed that Arab policewomen could hold on to their jobs by rejecting the viewpoints manifested by those three types of objections. In fact, they thwarted the gender-based one as a conservative attempt to stop their work in the area of violence against women; and the nationality-based objection as an often crime-based one in disguise. Their perceptions allowed us to elaborate on previous discussions, underscoring the significance of inner disagreement on minority-majority relations for conceptualizing ‘community’.