Identity formation among mixed families in a conflictual society: The case of Jewish–Muslim families in Israel

Abstract

Mixed families offer a unique opportunity to explore the interrelated aspects of identity such as religion, ethnicity, and nationalism. In Israel, intermarriages of Muslims and Jews are particularly interesting because the complex tensions between these identities are intertwined with the national conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. However, such mixed families have rarely been studied. The purpose of this study is to identify the ways in which mixed families construct their identities in the context of a conflictual society. It is based on ethnographic work conducted among 16 Jewish–Muslim families. Findings indicate two patterns of identity formation: single identity, in which one spouse transitions to the other spouse’s culture, and hybrid identity, in which each spouse takes part in the other’s religious and cultural practices. This article demonstrates how socioeconomic status affects the choices that mixed families make in the process of identity formation in the context of a conflictual society.

Introduction

Research on mixed identity and mixed families (MFs), as well as of conflictual societies (CSs) and national conflicts, has flourished in recent years. Nevertheless, studies dealing with MFs in CSs remain extremely rare. This is so even though MFs in CSs provide an opportunity to explore the complex relationships between groups in CSs and to learn about the processes of identity formation precisely in the context where which they might contribute the most to understanding the tensions between groups (Fogiel-Bijaoui, 2017; Sabbah-Karkabi, 2022).

In Israel, MFs of Jews and Muslims offer a unique example of interaction between conflicted ethno-national groups, where the two populations intersect within the most intimate of social systems. These families of Jews and Muslims in Israel, which also reflect macro socio-political conflicts between Muslim and Jews, constitute a significant arena for exploring the identity processes of religious, ethnic, gender, and national identities within a CS.

The objective of this study is to identify the ways in which MFs construct their identities in the context of a CS. The research questions for the study are how MFs construct their identities and what factors affect their deliberations as they choose how to construct their identities. To date, identity construction processes among MFs in Israel have not been examined. This pioneering study can contribute to the understanding of identity construction processes among MFs in the unique context of a CS. I employ an ethnographic method based on participant observations of the daily lives of the MFs and in-depth interviews with the spouses and children of these families, as well as relatives from the extended families.

In this study, I identify two patterns in mixed Jewish–Muslim families: families that adopt the ethnic-national identity of the man, and families that adopt a hybrid identity. I argue that the socioeconomic status of the families, in terms of the family’s economic resources and income, affects their deliberations in identity formation processes, considerations that can lead them to choose one of the two patterns. In this article, I present case studies of two families, each representing one of these patterns.

Identity formation among mixed families

MFs are families that cross symbolic boundaries in a given society and therefore transgress the collective norms of that society. MFs ‘question the social order and collective identities based on gender, race, nation, class, ethnicity, religion, or some combination of these’ (Fogiel-Bijaoui, 2017: 103). The topic of identity formation within MFs has been extensively studied in the past among families consisting of immigrants and natives (e.g. Cerchiaro, 2019; Luke and Luke, 1999; Therrien, 2012) and among families consisting of different groups within the same society (e.g. Nelson, 2015; Sagiv, 2017). The terms referring to MFs include, among others, interracial, interfaith, interethnic, and transnational families. Although the axes on which the complex identity of the family is examined (cultural, ethnic, national, etc.) are important, in most cases, the type of intersection usually relates to the viewpoint of the specific study less than the ontological differences between the families themselves. Therefore, in this study, I prefer the term ‘MFs’, which can refer to families with differences along national, ethnic, religious, cultural, and linguistic axes, or combinations of them.

Modern colonialist thought tends to perceive identity as dichotomous, and it distinguishes between the identity of the colonizer and the colonized in an absolute sense. With the development of post-colonialist theory, more complex perceptions of identity have evolved (Luke and Luke, 1999; Sagiv, 2017), viewing it as complex, dynamic, and fluid (Sagiv, 2017). Identity is complex in that it has many dimensions, such as nationality, ethnicity, religion, culture, and others (Fogiel-Bijaoui, 2017; Luke and Luke, 1999). It is dynamic in that it undergoes continual changing and reformatting throughout the course of life (Arweck and Nesbitt, 2010), and in response to changes and life events (Le Gall and Meintel, 2015; Nelson, 2015). It is fluid in the sense that it might change in different social contexts, even within the same time period, especially when a hybrid identity is adopted (Murphy-Shigematsu, 2012; Sagiv, 2017).

In the terminology of Bhabha (1994), these characteristics of identity allow the formation of a third space, where encounter and friction exist between different groups in the society. MFs may be the most significant example of those in this space, because they create a space within which the identities of both groups are constructed and formed together in the most intimate way (Luke and Luke, 1999; Sagiv, 2017). The question then becomes, how do MFs construct their identities?

Collet (2015) describes three main patterns that MFs tend to adopt regarding their identity construction. In the first, the partner from the minority group adopts the culture of the dominant or majority group while still minimally preserving their original culture. The second presents a complete contrast, where the partner from the majority group adopts the culture of the minority group, and the family as a whole joins the minority group. In these two patterns, the woman is the one who tends to adjust by adapting to the man’s culture and joining his cultural universe, whether it is the majority or the minority’s. Therefore, the second pattern is more common when the woman belongs to the majority group. The third pattern is a balanced one in which the identity of the family is equally and mutually organized, so that a new identity that is not necessarily built on the previous identities, is constructed (Collet, 2015; Fogiel-Bijaoui, 2017).

This new identity, which is based on some form of a combination of the identities of the different groups from which the spouses come – is also called a ‘hybrid identity’ (Erentaitė et al., 2018; Sagiv, 2017). However, the nature of this hybrid identity is a subject of disagreement. On one hand, a hybrid identity is described as a mosaic of identities, a product of the struggle of the family to construct its identities, and reflects the tensions between the differences in identities within the family and the society (Sagiv, 2017), and the result of mixing and combining elements of different national, cultural, and ethnic identities (Ducu and Telegdi-Csetri, 2018; Erentaitė et al., 2018; Sagiv, 2017). On the other hand, a hybrid identity is described as the creation of a new identity (Murphy-Shigematsu, 2012; Sagiv, 2017) that is an articulation and a transformation of the identities from which it is composed and not merely a combination of them (Bhabha, 1994; Miled and de Oliveira Andreotti, 2015). Furthermore, hybridity itself is described as a new identity of mixedness (Le Gall and Meintel, 2015; Therrien, 2020a).

The term ‘mixedness’ refers to belonging to a family, which transgresses a symbolic boundary, as a spouse (Therrien, 2020b) or as one of the children (Meyer, 2017). These boundaries can represent differences in ethnicity, race, culture, nationality, religion, and so on. They are socially constructed and are not essential. Therefore, the mixedness of the family can be perceived differently depending on the perspective of the observer (Appel and Singla, 2016; Therrien, 2020b), but it still can be a core of their belonging and identity (Le Gall and Meintel, 2015; Therrien, 2020a).

The identity of mixedness can be adopted by the spouses, but it more commonly researched among the children of MFs (Meyer, 2017). One of the prominent findings in studies that focused on identity construction among children in MFs is that these processes are very unique, diverse and also depend on the combination of the family’s background and the context (Meyer, 2017), the interaction between ethnicity, religion (faith and practices), the culture (Arweck and Nesbitt, 2010), and the personality of the child (Fresnoza-Flot, 2019). Considering this wide diversity in identity construction strategies among children of MFs and considering the fact that most of these studies did not take place in deeply divided societies (Fogiel-Bijaoui, 2017), it is hard to predict the ways in which children of MFs in deeply divided societies will construct their identities.

Mixed families in conflictual societies

A CS is one in which at least two significant groups exist that have significant gaps between them regarding resource distribution, ideological perceptions, identity, culture, policy preferences, definition of state, and other issues (Lerner, 2010; Smooha, 2019). The more that a society is regarded as conflictual, the more central the role of such conflict in the relationships between groups, and the more severe the conflict (Kachuyevski and Olesker, 2014; Smooha, 2019).

Certain conditions characterize CSs and might have an impact on identity formation in MFs. First, MFs in CSs have fewer options available when it comes to choices, and identity formation strategies are more limited. The national, ethnic, religious, and status boundaries between groups are more salient than in non-CSs, and the identities have more severe meaning in relation to the ethno-national conflict. Therefore, the members of MFs in CSs must ‘walk on eggshells’ in their identity formation processes, in order to avoid friction within the nuclear family, between the nuclear and the extended family, and between the family and society at large (Conrad, 2014; Donnan, 1990; Fogiel-Bijaoui, 2017; Hilker, 2012; McDoom, 2016).

Second, in CSs, MFs may be exposed to the threat of physical violence (Donnan, 1990; Fogiel-Bijaoui, 2017; Hartley, 2010). While mixedness itself can be considered and treated as otherness in every society (Therrien, 2020a), in CSs, this otherness may have a more severe meaning (Fogiel-Bijaoui, 2017). Members of MFs run the risk of stigmatization from each opposing group in a CS (Gaines, 2017). Each group in a CS tends to perceive the other group to be an enemy, and therefore marriage to a member of that group might be perceived to be treason or collaboration with the enemy. Furthermore, MFs are perceived as a threat to ethnic purity, and therefore, they may be exposed to threats from radical movements that strive to maintain ethnic purity (Donnan, 1990; Fogiel-Bijaoui, 2017).

Third, in CSs, the choices made regarding identity formation on the future of the family have a crucial impact. For example, within a CS, many decisions, such as whether to adopt the identity of the majority group or that of the minority group, are not merely decisions that concern cultural style, lifestyle, religious practice, or language, but may also have long-term repercussions on the quality of life of the family and its offspring (Fogiel-Bijaoui, 2017).

One of the most studied CSs in terms of identity in MFs is that of Northern Ireland. For example, Hayes and McAllister (2009) found that attitudes regarding social institutions in Northern Ireland dictated the behavior of mixed couples in everyday life. Todd’s (2018) research in Northern Ireland shows that changes in people’s social identities that occur in the context of mixed marriages are not sustained in divided and CSs. She finds that some individuals begin with a strong sense of group solidarity and, when they marry someone from the other group, their solidarity is challenged for a short period. In a divided society, social structures and symbolic syntax make changes to a person’s social identity more difficult. One main reason for this is that the prevalent language of nationalism can create a taboo that hinders a couple’s communication, making it difficult to form a common moral language because every expression is charged with nationalist interpretations (Todd, 2018).

The Israeli context: Israeli society as a conflictual society

The main conflict within Israeli society is the ethno-national one between Jews and Muslim Arabs (Smooha, 2002). The State of Israel has a population of nearly 9 million inhabitants, where 74.5% are Jews, 21.1% are Arabs, and 4.4% others (Israel Central Bureau of Statistics, 2021). Within the Arab population in Israel, this study focuses on Muslim Arabs (86% of the Arab population, Israel Central Bureau of Statistics, 2021), since tensions between Muslim Arabs and Jews in Israel represent the deepest divide in Israeli society.

Ethnic conflicts tend to be severe, continual, and uncontrolled. Disputes over territory and economic resources are an important part of ethnic conflicts, but most of such conflicts relate to control of non-economic resources, such as prestige or political authority (Williams, 1994). Where such conflicts are continual, hostility, and hatred between the groups accumulate (Kreisberg, 1993). The new generation is raised into a reality of conflict, and, as a result of a history of unsuccessful attempts at resolution, the conflicts are perceived to be unresolvable. Where uncontrolled conflicts demand significant material and psychological investment, due to cognitive dissonance, they are accompanied by the generation of an ideology that justifies the conflict (Bar-Tal et al., 2014; Kreisberg, 1993). These characteristics of ethnic conflicts well describe the ethnoreligious conflict between Jews and Muslim Arabs in Israel, and they have important implications for the understanding of identity processes within both groups (Smooha, 2019).

One aspect of ethnic conflict in Israel is ethnic stratification. In Israel, the Arab minority, especially Muslim Arabs within the Arab minority, does not have equal status to the hegemonic Jewish majority (Smooha, 2019). Even though this status gap has been shrinking in the last decades (Karkabi-Sabbah, 2017), the Arab minority faces a dilemma in its identity formation in relation to the Jewish majority, namely, whether it should accept or deny the Jewish majority group as the positive reference group. This dilemma affects the complex identity processes among Arabs (especially among Muslim Arabs) in Israel (Smooha, 2019).

The ethnic conflict in the Israeli society falls between the dominant majority, most of whom arrived in Israel in waves of immigration (one of these waves is from Russia during the 1990s), and the native minority. The state is considered to belong to the Jewish majority and is not identified with the Arab minority, although they are native to the place. The resulting conflict over state and land ownership is preserved by cultural and ethnic differences, which make it difficult to develop a collective Israeli identity that can be shared by both Jews and Arabs (Smooha, 2019). The common perception in part of Jewish society that Muslim Arabs are enemies makes it even more difficult to construct such an identity. This perception is attributed only to Muslim Arabs and not to all the Arab populations in Israel (Smooha, 2002), and this is the reason that tensions between Muslim Arabs and Jews in Israel represent the deepest divide in the Israeli society, as mentioned earlier. This background is necessary for understanding the complexity of identity formation processes among MFs in Israel.

Mixed families in Israel

In this study, a MF refers to one in which one of the spouses is Jewish and the other is Muslim. Although this division specifically refers to religion, in the Israeli context, the Jewish-Muslim divide also reflects the Jewish-Arab ethno-national divide, such that Jewish-Muslim families are not only interfaith, but also demonstrate a unification that transcends the main divide in Israel. In Israel, there is no civil marriage, only religious marriage. The authority to perform weddings rests with the authorities of the religion to which each of the individuals belongs. This means that individuals of different faiths cannot marry within Israel, but they can do so outside of Israel and then return to the country to register the marriage in Israel (DellaPergola, 2017; Sabbah-Karkabi, 2022). Due to these restrictions, mixed couples must choose one of three practices for their shared lives.

The first option is to live together without marrying. The second is to travel abroad to have a civil marriage and return to have it approved by the Israeli Ministry of the Interior. In the third, one spouse converts to the other’s religion in order to marry. In this option, it is usually the Jewish spouse who converts to Islam. This is because in Israel, conversion to Judaism requires a long and complex process that can take many years, while conversion to Islam is easier to facilitate for both a man and a woman.

Since there are no procedure of interfaith marriages within the legal system in Israel, the state has no statistical data on the number of mixed couples or MFs living in Israel. There is partial data relating to the number of converts since this parameter is under government supervision. However, these data do not reflect the number of mixed marriage couples since conversion is not always done for the purpose of marriage. Moreover, as mentioned earlier, some spouses do not convert but rather choose to cohabit without marrying and some choose to marry abroad and therefore do not appear in the database. This is the reason why there is no data on the prevalence of MFs in Israel.

One of the first significant studies of mixed Jewish and Arab families in Israel was conducted in 1969 by the anthropologist Eric Cohen. He describes 12 mixed couples in which the men are Arabs, and the women are Jewish. The women were of Sephardic origin (an underprivileged subgroup within the Jewish population in Israel) and had left their parents’ homes at an early age and, in some cases, had worked as prostitutes before they married Arab men. The Arab men were also marginalized in their Arab society. Cohen’s conclusion is that mixed marriages do not bring Jewish and Arab populations closer together. On the contrary, he indicates that they create greater hostility between Jews and Arabs and sharpen in-group solidarity, especially in the Jewish community (Cohen, 1969). Cohen’s (1969) study does not focus on identity formation processes among these families.

Since then, a few studies have been conducted mainly in the social work field (e.g. Cohen-Golani, 2011; Hakak, 2016; Kessari, 2001; Nasser, 1993). These studies largely focus on MFs from low socioeconomic backgrounds. They usually adopt a therapeutic approach and do not focus on identity formation processes (Hakak, 2016). Sabbah-Karkabi (2022) was the first to identify that MFs of Arabs and Jews in Israel come from groups with diverse socioeconomic statuses, not only from marginalized groups in Israel, but she focused solely on the women’s perspective and not on the perspectives of all the family members. Sabbah-Karkabi (2022) found that Jewish women married to Arab man tend to negotiate their ethnoreligious identity in two ways: one is by assimilation, in which the woman integrates her ethnoreligious identity into her spouse’s one. The other way is by blurring the woman’s ethnoreligious identity, in which the woman keeps her original Jewish identity but tries to avoid its manifestation in everyday life. However, her sample also includes Christian Arabs, not only Muslim Arabs, so these couples do not cross the deepest divide in Israeli society.

Sabbah-Karkabi (2022) also notes that MFs in which the man is Arab and the woman is Jewish are much more common in Israel than MFs in which the man is Jewish and the woman is Arab. This is driven by the fact that women are subject to a much more severe threat from society for crossing ethnoreligious borders and also because according to Islam, men are allowed to marry a woman from other religions but women are not (Karkabi-Sabbah, 2017; Sabbah-Karkabi, 2022).

Sagiv (2017) conducted a study that focuses on identity formation processes among MFs in Israel, but only within families that are a mix of two ethnic groups in the Jewish population in Israel, so the main divide in Israeli society does not pass through these families.

Methodology and participants

This study is based on ethnographic work I conducted, including in-depth interviews and participant observation with 16 mixed Jewish-Muslim families. I collected information by taking part in various events in the lives of the MFs, such as birthdays, Muslim holidays like Eid al-Fitr, Jewish holidays like Chanukah, and daily activities inside and outside the home. The participants were located through mutual acquaintances, active searching on social networks, and in the media, as well as by snowball sampling. The observations and the interviews took place between 2016 and 2020.

The criteria for choosing the interviewees were MFs, in which one partner is Jewish and the other Arab-Muslim, with at least one child, living together in Israel, and sharing a household. In total, in addition to participant observation, I interviewed 19 members of 16 different families (11 women, 8 men), each one separately. In each family, at least one member of the nuclear family (one of the spouses or a child) was interviewed (13 spouses, 5 children), and other relatives were interviewed as well (one parent of one of the spouses and two of the spouses who were also interviewed as siblings of other spouses). All the children were above the age of 18 when interviewed.

Five of the families had medium-high socioeconomic status, and 11 had low socioeconomic status. Families with medium-high socioeconomic status also belonged to the middle class as manifested by the location and size of their residence, ownership of their house, their occupation, occupational continuity, and the educational level of the spouses and their parents, while families with lower socioeconomic status also belonged to the lower class under the same terms. Since the observations and most of the interviews took place in the homes of the families, they were conducted in diverse types of settlements (e.g. urban, semi-urban, rural).

Since these families often experience negative treatment by Israeli society, many expressed wariness of exposure. I assured them that no personal details would be included in the published study, and therefore, they would remain anonymous. Therefore, all the names mentioned in this study are pseudonyms. As an ethnographic study, this study is based on the participants’ subjective perception of their identities and on their narratives.

Two patterns of identity formation

The analysis of the findings indicates two patterns of identity construction. The first is a one-way transition of one spouse to the other spouse’s culture, creating a single identity and a monolingual home. These families typically belong to the lower class and have a lower socioeconomic status. They typically practice a traditional Muslim lifestyle, manifested in the type of residence (e.g. close proximity to the extended family), Halal food, Muslim prayers, the traditional attire of the women, and strict traditional gender roles within the family. Out of the 16 families participating in the study, 11 followed this pattern. Of these, most (eight) chose to adopt an Arab identity, and only three families chose to adopt a Jewish identity. All of the families that followed this pattern adopted the cultural identity of the man. In this article, this pattern is illustrated by the case of the Albi family.

The second pattern is the hybrid-identity family. This type of family has medium socioeconomic status and practices a more secular, modern lifestyle. They formed a hybrid identity and had a multicultural, multilingual home in which both partners took part in each other’s religious practices. Five families in this study followed this pattern. In this article, this pattern is illustrated by the case of the Hatib family.

Choosing a single identity: the Albi family

Khaled and Maya met at a hotel in a resort town in Israel, where they both were working in menial jobs: Maya worked in housekeeping and Khaled in maintenance. They were both in their mid-20s. Maya was Jewish and Khaled was Arab-Muslim. After being in a relationship for a year, they moved in together, and 1 year later, their first child was born. They wanted to get married after their first child was born but faced difficulties. The following quote from Maya illustrates this clearly:

After Taher was born, we wanted to get married. We had a whole mess after the birth; we wanted to register Khaled as his father, but we were told at the Ministry of the Interior we were not married and therefore a paternity test is required. We heard of friends who travelled to Cyprus to get married, but since Khaled owes money to National Insurance, he cannot travel out of the country, so this was not an option for us […] I did not want to convert to Islam at first, but it was the only way we could get married, so I recited a few sentences I was told and then we were considered married.

Maya here describes the way in which her choice to convert to Islam resulted from the special legal situation in Israel. Conversion to Judaism by Khaled was not a reasonable option, since the process of conversion to Judaism is a long and a nearly impossible process for Muslims living in Israel. Therefore, the couple decided that Maya would convert to Islam, as this is accomplished by reciting a simple declaration wherein the person accepts the Muslim faith upon them. The option to marry in a foreign country, as mentioned by Maya, is unattainable for citizens of low socioeconomic status, as financial limitations often prevent them from doing so.

Three years after they met, the couple was married in a Muslim wedding according to Islamic law, and they continued to live in the same city for 1 year more until their second child was born. Then, it became difficult for them to sustain themselves financially with two children, and so they moved to Khaled’s family home in an Arab village. Khaled described this in the quote below:

We were living in a one-bedroom apartment when Sami was born, and no one was helping us. My wife’s sister came to watch Taher when Maya was in labor and during her hospital stay, but later she left, and we were on our own with two children. One salary was not enough to pay for rent and energy and water bills… My siblings sent me money […] After some time, we understood it is impossible to continue this way and we moved to my family’s home. There my mother helped us with the children, and we did not need to pay rent, we began to get by.

This was the stage at which the process of choosing one identity over another and the transition of the two partners from a two-identity family to a one-identity family, namely, the Arab one, began. During the period that I observed the family, they were living on the ground floor of the extended family home of the father, Khaled. His two brothers lived with their families on the floors above, each in their own apartment. The couple had four children at the time of observation: three boys (1, 9, and 11 years old) and a girl (7 years old). At home, the couple spoke to their children in Arabic. The children attended Arab kindergartens and schools where Arabic was the language used. The family was living in proximity to the father’s family, meaning that they were always in an Arab environment. Khaled and Maya both had a secular orientation when they met and maintained a secular lifestyle during the first years of their relationship. Over the previous few years, they had been growing closer to Islam. Khaled was attending mosque regularly, while Maya had started to wear a head scarf. This is how Khaled described their process of becoming closer to religion:

At first, we came here like tourists, with about two suitcases. We thought we would live here for a short while, save some money and would eventually go back. But life here is convenient, close to the family, Maya is happy being with my mother and family, close like this […] She even started learning from the women here about Islam and she always convinces me to fast with her on Ramadan.

Maya and Khaled explained that they celebrated the Muslim holidays with Khaled’s extended family and relied on his family members for help in their daily lives, and on their joint resources to sustain themselves. Maya and Khaled’s links to the Jewish community were weak; they do not speak Hebrew with their children, and, on Jewish holidays, Maya settled for a telephone call to her parents and siblings to wish them happy holidays.

Another dimension of the Arab identity is the language. This is how Maya describes the manner in which she began to familiarize herself with the Arabic language:

We moved North and at first, I knew very little Arabic, maybe just a few words, after some time I began to understand more. Khaled was at work and I often stayed with his mother and his brothers’ wives who also had young children. Their Hebrew is not good, so we spoke in Arabic; that was more convenient. Taher (the oldest son) understands a little Hebrew because he remembers we lived in the South, but the rest of the children hardly understand any. Sometimes I speak Hebrew with Khaled so the children would not understand.

Maya specified that she spoke Arabic because it was more convenient. Here, it seems that the choice to speak one language over another was incidental, not planned in advance, but simply part of the development of their lives. The family has a low socioeconomic status and belongs to Israel’s lower class in terms of occupations and lifestyle; the mother completed 10 years of school and was a housewife, while the father completed 8 years of school and was employed doing menial labor.

Several common patterns can be found in families classified in this pattern. The first of these is the adoption of a single identity and culture, which requires one spouse to transition to the culture of the other. These spouses choose to abandon their native culture and religion to enter a new world. Like immigrants, they learn the language and customs of the culture that absorbs them. Most of these couples live in localities dominated by that same culture, usually in Arab villages.

Traditionally oriented couples or families of low socioeconomic status often choose the identity of only one spouse. In Israel, generally, one spouse chooses to convert to the other’s religion. Due to these couples’ precarious economic circumstances, they usually join the Arab spouse’s family, since these families are more traditional, and more supportive, as they usually welcome the couple into their home.

The story of the Albi family demonstrates the casual relationship between socioeconomic status and choice to adopt one identity and, out of the two possible ones, the Arab one. The spouses were living in the city at first and led a secular lifestyle. Financial difficulties caused the spouses to wish to be closer to one of their families. To do so, and to become better integrated into its life and obtain its support, they had to choose and adopt a single identity. The choice of the Arab identity was made because in Arab society, family support with regard to helping with the children and so on is stronger than in Jewish society. We also saw that because of financial difficulties, the only option for the spouses to marry is if the wife converts to Islam.

For families who adopt an Arab identity, the children study in the Arab educational system and sometimes speak only Arabic. These children construct an Arab identity. This is a total transformation, in which the spouse from outside the community, who is often but not always the woman, assumes an Arab identity.

Forming a hybrid identity: the Hatib family

Abbas and Natasha met at a college in Israel. Abbas was a young lecturer, and Natasha was a student who was taking one of his courses. Their relationship at the time was very superficial. They only began to get closer when they met again a year later at the home of a mutual acquaintance. After being a couple for 1 year, they were married in a civil wedding in Cyprus and began to share a joint household. Soon afterwards, they had their first son, Omer (today 22 years old) and two daughters (today 16 and 19 years old). Both parents had an academic education and earned good salaries, and they belonged to Israel’s middle class.

The family chose to live in a Jewish town that was geographically close to Abbas’ family’s village. Because the family lived in a Jewish town, the children attended Jewish kindergartens and schools where the Hebrew language was used. On one hand, the family was living in a Jewish environment, and many social links were formed with this population. On the other hand, their proximity to Abbas’ family home and the close relationship with them meant that the family spent much of its free time with the extended Arab family. The nuclear family led a secular lifestyle, but nonetheless celebrated both Jewish and Muslim holidays. They celebrated the Muslim holidays with their extended Arab family and the Jewish holidays within the nuclear family and, sometimes, Natasha’s brother would join them. After 18 years of marriage, Abbas passed away, after which Natasha and their children moved to a town with mixed Jewish and Arab population, where they still lived in a Jewish environment. Omer, the eldest son, described their relations with their extended family in this way:

My mother has one brother; on holiday he used to visit us, and we visited him once or twice. He lives in the center of Israel and it is far. My father has many siblings, large Muslim family; sometimes it seems like half of the village is my family, everyone is connected… It is practically adjacent to the town where I grew up and we spent every holiday there with the cousins and grandmother. It was important for him [Abbas] that we know his side, the family […]. After he passed away, my sisters disconnected almost all ties with his family; they felt they were constantly criticizing how they dress and act, it is a conservative society. When my father was alive, the family did not intervene, he was an academic and secular and they never told him what to do and how to act […]. I also disconnected ties with them for about a year, but now I have good relations with them. Because I’m a man, so they do not mind how I dress and act, and it is fun to have such a large family.

Omer described the different attitudes that he and his sister experienced from their extended Muslim family. In Israel, the Muslim population is patriarchal and traditional. This MF was secular and therefore less patriarchal and traditional; however, the extended Muslim family still treated men and women differently. Omer, being a man, did not need to adhere to codes of modesty, unlike his sisters, who were expected to act differently by the extended family. He describes the topic of identity and language as follows:

We always spoke three languages at home. My mother immigrated from Russia, so she spoke with us in Russian, my father insisted we speak Arabic, and my parents would speak Hebrew between them. We also learned Hebrew at school and around the neighborhood. I can clearly remember how I would be made fun of as a child when I would be using words from three different languages to construct sentences […]. I do not feel I am Russian because of my skin color; no one would think I am Russian, but I do feel I am half and half. I can be Jewish, and I can be Arab Muslim; I am both.

Between themselves, the parents spoke Hebrew because Abbas did not speak fluent Russian and Natasha did not speak fluent Arabic. For this reason, the common language at home was Hebrew. However, in addition to Hebrew, the father insisted on speaking to the children in Arabic, while the mother spoke to them in Russian.

As shown, this family lived between the two worlds, the Jewish and the Arab-Muslim worlds. This second pattern in this study is generally associated with middle-class couples and families who are more secular and modern. Within such couples and families, each spouse maintains their own culture and even performs everyday practices related to their culture and religion.

This pattern of identity formation influences the children in such groups, who take on components of both spouses’ identities, forming hybrid identities. These children do not see this as a contradiction. In Arab environments, they speak Arabic and eat the food served by their Arab grandmother while in Jewish communities, they speak Hebrew and eat the food served by their Jewish grandmother. From the perspective of their middle-class parents, this is an ideal situation.

The case of the Hatib family also demonstrates the casual relationship between socioeconomic status and the family’s choice of a hybrid identity. First, the family did not need the help of the extended family, could continue living in the city, and could conduct a secular lifestyle that maintained a connection to tradition. This lifestyle enables such families to get together often with their extended family but does not bring them to adopt the identity of just one of the families. Second, the academic status of the spouses (especially the Arab man) is honored by the extended family and helps them accept the members of the MF in spite of the cultural differences. Third, the improved economic status enables them to get married abroad so that the wife does not have to convert to Islam and can maintain her Jewish identity.

The family, and especially the children, learn to live with and develop a hybrid identity. Such a hybrid identity is perceived as subversive because it challenges the established and assumed integrity of the social world. It breaks down the primordial unity of the whole and defines it across two systems at the same time (comp. Therrien, 2020a). This process exposes possibilities by the very act of hybridization.

In Israel, these families threaten the binary categories of Jew and Arab, and many of the children in these families present an identity that does not meet one of these categories, but, rather, creates a flexible, hybrid identity. This hybrid identity is manifest in the fact that in everyday life, they choose which of their identities will be present in any given situation. Therefore, they can cross borders, both physical and symbolic, to alternate between being Jewish or Arab.

Discussion and conclusions

The objective of this study is to identify the ways in which MFs construct their identities in the context of a CS. The study’s findings indicate two patterns in which members of MFs choose to construct their identities in the context of the CS of Israel. The article also shows how the socioeconomic status of the family can affect the ways in which the members of the family choose to construct their national and family identities.

The findings demonstrate how some of the characteristics of a CS affect the ways in which MFs choose to negotiate their identities. One characteristic of Israeli society as conflictual is, as noted, the lack of any Israeli collective identity and the perception of individuals as having only a Jewish or an Arab identity (Smooha, 2019). As a result, MFs cannot adopt or generate an Israeli identity (Sagiv, 2017; comp. Collet, 2015) and must adopt a Jewish identity, an Arab identity, or both (a hybrid identity). This situation strongly affects identity processes within MFs in the CS.

In this context, it is interesting to note that most of the families in this study who chose to adopt one of the identities chose, surprisingly, the Arab one. This choice is not obvious, because, in the context of Israeli society, the Arab identity is that of a discriminated-against minority (Smooha, 2019). It might be expected that where the family has the option to choose one of the two identities, they would choose the privileged, majority one. The choice made by families to adopt the Arab identity demonstrates the importance of family support within these families and the effect of the marriage laws in Israel, which, in practice, allow mixed marriages only if the woman converts to Islam.

In general, the findings support the model of Collet (2015), showing that in a CS as well, the MF tends to choose one of two patterns: adoption of one identity (the minority identity or the majority one), or adoption of a hybrid identity. The findings elaborate her model, in that they suggest that in a CS, families may prefer to adopt a minority identity for the reasons detailed earlier, and in that they show that socioeconomic status might explain the choice made by the families of the different patterns.

Also, in accordance with Collet (2015), the findings show that most of the families who chose to adopt one identity chose to adopt the man’s identity, but suggest a different explanation for this phenomenon. It is tempting to say that male dominance is the reason why the couple chose the man’s identity, and that the woman gave up her original ethno-national identity (comp. Collet, 2015; Karkabi-Sabbah, 2017; Sabbah-Karkabi, 2022). However, this is not the only possible explanation. As mentioned above, in most mixed Jewish-Muslim families, the man is Arab, and the woman is Jewish; therefore, the fact that most families choose the man’s identity could arise from the fact that the families made the explicit choice to adopt the Arab identity, for reasons explained above (i.e. family support, conversion rules). An analysis of the families’ perceptions of choosing the Arab identity strengthens the second explanation, although it does not rule out the first.

The findings that in some cases, the Jewish woman assimilates and adopts her spouse’s Arab identity are also in accordance with the findings of Sabbah-Karkabi (2022), but the interpretation of these findings might be a bit different. This study also demonstrates how important it is to investigate the perspectives of all the family members in order to gain a holistic understanding of the identity processes within the family, and what may look like blurring of her identity from the perspective of the woman alone (Sabbah-Karkabi, 2022) can be seen as part of a flexible and sophisticated way of dealing with identities when analyzing the family perspectives as a whole.

The findings show that identity change among individuals in MFs in a CS can be stable and long-lasting, especially (but not only) among women of low socioeconomic status who adopt an Arab identity. These findings differ from those of Todd (2018), who claimed that a person’s social identity change in a mixed marriage is not sustained in CSs. The difference may be because the tensions between Jews and Arabs in Israel are greater than those that exist between Catholic and Protestant societies in Northern Ireland, since one of the spouses must give up their original identity entirely and adopt a completely new one. For this reason, the family unit does not experience an identity conflict that could disturb the stability of the identity change (comp. Collet, 2015). The consistency of these findings with other studies conducted in Israel (e.g. Karkabi-Sabbah, 2017; Sabbah-Karkabi, 2022) supports this suggested explanation.

Previous studies dealing with hybrid identity among MFs have not reached an agreement on the nature of the hybridity. Some researchers refer to hybrid identity as an integration of elements from existing identities (Ducu and Telegdi-Csetri, 2018; Erentaitė et al., 2018; Sagiv, 2017). Other studies have highlighted hybrid identity as a new identity and even an independent one, based on mixedness (Le Gall and Meintel, 2015; Miled and de Oliveira Andreotti, 2015; Murphy-Shigematsu, 2012). This study supports the former and suggests that hybridity is not a new identity in itself, but one that could be passed or switched, or that could use the different identities, depending on the situation. That is, its articulation would not be expressed through the creation of a new identity, but through flexibility of the use of the existing identities.

Studies of MFs that were conducted in Israel (e.g. Cohen, 1969; Cohen-Golani, 2011; Kessari, 2001; Nasser, 1993) tended to study families from the lower class only and therefore present a very partial understanding of MFs in Israel. This study completes this understanding by examining MFs from the middle class as well, therefore showing an alternative way for MFs to navigate their lives within a CS. A study of families from the lower class only does not enable the identification of the whole range of patterns of management of ethnic and national gaps within a family. Therefore, it is important to study MFs from all layers of the population. This study demonstrates how class interacts with the legal situation in a CS and affects the ways in which members of MFs choose to construct their identities. The legal situation, which affects the considerations of some families to adopt an Arab identity, does not affect the considerations of families in middle and high classes, who can choose to adopt a hybrid identity. Identifying hybrid identity patterns invites more studies about the processes of construction of a hybrid identity in a CS. Future research could study the ways in which various identities are negotiated within a hybrid family unit.