‘. . . 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

Spanish

French

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’.

Keywords

Arab minority in Israel community objection diversity policy policewomen

Introduction

In recent years, dozens of female Arab¹-Israeli citizens have joined the Israeli police force. Women comprise just under a third of the Israeli police force (Police, 2022), and minority women constitute about 1% of that. Similarly, elsewhere in the world, although diversity policies are embraced, minority women remain under-represented (Batton and Wright, 2018).

The indigenous Arab ethno-religious-national minorities in Israel, consisting of Christian, Muslim, Druze, and Bedouin, are commonly known to conduct conservative, collectivist, family-oriented ways of life (Abu-Rabia-Queder, 2017; Meler, 2017; Sa’ar, 2017). In recent years, with the proliferation of neo-liberal individualist trends, a value-multiplicity emerged, alongside continuity in shared social conventions (Khoury and Benjamin, 2021). Such trends are more dominant in urban residential areas, compared to rural ones. Applying these notions to Arab minorities, we interpret structure as spatial, either urban or rural. Recent research has shown the salience of various types of urbanism to opportunity structures available to Arab (Blatman and Sabbagh-Khoury, 2023). The settler-colonialist context further contributes to this complexity, as various positioning processes are simultaneously enabled or limited. Each of the ethno-religious-national minorities negotiates its integration into (or avoidance of) Israeli State institutions, like the political system, labor market, security forces, and higher education. Such negotiation takes somewhat different forms in nationally mixed spaces in which individualistic trends proliferate (Abu-Rabia-Queder, 2017). The daily reality of Arab policewomen in Israel embodies the tensions entailed in working for a nationally mixed organization while also belonging to an ethno-religious-national minority and living in a community that may (still) be able to exert social control on its female members.

We introduce and discuss the concept of community objection, contributing to earlier discussions (Voydanoff, 2001) of community and the extent to which communities should be seen as collectives of shared values. We view community objection as an endeavor to exert social control, reflecting inner differences on two issues: the willingness to accept that employment in masculine organizations can be consistent with appropriate sexual behavior; and, the willingness to accept employment in organizations representing the majority. Women’s ability to evade social control is contingent upon their access to resources. In other words, greater access to higher education and professional employment enables minority women to maintain sanctioned paths of action, while still being aware of social sanctioning (Barakat, 2022; Meler and Benjamin, 2022; Sa’ar and Younis, 2021).

To contribute to a broader theoretical understanding of community objection, we ask: Which patterns of community objection are perceived by Arab policewomen as threatening? How do these women explain their community’s objection to their employment? Below, we review the existing scholarship on communities, subsequently introducing the topic of women in police forces, women in masculine occupations, and the Israeli case study.

Literature review

Majority−minority relationships differ across specific histories of the encounter between minority communities and the dominant privileged category (Anthias, 2020). In a settler−colonialist context, indigenous minority communities may be characterized by consolidated social institutions, a vivid national resistance movement, and heritage maintenance projects (Sabbagh-Khoury, 2022). Elsewhere, minority communities that emerge around immigration processes may be more fragile and dispersed, with powerful forces pushing them toward assimilation, and therefore scarcer in nationalistic movements. Distinctions between types of majority−minority relationship are implicated in the meaning attributed by communities, to employment in ethnically mixed organizations, primarily in social services. Under conditions of immigration and aspiration for assimilation, ethnically mixed workplaces, may be seen as an advantage for the community. In contrast, in the case of indigenous minority communities, in which some resist the dominant category control while others aspire to exploit opportunities for improved social status, ethnically mixed workplaces may be perceived more ambivalently. Namely, such jobs can be concurrently respected and degraded.

Voydanoff (2001), in her seminal work, emphasized the potential of community for providing social support. Her conceptualization of community is focused on six dimensions that are seen as generated in the intersection between the shared residential territory and the extent to which values are shared. She perceives one’s satisfaction with the community as an individual-level variable reflecting, inter-alia, the extent to which values are shared in a shared residential territory. Emphasizing the complexity generated by the various levels, Voydanoff was able to maintain the image of the community as basically unified, characterized by a consensual value set. A more recent account, by Jennings et al. (2022), maintained the unanimous image of communities that together inflict social control on employed women, forcing them to manage their movements in specific ways in order to maintain a positive identity and moral status. Adding complexity to the understanding of community, Dingyloudi and Strijbos (2020) build on Voydanoff’s perspective by emphasizing the diverse range of possible experiences among members of communities, including a ‘sense of service, sacrifice, restriction, exclusion, and lack of freedom’ (p. 1053).

The added complexity suggests that developing a theoretical perspective on minority communities requires a diversification of communities’ relationship with the majority. Namely, even if individuals and families within a residential community may share ethno-national-religious affiliation, as well as the minoritized excluded status, they may differ on the extent to which they are willing to seize opportunities offered by the majority. Two issues demonstrate this need for diversification: first, the extent to which employment opportunities offered by the majority are seen as consistent with the minority specific socio-cultural views, for example, appropriate sexual behavior; second, the differential willingness to become part of mixed workplaces, particularly those representing the dominance of the majority and its forceful position. Diverse perceptions within communities concerning these two issues necessarily generate inner conflicts in minority communities. One specific opportunity in relation to which such inner conflicts arise is the police. Thus, investigating Arab policewomen’s perceptions of their communities’ objection to their employment could enable us to theorize on the multiplicity within the category of majority−minority relationship, a notion that has not been discussed widely enough so far.

We explore that multiplicity by identifying distinct patterns of objection by different members of communities who object to women’s employment paths. Without a systematic study into their communities’ diverse objections, women’s ability to understand and refute these objections, and as a result their ability to continue pursuing their desired occupational routes, may be left lacking. Moreover, women’s resilience vis â vis community objection reflects the dynamics of their position within the changing social environment. Specific social environments, in which there are unsupportive relationships between the community and women’s employment can be better understood, leading to an investigation of how women can hold on to sanctioned occupational paths despite the lack of support.

The gender/national context

Speaking of the marginal, ‘unhomely’ space within which women negotiate their own identities, Herzog (2007) indicates simultaneous intersecting and separate operation of national and gender structures. She explains women’s encounter with categorizing markers, while emphasizing their potential to challenge dominant social definitions. Following Herzog’s clarification, we deploy the phrase ‘gender/national’ to refer to the concurrent dynamics of intersecting structures, expectations and resistance. We focus on the Arab indigenous minority in Israel, and its community’s response to the recruitment of Arab women to the Israeli police, as a relevant case study for the investigation of community objection and its various patterns. The Arab indigenous minority, who remained in Israel after experiencing the Nakba² in 1948, have since then been citizens of Israel, until 1967 under military governance (Bäuml, 2011). They constitute 21.1% of Israel’s population (Israel Central Bureau of Statistics (ICBS), 2024), and its members hold a formal citizenship status, distinguishing them from Palestinians residing in the territories occupied since 1967. Arabs in Israel suffer from discrimination, exclusion and oppression resulting in stark inequality, expressed at the everyday practical level, as well as the constitutional level, social rights and resource allocation (Bäuml, 2011; Sa’ar, 2017). Systematic exclusion led Jamal (2007) to characterize their status as ‘hollow citizenship’. Nevertheless, in recent decades, Arab women’s education and employment rates have increased significantly (Council for Higher Education (CHE), 2022; Meler and Benjamin, 2022; Sa’ar and Younis, 2021).

Arab women constitute about 68.9% of Arab students in Israel (CHE, 2022) and 27% of those aged 29−31 hold an academic degree (Ministry of Labor, 2023). Young Arab women tend to study and train in education, health and welfare occupations, leading to occupational saturation and part-time jobs, underemployment or unemployment (Ministry of Labor, 2023). Those holding academic degrees encounter a range of barriers to finding quality jobs (Abu-Rabia-Queder, 2017; Meler and Benjamin, 2022; Sa’ar and Younis, 2021).

While women who hold academic degrees are employed in higher rates than those without academic education, altogether only 41.8% (Ministry of Labor, 2023) of Arab women are employed (compared to 74.2% of employed Jewish women).

Two scripts accompany their employment, say Sa’ar and Younis (2021). The first is the gender script rooted in the gendered patriarchal contract; The second script is based on adjusting to Jewish dominance, and the realization that higher salaries can be achieved through opportunities opened by the majority group. Scripts impact perceived opportunities and the ability to act according to both scripts. Nationality continues to impose clear limitations on the extent and nature of their participation.

Nevertheless, there are several change processes at hand that extend their opportunity structure, in light of which gender roles and identities are multiplied (Meler, 2017; Sa’ar, 2017), like transitional gender ideology among men (Khoury and Benjamin, 2021), which allows some women to benefit from their partner’s support. Furthermore, family patterns based on an equality-oriented lifestyle tend to evolve among Arab couples who move to mixed cities (Meler, 2017). Barakat (2022) recently documented similar transitions among Druze couples in which the women work in non-traditional professions. However, Sabbah-Karkabi (2022) claims that despite recent social and economic changes among Arab women in Israel, gender differences in domestic labor persist due to their socio-economic marginalization, a high proportion of Arab households below the poverty line, high proportion of Arab women employed in part-time jobs or unemployment. These factors slow down the dismantling of patriarchal expectations and as a result, most women will continue to perform household chores alone, maintaining gender gaps in Arab families.

The described gender/national context overwhelms the relationship with government institutions that, like the police, represent the majority power position while concurrently signifying possible quality employment. Indeed, some studies show that a crossing of gender/national boundaries by Arab women occurs upon the emergence of family relations that approve of geographic mobility when seeking quality employment (Meler and Benjamin, 2022; Sa’ar and Younis, 2021). The Arab society in Israel illustrates the influential position that communities, alongside family relationships, have in shaping a woman’s ability to respond to employment opportunities (Meler, 2017; Sa’ar, 2017; Sabbah-Karkabi, 2022).

The influence of the community on women’s decision-making processes when it comes to employment, and its significant ability to shape women’s response to opportunities, is further illustrated by a study conducted in Bangladesh (Jennings et al., 2022). Although the study showed that women’s mobility had increased, the authors reported that women’s lives continued to be governed by a strict set of community rules (purdah: the exclusion of women from public observation). Complying with community expectations offers a certain path for positive identity and moral status. However, the negotiation of community rules is an integral part of women’s day-to-day experience. It is for this reason that an analytical gaze should look beyond women’s ability to respond to employment opportunities, and the way they manage and negotiate their lives in a changing society. Indeed, for educated Arab women, such negotiation enables a discernible increase in the rate of occupational engagement. Although in some respects the social reality has changed, and women’s mobility has increased, their lives continue to be affected by their community and extended families, who view employment opportunities as inappropriate and inconsistent with their conservative views (e.g. Jennings et al., 2022). Community objection to women’s response to employment opportunities in the police forces, however, has an additional and more complicated dimension, namely, the national pattern of objection. Mirroring the split among women between those who won’t integrate and those, often with higher education, who are eager to cross gender/national boundaries and attain better quality jobs (Abu-Rabia-Queder, 2017), is the split among members of the community. Alongside those holding nationalistic views, who see employment at the police as a betrayal of the Palestinian national collective, there are members of the community who support such an opportunity as a career achievement.

Diversity policy, representative bureaucracy: integrating Arab policewomen

The high level of segregation between Arabs and Jews in Israel may have cultivated differential police practices in Jewish versus Arab areas and, such disparities may be perceived as police bias and discrimination (Hasisi and Weitzer, 2007). Moreover, persistent tension and conflict between the police and the Arab minority are periodically exacerbated by significant and contentious public-order events, in which the police are perceived as the face of the state (‘state in the street’) (Hinton, 2006). However, generally speaking, Arab women (similarly to Jewish women) tend to express more favorable views than men in their overall evaluation of the police, and with respect to citizen receptiveness to the police (Hasisi and Weitzer, 2007). When analyzing the interactions between the police and Arab citizens, one of the significant landmarks is the severe incidents of October 2000, in which 12 Arab citizens and a Palestinian who is not an Israeli citizen were killed during mass solidarity demonstrations held by Israeli Arabs after the outbreak of the Second Intifada.³ Throughout the following decade, relations and mutual concerns between Arab and Jewish citizens were exacerbated due to periods of conflict and war (Hasisi and Weitzer, 2007). In recent years, in order to increase governance and strengthen legitimacy and public trust, and to improve its relationship with the Arab minority, the Israeli Police made an effort to advance its service and increase its presence, while also attempting to avoid profiling and police violence (Hasisi and Litmanovitz, 2021). In 2016, a police headquarters was established for the Arab sector, led by the first Muslim major general. Two years later, in 2018, a plan to recruit 800 policemen from Arab society and establish 17 new stations in Arab localities was introduced. The threshold conditions for recruitment to the Israeli police force are 12 years of study and passing certain entrance exams. In addition, in 2021, a division was established to deal with crime and conflicts in Arab society. As part of the division’s goals, a national recruitment target of approximately 10% male and female police officers was set. The recruitment of Arab policewomen is part of this diversity policy.

Diversity is perceived as a means for enhancing both the teamwork within organizations and the capability of organizations working with diverse populations to meet the needs of the different cultural groups they serve (Hajro et al., 2017). Diversity is further justified by the representative bureaucracy approach, which is essentially the creation of cultural and linguistic homogeneity among service givers and receivers (Krislov, 2012). It was found, for example, that the creation of such homogeneity in the police, by recruiting policewomen, has strengthened the ability of the police to respond effectively to domestic violence calls (Rhys and Miller, 2013). However, a common focus of research on diversity (Dobbin and Kalev, 2016; Hopkins, 2012) and the rise in representation of minority groups thanks to representative bureaucracy policies (Bradbury and Kellough, 2011), is the varying degrees to which minority groups want to position themselves within the public sector. Criticizing the policies on this ground, researchers ask, who is represented? It is argued that a representation arrived at without a serious dialogue, would be a poor representation, likely lacking lesser-known categories. According to Farrell and Barro (2023), the internal diversity within minority communities may be difficult to represent, especially given differences in class and specific ethnicity, to which we wish to add levels of gender conservatism and levels of nationalism.

By adding a focus on gender conservatism, we want to underscore the potential inner diversity within communities that may be composed of two polarizing categories: first, those members of the communities who have developed egalitarian gender attitudes (Khoury and Benjamin, 2021), who are interested in employment offered by the majority, who support women who positively respond to diversity policy opportunities; and, second, other members for whom masculinity is a hierarchical power structure to be reproduced as such by various manifestations of control of women’s behavior. One possible controlling practice in the context of such masculine identity is organizing community objection to women’s effort to assimilate in the labor market, particularly objecting to opportunities that challenge hierarchical masculinity by entering occupational fields that are traditionally perceived as ‘masculine’. Men who believe in controlling women would use different ‘justifications’ to execute their control.

Indeed, Objection to women’s recruitment to police forces (Rabe-Hemp, 2009), is associated with identification of police work with masculine traits like strength and aggression, while feminine qualities such as nurturing, caring and empathy have been considered less relevant or even detrimental to policing. However, women in law enforcement bring unique strengths to the traditionally male-dominated field, when contributing their ability to de-escalate potentially violent situations and their expertise in handling cases of violence against women and sexual offenses (Miller and Segal, 2019). Studies further show that women also encounter objections to their recruitment from inside police organization, including exclusionary physical fitness standards, restrictive appearance requirements, sexual harassment, and social exclusion (Green, 2021; Rabe-Hemp, 2009).

In summary, the research into the pathways for recruiting Arab women to the police is an opportunity to contribute to the understanding of differences within communities concerning minority-majority relationship, reflected in various patterns of community objection, as perceived by the women who encounter them. Their experience and insights may help shed light on the resources they use to resist such objections. Keeping in mind the high figures of dropouts, policewomen’s resources to resist community objection can be assumed to reflect theirs and their families’ distinct intersectional position within the community facilitating access to resources enabling policewomen’ resilience in facing their degradation.

With the aim of investigating both the multiplicity of objection patterns and Arab policewomen’s insistence to continue holding on to their police jobs, we raise the following research questions: How do women explain their communities’ objection to their employment? What enables Arab policewomen to continue working despite community objection? Answering these questions will contribute to the understanding of the employment experience of female members of minority groups, while focusing on their communities of belonging’s objection as diversified.

Methodology

This article follows feminist interview methods (Reinharz, 1992), combined with Charmaz’s (2015) guidelines for grounded theory research that are well suited for examining the subjective perspective of women in their own words, eventually generating a systematic procedure for developing and organizing our ideas about the data. We carried out qualitative research, using semi-structured in-depth interviews conducted in 2022. Our analysis of interviewees’ subjective meanings of community objection, shaped by the context of the relationship between the police and their families and communities of origin, is presented below.

Research participants

This article is part of a broader research project on Arab women, addressing the effects of the diversity policy enacted by the Israeli police. Out of a total of 164 Arab policewomen, 16 have been employed by the police for over 15 years, 33 have been there between 5 and 15 years, and 115 have been employed for less than 5 years. Some investigate crimes and domestic violence, while others work in intelligence or in patrol teams. Arab Policewomen come from all four Arab religious/ethnic minority groups, mostly Muslim and Christian, with some Druze and Bedouin. We interviewed 27 women in total. Participants were aged 24−45; three are divorced, 11 are married, and 13 are single. 12 have children of diverse ages. Four hold an MA, 20 hold a BA degree, and three have no-academic education. Most of them grew up in families who have already encountered social control in their communities, on grounds of operating in nationally mixed spaces. This is not a representative sample, but an effort was made to reach a variety of policewomen from different regions, from different ethnic groups, from different policing positions and marital status.

Research tools and data analysis method

We obtained formal approval from the police to conduct the study, and received contact information for all currently employed Arab policewomen. The interviewees were approached by a phone call, introducing the study as dealing with work−family balance. Potential participants were assured that they are not obligated to take part in the study, and that their interviews are firmly protected, and only accessible to the research team, with total anonymity ensured with regards to any data reported to the police. Their response to the topic was often enthusiastic, as they felt it was an important subject and wanted to voice their concerns. However, they often lacked spare time for an interview.

The interviews were conducted at interviewees’ workplaces, in police stations nationwide, at their convenient time, ensuring privacy. The interviews lasted about 90 minutes each, and were held in Hebrew. The interviewees, despite Hebrew not being their mother tongue, exhibit full proficiency, eliminating the need for translation during both interviews and transcriptions. All interviews were recorded, with respondents’ consent and the transcripts were done professionally. The analysis was carried out in keeping with the principles of feminist research methods, which strive for diminishing inherent power relations in the interview (Reinharz, 1992). Respondents were allowed to express themselves and raise relevant conversation topics during the interview. Nonetheless, the interview focused on the respondent’s employment experience, her decision to work in the police, coping with assimilation processes in the police, the family’s and community’s approach toward the woman’s occupational choice, and the general social acceptance of an Arab woman who is performing policing roles. All participants were designated pseudonyms, and any identifying details were removed or changed in a way that protects participants’ identity, without affecting the interpretation of the findings (e.g. years of seniority in the organization, the place where they serve, or their position).

The data were thematically analyzed using the grounded theory guidelines (Charmaz, 2015). Out of the themes that emerged as significant in their world, the analysis presented here centered on the themes of nationality-based objection; gender-based objection; and their relationship with their extended families, their partners, and their communities.

Findings

Arab policewomen who decide to take advantage of the diversity policy and join the police, taking upon themselves a demanding full-time job, must rely on the support of their parents and partners. That support is especially necessary in cases of strong objection of various types, expressed by members of their extended families, communities and, more broadly, their circles of ethno-national belonging. These patterns of objection are used to criticize and, at times, sanction their careers. Social control and sanctioning essentially mark the act of working as a policewoman as contradictory to belonging. Below, we introduce three patterns of community objection: gender-based objection, triggered by demeanor that appears to ignore gender expectations; nationality-based objection, responding to what seems as lack of loyalty to the national collective; and crime-based objection, expressed once policing threatens to disrupt prevailing power relations.

A gendered pattern of objections

The interviews reveal the gendered expectations that are reproduced by the community’s objection to women’s police employment. Obviously, policing is perceived as an inappropriate occupation for women, particularly in their positions as mothers and wives. The convention of controlling women’s sexuality is an integral element of gendered normative expectations:

It is a common belief in our communities that a policewoman is equal to a prostitute. I have no idea where this belief came from . . . how did they come to this conclusion. A woman who is independent, who goes out, or comes home late at night, and works with men is loose, or cheap . . . Me, for years I struggled to become a police-officer, and I’m still fighting for it, and I also really must maintain my honor, the honor of my family, and behave accordingly . . . When they hear you’re a police-officer, everyone harasses you. Sometimes, it’s very annoying. (Hanna, 38, single, Muslim, BA)

A job that requires women to be seen in various situations, sometimes on their own, in the public sphere, breaks away from the understanding that proper femininity should be confined to the private sphere. Moreover, working in a gender-mixed organization, which often includes night shifts too, gives rise to a whole range of stigmatizations by the community. A deviant woman does not deserve to belong to the community. Concern about these forms of sanctioning is precisely what makes policewomen’s mothers warn their daughters about their career path.

As we have shown elsewhere, teaching jobs benefit of a respectable status among conservative families as good and protected way to combine paid and unpaid work while fulfilling one’s academic degree (Meler and Benjamin, 2022). Unlike the respectable status and the social and religious approval of the teaching profession, which is the dominant occupational path among employed Arab women, police work does not allow them to remain in spatial proximity to their homes and combine work with domestic tasks (Abu-Rabia-Queder, 2017). Fathers, however, felt they could handle community disapproval:

My father was the first to encourage me to be a policewoman, but at first, my mother objected . . . She told me, ‘You are a Muslim and our village disapproves of this. . . and no one will . . . marry you’ . . . (Liali, 34, single, Muslim, BA)

Mothers are worried about their daughters’ unusual position, which would endanger their chances of marrying and gaining their communities’ legitimacy. Liali’s excerpt echoes Hochschild’s (2003) claim that since one of the traditional tasks of mothers is to pass on the cultural values of society, they serve as ‘guards of the patriarchy’. The absence of family-friendly policies is a challenge encountered by female-police-officers in both general (Green, 2021) and specific Arab women contexts (Meler and Benjamin, 2022). Previous research (Abu-Rabia-Queder, 2017; Meler and Benjamin, 2022; Sa’ar, 2017) indicates that one of the primary concerns for Arab women is the struggle to find a balance between their integration into the labor market and their dedication to family values, which entails fulfilling traditional feminine and maternal roles.

Disrupted expectations to marry reflect community objections in other interviews:

. . .I was dating a guy. . . who told me: ‘Listen, you either choose me or the police, I can’t be with a policewoman who works night shifts with policemen, or in a police car sitting next to a policeman’. So, I told him, listen, I am not giving up my career for a man, you can leave. And I heard that from others as well: ‘We do not approve of a woman who works in the police . . . ’ I mean, it is a real difficulty for a woman who really wants to meet someone from her religion and start a family. (Nariman, 28, single, Christian, no-academic degree)

Other single policewomen indeed explained that working at night and sharing a car with a male partner deters potential spouses. Being forced to choose between marriage and her job reflects for the Arab policewoman the community’s persistent objection to her career, and the expectation from her to choose the normative path for women, as perceived by the community. Despite the increase in education and employment rates among Arab women, gender norms still influence the timing of marriage and the types of employment available to women (Abu-Rabia-Queder, 2017; Meler and Benjamin, 2022; Sa’ar, 2017). Two of our interviewees married spouses who objected to police careers as overly masculine, and consequently had to postpone their occupational aspiration until after their divorce. Police jobs, thus, trigger gendered community objection, namely, the concern that a woman working for the police is not likely to follow the conventional path of marriage and motherhood, and is instead likely to stray from it into the unknown. Working for the police is viewed as a disruption to the normative social order.

Nationality-based objections

The term ‘traitor’ comes up in the interviews, exposing the nature of a predominant community objection pattern: the national pattern of objection, condemning an Arab citizen for cooperating with the state authority. Policewomen are considered members of their communities who turned against their circles of belonging:

The mere fact that you are an Arab and a policewoman is enough for them to look at you as if . . . to see you as a traitor . . . (Alar, 44, divorced+2, Christian, BA)

Our interviewees expressed their belief that the nationality-based objection is often genuine, embedded in the historical context and the contradiction between their national and civil identities:

The older members of the extended family, for example the grandparents and the older uncles, did not approve of an Arab Muslim woman serving in the Israeli police, because they suffered from the [1948] war and many difficulties since then. (Lubna, 29, single, Muslim, BA)

Lubna, third-generation of the Nakba, shared her narrative, echoing the findings of Allassad-Alhuzail et al. (2023) in their study on Arab social workers. She explicitly uses the Nakba, the 1948 suffering, as an explanation for her family’s nationally based objection to police employment. Such employment is seen as contributing to the normalization of the historically oppressive relationship between the Zionist state and the Arab national minority:

Some people in the community just do not get it. They come, you know, ugh, why are you in uniform? Ugh, how do you serve the State? That’s how it goes . . . it’s not easy. Let me explain, I came from a hostile village . . . one of the problematic villages . . . with strong anti-police and anti-state views, and at the beginning people came and said to me, are you not ashamed? you bring shame to the village, you bring shame to the people. (Nariman, 28, single, Christian, no-academic degree)

Arab policewomen convey the authentic pain expressed through this type of community objection, grounded in many years of hollow citizenship (Jamal, 2007), and myriad forms of violence, exclusion, and discrimination. The national pattern of objection expresses the alienation that is inevitable once policewomen become members of the oppressive establishment. The police, as the ‘state in the street’, generates a sense of antagonism that cannot be mitigated by the allegedly neutral diversity policy.

Crime-based objection

A multi-layered reality is revealed when it comes to the escalated national conflict, and the diverse political positions on the collaboration with a symbol of state authority. As the community is not monolithic in its religious and political orientation, the demand to be loyal to the community could also mean supporting extreme fundamentalism, and even conflicts over material assets:

. . . There was once a homicide in our neighborhood . . . in the village, some kid stabbed his uncle because that uncle leaped at the mother and wanted to chase her out of the house, they wanted her house [which was owned by her husband’s family].

I entered the house. I believe I prevented the lynching of that woman. I locked her in the house, locked myself along with her, and called the police. I reported, they took care of it, we got her out of there. The fact that this woman’s husband’s family did not manage to harm her as they planned made them want to harm me! The police got me and my children out of the village when they understood the rage of the offenders, who protested and shouted: ‘Why do you deny us of bloody revenge, who are you? Who are you?’ (Huda, 45, married+3, Muslim, BA)

A third pattern of community objection emerges in this case – grounded in violence against women. The victim was about to be murdered as part of a family conflict, in which the right of a woman to continue living in a property belonging to her deceased husband is questioned. His family is trying to claim it back by forcefully attempting to evacuate her. Meler (2015) has previously reported on women’s disputed ownership of assets located on land owned by families of their deceased husbands, leading to their murder. Members of her community are furious with Huda for interfering, to the extent that they see her as a traitor who called the police on them. When describing the case, she clearly frames the violence as criminal, despite its prevalence, and its fundamentalist nature. Several possible meanings of the word ‘traitor’ in the context of Arab communities are at play: the national meaning, namely, an Arab citizen collaborating with state authority; the conservative meaning, grounded in legitimizing violence against women; and the criminal meaning, as in a member of the community who turns against the local criminal gang.

I was driving [and somebody] overtook and blocked me. He told me: ‘listen, my name is [. . .], I know you, your name is [. . .], you live here’, he pointed at my house; then he continued to say ‘you are a policewoman and I know you are a policewoman, and if you dare to harm me, I will shoot you and shoot at your house’. I told him: ‘listen, if you are a real man, I will wait for you in my house. Come with your weapon. You said you wanted to shoot me’. Immediately I reported him to the police. The police arrived at my house, and he was arrested. In the interrogation, he admitted that he provoked me because I am a policewoman and an Arab. And then, he continued to explain that the police killed his cousin [who is a criminal], who was killed by a police unit that obviously has nothing to do with me, as he was killed before I even joined the police. (Nariman, 28, single, Christian, no-academic degree)

Over the last decade, criminal armed violence has surged dramatically in Arab communities, forcing the police to direct their attention to the problem after years of neglect. Against this backdrop, Arab policewomen represent forceful intervention that is rarely appreciated. Those involved in criminal activity sometimes deploy the call for national loyalty as a way of demanding policewomen to turn a blind eye on their unlawful activities:

[Our society’s objection to policewomen] is stronger I believe, you know, in the villages [in the district. . .] or the villages [in the area. . .] I mean, but when they are near a city, or a mixed-city, then the objection decreases a little. . .for example, in [a mixed city] you will not see any objection, I mean, maybe a few who oppose the police because the family engages in foul play . . . (Alar, 44, divorced+2, Christian, BA)

The speaker makes the distinction between three categories of members of Arab communities who object to women’s enlistment to the police. The first category is those living in rural segregated closed traditional surroundings; the second category lives in urban settings in spatial proximity to Jewish communities accepting and legitimizing the operation of the police, which echoes previous studies about the more liberal lifestyle and Israelization processes of Arabs in mixed-cities (Meler, 2021); the third category is that of criminal members of Arab communities who live in both types of spaces, but have clear interests against police intervention.

Working with community objections

Previous studies investigating the relationship between the police and Arab communities in Israel reported that officers in charge of regional police stations, realizing the short-term effects of security control, often extend police activities to supporting communities, by recognizing their specific local needs (Hasisi and Litmanovitz, 2021). Such approaches, which replace security operations with social work activities, inform our understanding of how Arab policewomen justify their police jobs, despite the various patterns of objection they face:

Being a policewoman, despite what people are saying, doesn’t go against our mentality, on the contrary. You work for the people. You save people’s lives. It’s doing justice, you are a person of justice and no, the fact that you’re wearing the uniform shouldn’t be used against you. I try to look ahead as much as possible. To know why I am here, what is my purpose, what is my goal, and to believe in what I want. To act according to my belief. I always remind myself why I joined the force, what my goal is, I very much want to help women living with a violent partner. (Rasha, 29, single, Muslim, BA)

In many communities, being an Arab policewoman means being perceived as someone who removes herself from gender conventions and national perceptions (‘mentality’). Rasha is aware of the community gossip used to sanction her. She downplays the community’s objection, highlighting her perception of justice and the sense of mission that guides her in her role as a policewoman, saving women, and challenging the cultural practices that put them in danger in the first place. Even suspects, often strangers to these policewomen, permit themselves to express community disapproval:

. . . But Arab suspects whom I investigate seem to sometimes sit in front of me and wonder, like, ‘What do I have to do with this job?’ And I answer that it’s a great job and a great objective . . . for the Arab society in general, and for women in particular . . . (Ghadir, 31, single, Christian, BA)

Even in a situation in which the power hierarchy clearly gives the policewoman authority, Arab men allow themselves to express the various patterns of objection, disrespecting her status of power in an attempt to degrade her and ‘put her in her place’. Arab policewomen who were recruited through the diversity policy often feel that while their jobs are criticized as ‘security’ jobs, their definition of their jobs is a ‘social service job’ that responds to urgent needs in Arab households, primarily women’s needs. Their policing jobs are seen as an opportunity to benefit their communities, since they allow them to care for disadvantaged members of their communities. Their preference for viewing a police job as a social service rather than security-related and aimed at those viewed as dangerous members of the minority, is substantiated by their treatment of members of the community as family members.

To sum up our findings, we wish to highlight the power of community objection in the form of gossip and other sanctions directed at those who refuse to obey social conventions. As shown by Barakat (2022), some women are shamed by social control and village gossip, while others can continue their work without allowing these objections to limit their opportunities. What we found is that the pride the comes with serving their communities in the face of high levels of criminal activity and violence against women, enabled Arab Policewomen to hold on to their police jobs.

Discussion

In recent years, the Israeli public sector initiated a diversity policy directed at the recruitment of Arab citizens into its organizations. When Arab policewomen attain the jobs offered to them by the diversity policy, they are signified as symbolically representing the majority and as separated from their minority communities. Symbolically separated, they encounter efforts made by members of their residential communities to inflict on them social control, pressuring them to refuse the occupational opportunity. Above, we framed members’ of communities’ efforts to degrade the police jobs as part of an ambivalence that is typical of indigenous communities. It is an ambivalence that grows with some members’ efforts to resist and fight against the majority category control and other members’ attempts to exploit opportunities to enhance their social status. We named the efforts to degrade police jobs ‘community objection’, and our investigation of it elicited three types: gender-based, nationality-based, and crime-based. The three types were detected in each of the four ethno-national-religious minority communities, often concurrently, rather than mutually exclusive, reflecting the significance of inner disagreement on minority-majority relations for conceptualizing ‘community’.

The most prevalent pattern of ‘community objection’ concerns conservative members of one’s community who object to police jobs and reject them as being disruptive to gendered expectations and appropriate sexual demeanor. The gendered pattern of objection criticizes women’s departure from local conservative proper femininity. Such objection is provoked, among other things, by the fact that policing historically perceived as masculine, aggressive, and dangerous (Green, 2021). In other words, members of the community disagree on the impact of police employment on women sexuality, with some believing it is destructive.

In Israel, given its intensified national conflict, diversity policies generate another pattern of objection that is specific to national minority women taking up police jobs. It is an objection anchored in ethno-national inequality, discrimination, and exclusion. It emerges among minorities who suffer from racist treatment by the police. An inner disagreement emerges between those who see police jobs as representing collaboration with the oppressor, and those who see in it an opportunity. The political awareness and sensitivity to the national tensions that Arab policewomen bring with them to police’s encounters with minorities, is a position that is seen as dangerous by those who convey nationally based objection.

Finally, a lesser-known pattern that emerged in the analysis is the criminal pattern of community objection, which seems to arise when a policewoman’s employment represents higher risks for criminals. We identified the criminal pattern in two types of situations. First, in incidents that involve gendered violence against women; and second, in criminal incidents in which the status quo of neglect/surveillance characterizing the relationship between the Arab minority and the police was broken.

We have shown above how police employment of women generates all three patterns of community objection, yet Arab policewomen insist on morally resisting these patterns of objection and keeping their jobs. An investigation of their insistence to maintain their conviction despite the various patterns of community objection, revealed an inner disagreement or ambivalence in their minority communities enabling them to hold on to their jobs. Contrasting the risks attributed by some members of their communities, Arab policewomen perceive their jobs as allowing them to engage in a meaningful social service, addressing community needs. This allowed them to minimize the significance of ‘community objection’, which according to their view, is perceiving police jobs as security work. They did not speak of security as part of their job description, and by circumventing security, they could experience the three patterns of community objection as misguided, based on attitudes which they disagree with rather than on an accurate understanding of their work routines. Our study was limited mostly by its short-term perspective that focused on a specific point in time, and thus could not examine the experience and insights of working alongside community objection over time. Future research should explore the notion of ‘community objection’ against the criticism of diversity policy raised by scholars (Farrell and Barao, 2023) who question the critical/political awareness of minority policewomen.

Community objection to women’s employment repeatedly emerges in studies investigating barriers to women’s occupational development (Jennings et al., 2022). The ‘community’ is assumed to be characterized by a unified contour, frequently objecting on the grounds that women’s employment is likely to undermine the social order (Wasserman and Frenkel, 2015). Such unifying arguments overlook the importance of highlighting diversifying dimensions within residential minority communities. Elaborating on Voydanoff’s (2001) account of community, so that it can become more consistent with the experiences of minority communities, we correspond with Dingyloudi and Strijbos (2020), whose account of Voydanoff’s perspective highlighted the extent to which experiences of restriction, exclusion and lack of freedom are left out unless diversifying dimensions are taken into account. What we propose is a notion of minority community that challenges Voydanoff’s decision to see one’s satisfaction with their community as an individual-level variable. Instead, we propose an analytical approach which views one’s satisfaction with their community as a community-level variable, raising the question of what are the diversifying dimensions of minority communities. We believe that the two dimensions we proposed above as generating ambivalence would be applicable for quite a few minority communities around the world. The first is the diversifying dimension of the type of relationship with the majority: some may believe that cooperation with the majority is better for their minority communities, while others may believe that resistance and struggle are better for the community’s future. National-based community objection arises when those who believe in struggle against the majority try to use the community power to restrict women from taking advantage of occupational opportunities. The second diversifying dimension concerns beliefs about the odds of minority women maintaining the code of appropriate sexual behavior when employed in gender-mixed and nationally mixed organizations. Gender-based community objection emerges when conservative forces try to use community power to restrict women from entering gender-mixed work environments. In addition to our contribution to the notion of minority community, examining community objection revealed a misuse of the national-based community objection. Since a comprehensive differentiating analysis of objection patterns has never been conducted, the concept of criminal community objection has not been recognized, and thus, neither was its contribution to the delegitimization of diversity policies. The realization that crime-based community objection is disguised behind nationality-based community objection sheds light on the need to develop the notion of minority community as diversified, along critical, political and intersectional lines.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Tal Meler

Notes

Author biographies

Tal Meler (PhD) is a senior lecturer in sociology and gender studies on research track at Zefat Academic College, Israel. Her areas of research are: Arab-Palestinian women citizens of Israel; The Arab-Palestinian family in Israel; Economic abuse; Urbanization within Arab-Palestinian society in Israel–from a gender perspective.

Orly Benjamin is a full Professor at the Sociology and Anthropology department, Bar-Ilan University. She currently serves as the president of the Israeli sociological society. Her areas of research are family relations, Public procurement and in-employment poverty from a gender perspective.

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