Permission to rebel: Arab Bedouin women's changing negotiation of social roles.

MOST STUDIES ANALYZING the Bedouin women of the Negev in Israel describe this population as marginalized and powerless, blaming the traditional nature of Bedouin society. (1) This body of literature describes the Bedouin woman as a victim dependent on the male collective for support, unable to fight or cope in her own society. Nonetheless, a few studies describe her as an empowered contributor to society or to social change, through the theme of secondary or higher education. (2) These latter studies, most of which were carried out by women, point to the Bedouin woman's agency while highlighting the interaction between the power of tradition and the effects of colonization.

The current study, which analyzes the Bedouin woman's power and contests her marginalized status, contributes to existing literature in several ways. First, although studies of the Bedouin community in general and of Bedouin women in particular have focused on a single generation, the current research examines three generations-daughters (schoolgirls and dropouts), mothers, and grandmothers. This helps to highlight two main issues: whether these women, as three generations that live in the same space but encounter different realities, have different ways of struggling with their lives and whether one generation influences the next in their ways of struggling. For example, is power passed from mother to daughter as knowledge to contest, adapt, and transform her reality?

Second, most studies have focused on more privileged Bedouin women. For instance, Anat Passate-Shubert and Ronit Halevi (3) analyzed Bedouin women who studied at institutions of higher learning, describing them as leaders and change agents. In contrast, the present study looks not only at the struggle of educated girls but also sheds light on a more neglected group of Bedouin women--girls who have dropped out of school--and aims to show their own way of struggling as different from that of their educated peers.

Third, other studies of female dropouts from the Bedouin community have described the girls as objects rather than subjects. For instance, as Jewish men, Yosef Ben-David and Ron Hos (4) could not enter the female space in this gender-segregated society, for Bedouins forbid any public contact between women and men. They were therefore forced to interview the dropout girls through informants from the local village. In contrast, as a Bedouin woman, I was able to hear the voices of these girls directly, interviewing them face to face and entering their world. Moreover, although Ben-David and Hos focused on the reasons for dropping out, mostly blaming the traditional nature of Bedouin society, my study examines the ways these girls cope and struggle in their everyday lives with internal Bedouin and external colonial forces that cause them to leave school, reflecting the girls' seeds of resistance and untapped power within the context of Bedouin society. The aim of this study is to show that women from the margins--that is, those who are not major actors in the public sphere and are essentially invisible--also have an individual face and, more importantly, have their own way of seeing their lives that is both similar to and different from that of the educated girls.

THE DUAL MARGINALITY OF BEDOUIN WOMEN

The Bedouin woman is marginalized twice: once, as part of a Bedouin minority among a Jewish Israeli majority and an Arab minority, and, again, as a female in a Bedouin male-dominated society. This dual discrimination affects women's status in all aspects of their lives.

Ethnic Marginality in a Jewish-Majority State. The Bedouins of the Negev are among the Palestinian Arabs who remained in Israel after the establishment of the Israeli state in 1948 and today comprise a minority group among Israeli citizens. From 1948 until the late 1960s, the Negev Bedouins lived under the Israeli military administration, as did all Arabs in Israel. This meant that they were isolated from Arab populations in other parts of Israel and needed special permits to leave their restricted area in search of jobs or education.