Muslim headscarves in France and army uniforms in Israel: A comparative study of citizenship as mask

Patterns of Prejudice

Volumn 43, Issue 3-4, 2009, Pages 287-311

  Bilsky, Leora ^a  

^a TEL AVIV UNIVERSITY   (Israel)

Author keywords

Citizenship; Equality; France; Hannah Arendt; Hijab; Hypocrisy; Israel; Mask; Nizar Hassan; Plurality

Indexed keywords

EID: 70350560534     PISSN: 0031322X     EISSN: 14617331     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/00313220903109193     Document Type: Article

References (57)

1. The notion of 'abstract individualism' assumes that essential human characteristics are properties of every individual regardless of particular circumstances. For more on 'abstract individualism' in the context of the French controversy over the hijab, see Joan Wallach Scott, The Politics of the Veil (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 2007), 124-50.
2. See Leora Bilsky, 'Uniforms and veils: what difference does the difference make?', Cardozo Law Review, vol. 30, no. 6, 2009, 101-29 (forthcoming), for a full comparison of the two controversies. Here, I focus on the theme of hypocrisy, and develop a theory, based on Hannah Arendt's writings, that can explain its role in the two debates.
3. For an elaboration on the view that there is no necessary contradiction in Israel's being simultaneously 'Jewish' and 'democratic', see Ruth Gavison, 'The Jews' right to statehood: a defense', Azure, vol. 15, 2003, 70-108.
4. See Ruti Teitel, 'Militating democracy: comparative constitutional perspectives', Michigan Journal of International Law, vol. 29, no. 1, 2007, 49-70 (58-62). Teitel suggests focusing on the different conceptions of public space in the United States (libertarian) and in Europe (militant) in order to understand the differing approaches to church-state relations.
5. Rogers Brubaker, 'Immigration, citizenship, and the nation state in France and Germany', in Gershon Shafir (ed.), The Citizenship Debates: A Reader (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1998), 131-67.
6. Charles Taylor, 'The politics of recognition', in Charles Taylor, Multiculturalism: Examining The Politics of Recognition, ed. Amy Gutmann (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 1994), 25-75.
7. Scott, The Politics of the Veil, 3. As Scott points out, only 14 per cent of French Muslim women wore the hijab before the law was passed.
8. See also the case of Dogru v. France [2008] ECHR 1579, in which the European Court of Human Rights upheld the decision to expel a French Muslim student from her public school on the grounds that she insisted on wearing her hijab. In the decision, it is noted that, in the year 2004-5, when the law was passed, a total of 639 religious signs were recorded in French public schools, and that this total was less than 50 per cent of the signs that were recorded during the year before. This means that about 1,300 cases were noted in the year before the law had been passed.
9. Scott, The Politics of the Veil, 42-89.
10. Ibid., 85-9.
11. Likewise, Ruti Teitel argues that, behind the arguments in defence of equality, one can find religious discrimination: 'the language of the proposed garb law suggests it is designed not to equalize, but rather to cover up present discrimination against millions of France's Muslim citizens': Ruti Teitel, 'Through the veil, darkly: why France's ban on the wearing of religious symbols is even more pernicious than it appears', FindLaw's Writ (online), 16 February 2004, at http://writ.news.findlaw.com/commentary/20040216_teitel.html (viewed 21 May 2009).
12. This difference can be connected to the public perception of the different agents involved. In France the teenage girls were depicted as lacking free agency or real choice; hence, the concept of 'hypocrisy', which depends on a distinction between outside/inside, between internal motives and external explanations, cannot apply to them. Nevertheless, we can find a variation on the accusation of hypocrisy when wearing the hijab is taken to represent a commitment to radical Islam. However, as Scott notes, this type of accusation contradicts the depiction of the girls as lacking meaningful agency: Scott, The Politics of the Veil, 124-50.
13. 'Duah ha-vaada li-vdika ve-shimua le-berur ha-tluna neged ha-martse Nizar Hassan', 31 January 2008, available on the Sapir College website at http://college.sapir.ac.il/sapir/News/shimua.pdf (viewed 22 May 2009). All excerpts from the Hebrew report are translated by the author.
14. Tamara Traubman and Yuval Azulai, 'Hayal, shaper hofaatha!', Haaretz Magazine, 23 April 2008.
15. Israel is defined as a 'Jewish and democratic state' in its basic laws. See 'Basic Law: Human Dignity and Liberty', clause 1, passed by the Knesset on 17 March 1992;
16. 'Basic Law: Freedom of Occupation', clause 2, passed by the Knesset on 9 March 1994.
17. The term 'ethnocracy' was first used in the Israeli context by Oren Yiftachel, who argued that Israel should be defined as an 'ethnocracy', a regime that is neither authoritarian nor democratic since, although it exhibits several democratic features, it facilitates a non-democratic seizure of the country by one ethnic group (the Jews). In this regime, there cannot truly be equal citizenship for those who are not part of the dominant ethnic group, i.e. non-Jews: Oren Yiftachel, '"Ethnocracy": the politics of Judaizing Israel/Palestine', Constellations, vol. 6, no. 3, 1999, 364-91 (364).
18. Similarly, but with some difference, Sammy Smooha characterizes Israel as an 'ethnic democracy', a democratic regime that gives individual civil and political, as well as some collective, rights to minorities, while attempting to create a homogeneous nation-state, a state of and for a particular ethnic community. In this type of regime minorities are treated as second-class citizens, but are allowed to engage in democratic struggles to improve their status: Sammy Smooha, 'Ethnic democracy: Israel as an archetype', Israel Studies, vol. 2, no. 2, 1998, 198-241 (199-200).
19. For more about the conflict between 'Jewish' and 'democratic' as it was played out in the trial of Yigal Amir, the assassin of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, see Leora Bilsky, Transformative Justice: Israeli Identity on Trial (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press 2004), 201-36.
20. There is no English equivalent of mamlachtiyut. Hebrew-English dictionaries translate the term as 'statehood' or 'sovereignty'. However, as legal historian Nir Kedar points out, this could be misleading as it misses the important normative aspect of the term. Kedar suggests that mamlachtiyut 'is a contemporary political ideology that copes simultaneously with the form and substance of two basic characteristics of the modern state: sovereignty and norm... the term not only implies sovereignty (i.e. power) and formal state machinery but is a normative expression that stresses "state consciousness", i.e. society's ability to construct a sovereign polity based on the respect of democracy, law and civic values': Nir Kedar, 'Ben-Gurion's mamlkhtiyut: etymological and theoretical roots', Israel Studies, vol. 7, no. 3, 2002, 117.
21. For more on the role of the army in Israeli democracy, mainly in the country's early years, see Uri Ben-Eliezer, The Making of Israeli Militarism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press 1998), 193-206.
22. For the implication of the construction of citizen-assoldier for the citizenship of women, see Niza Berkovitz, '"Eshet hail mi imtsa": nashim ve-ezrahut be-Israel', Sociologia Israelit (Israeli Sociology), vol. 2, no. 1, 1999, 277-317.
23. It is interesting to compare this notion to the argument over whether the draft of women into combat units promotes democratic values and equality. For more on this argument, see Daphne Barak-Erez, 'Al tayasot ve-sarbaniot matspun', in Daphne Barak-Erez (chief ed.), Iyunim Be-Mishpat, Migdar VeFeminism (Srigim-lion: Nevo 2007), 65-98.
24. For a critical view of the military draft's ability to promote democratization and gender equality, see Hassan Jabareen, 'Likrat gishot bikortiot shel ha-miut ha-Palestini: ezrahut, leumiut ve-feminism ba-mishpat ha-Israeli', in Daphne Barak-Erez (ed.), Tsava, Hevra ve-Mishpat (Tel Aviv: Ramot Press 2002), 53-93.
25. For a discussion of the different meanings of 'militarism', see Baruch Kimmerling, 'Militarism ba-hevra ha-Israelit', Teoria ve-Bikoret (Theory and Criticism), vol. 4, 1993, 123-40. Kimmerling rejects the argument, posed by several political scientists, that militarism has not developed in Israel despite the army's central role. Kimmerling distinguishes between different types of militarism and argues that Israel is characterized by 'civil militarism', which is manifested by a penetration of the army into civil spheres such as education and politics.
26. For more on the army as an instrument of stratification between various social groups in Israel, see Gershon Shafir and Yoav Peled, Being Israeli: The Dynamics of Multiple Citizenship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2002), 101-3, 126, 143-5;
27. Yagil Levi, Tsava Aher Le-Israel: Militarism Homrani Be-Israel (Tel Aviv: Yedioth Ahronoth Books 2003);
28. and Orna Sasson-Levy, 'Constructing identities at the margins: masculinities and citizenship in the Israeli army', Sociological Quarterly, vol. 43, no. 3, 2002, 357-83.
29. According to research conducted by Sikkuy (The Association for the Advancement of Civic Equality in Israel), in 2007 Arabs constituted only 1.4 per cent of the senior academic staff of universities in Israel, and 13.8 per cent of the senior staff of colleges: Yaser Awad, 'Yetsug ha-ezrahim ha-Aravim be-maarehet ha-haskala ha-gvoha 2008', December 2008, available on the Sikkuy website at http://www.sikkuy.org.il/docs/haskala2008.doc (viewed 21 May 2009).
30. Henriette Dahan-Kalev and Udi Lebel, 'Generalim be-batei ha-sefer: al ha-kesher hamitatsem bein tsava ve-politica', Politika: Ktav-Et Le-Mada Ha-Medina ve-Yahasim Bein-Leumiim (Politika: Journal of Political Science and International Relations), vol. 11/12, 2004, 27-40.
31. Kenji Yoshino, Covering: The Hidden Assault on Our Civil Rights (New York: Random House 2006), ix.
32. Judith Resnik, 'Living their legal commitments: paideic communities, courts, and Robert Cover', Yale Journal of Law and Humanities, vol. 17, no. 1, 2005, 17-55.
33. Paul Horwitz, 'Uncovering identity', Michigan Law Review, vol. 105, no. 6, 2007, 1283-300.
34. Accordingly, Yoshino acknowledges that not every demand for covering should be rejected but should, instead, trigger a conversation in which good reasons are given for supporting the demand, balancing them against the loss of liberty on the part of the individual.
35. Taylor, Multiculturalism.
36. Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Viking Press 1963), 96.
37. See also George Kateb, Hannah Arendt: Politics, Conscience, Evil (Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Allanheld 1983), 10: 'Arendt presents the political actor as one who hides much in order to reveal more. He wears a mask. But the mask in the ancient theater hid the face yet allowed the actor's true voice to come through... To wear a mask is to sustain a persona, a role, a position, an identifiable character. It is not a distortion of Arendt's meaning to say that she believes that it is the highest responsibility of the citizen to protect his mask so that in the artificial composure of his appearance the truth of his words may sound.'
38. Arendt, On Revolution, 106-7.
39. This is different from modern writings on citizenship that focus on the equalizing effect of national closure that makes citizenship conditional on a process of political assimilation; see, for example, Rogers Brubaker, Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1992). For Arendt, the ideal of political equality granted to citizens is accompanied by the ideal of plurality (and not assimilation). It is for this reason that she is critical of assimilation as the cornerstone of national citizenship.
40. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Meridian Books 1958), 301.
41. Arendt, On Revolution, 103 (emphasis in the original): '... the unmasking of the hypocrite would leave nothing behind the mask, because the hypocrite is the actor himself in so far as he wears no mask. He pretends to be the assumed role, and when he enters the game of society it is without any play-acting whatsoever.'
42. Ibid., 99 (emphasis added).
43. Ibid., 104.
44. Scott, The Politics of the Veil, 124-5.
45. Seyla Benhabib, The Rights of Others: Aliens, Residents, and Citizens (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press 2004), 187, 193.
46. Benhabib explains that 'democratic reiterations' are linguistic, legal, cultural and political repetitions-intransformation, invocations that are also revocations. They not only change established understandings but also transform what passes as the valid or established view of an authoritative precedent. See also Seyla Benhabib, 'What is that on your head? Turkey's new legislation concerning the "headscarf"', 5 March 2008, available on the Reset Dialogues on Civilization website at www.resetdoc.org/EN/Benhabib-Headscarf.php (viewed 26 May 2009).
47. He was interviewed by newspapers and his views were reported but, as I shall show, he was not given a proper 'hearing' in parliament when his act was discussed and condemned.
48. See Bonnie Honig, 'Toward an agonistic feminism: Hannah Arendt and the politics of identity', in Bonnie Honig (ed.), Feminist Interpretations of Hannah Arendt (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press 1995), 135-67. Honig criticizes Arendt for stopping at the 'private' and challenges the idea that the 'body' defies representation.
49. See Scott, The Politics of the Veil, 151-75.
50. In fact, two of the defining struggles of Israeli feminists (against the army and religious authorities) were based on the claim that, while men have a central role in the Israeli public sphere, women tend to be excluded from it. The feminist struggle can therefore be characterized as an attempt to include the female body in the public sphere by making the latter a gender neutral space. For an interpretive essay on the struggle of Jewish religious women to pray at the Western Wall with a Torah scroll and prayer shawls, see Lea Shakdiel, 'Women of the wall: radical feminism as an opportunity for a new discourse in Israel', in Hanna Naveh (ed.), Israeli Family and Community: Women's Time (London and Portland, OR: Vallentine Mitchell 2003);
51. and Phyllis Chesler and Rivka Haut (eds), Women of the Wall: Claiming Sacred Ground at Judaism's Holy Site (Woodstock, VT: Jewish Lights 2003).
52. Miller v. Minister of Defense HCJ 4541/94.
53. See Daphne Barak-Erez, 'The feminist battle for citizenship: between combat duties and conscientious objection', Cardozo Journal of Law and Gender, vol. 13, 2007, 531-60.
54. Yofi Tirosh, 'Alice be-erets ha-(ham)raa: hirhurim al hishtakfuiot ha-guf ha-nashi ba-siah al shiluv nashim be-tafkidei lehima', in Barak-Erez (chief ed.), Iyunim Be-Mishpat, Migdar VeFeminism, 885-940.
55. Indeed, some explanation as to why the two debates were not connected can be found in an earlier article by Hassan Jabareen, who criticized the feminist struggle to join combat units as lacking a larger perspective about its impact on strengthening the centrality of the army with regard to Israeli citizenship, and its concomitant adverse effect on Palestinian citizenship; see Jabareen, 'Likrat gishot bikortiot shel ha-miut ha-Palestini'.
56. 'Muslim girl shaves head over ban', 1 October 2004, available on the BBC News website at http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/3708444.stm (viewed 26 May 2009).
57. 'Campaign "Israeli amiti lo mishtamet"', 15 December 2007, available on the Promomagazine website at http://www.promomagazine.co.il/pages/show/1995 (viewed 26 May 2009).