Synopsis — The idea of women's liberation was imported in the 1970s from the West by liberal feminist activists who immigrated to Israel. The first Israeli feminists adopted all the liberal feminist slogans and ideology together with their advantages and the disadvantages. The implantation of these ideas in the Israel—a country torn ethnically—has produced a conflict from which Mizrahi feminism has evolved. By the 1990s, Mizrahi women who participated in feminist activity, and who found themselves excluded and marginalized by the Ashkenazi women who dominated the Israeli feminist movement began to give expression to their feelings of oppression. This reached a peak in 1995 in Natanya with the First Mizrahi Feminist Annual Conference. This article outlines the historical, social, political and ideological processes in which Mizrahi feminism developed. It shows how slogans such as sisterhood and solidarity, have been used to endorse activities which do not benefit women of all the different ethnic groups in Is-rael. The article includes a discussion of dilemmas that arise from " tokenism " and the purportedly uni-versalist feminist agenda. The Mizrahi feminist agenda and its ideological framework, as well as its strategic aspects, are also critically reviewed.

Prof. Smadar Lavie discusses the possibilities and contradictions of the 2023 Ashkenazi-dominated protests against the Israeli regime, and traces the efforts of a small cohort of Mizrahi activists to make their voices heard. She reviews the emergence of Israel's alt-Right on the Mizrahi majority vote and its turn toward fascism based on charismatic leaders. Emphasized as well are Israel's feminist struggles and achievements that the present regime now plans to nullify.

This study examines the growth of a progressive religious Muslim activism among Palestinian women in Israel and the challenges it poses to the religious patriarchy and colonial power structures. Based on semistructured interviews with a religious feminist organization’s activists, the study revealed that feminist Islamic activism addresses an alliance between state officials and patriarchal–religious establishment gatekeepers that interlock to block Muslim feminist reform. Unlike other Muslim activists in former settler colonial states where state and religion are separate and unlike progressive Muslim women in Muslim states who struggle to escape the religious–patriarchal trap, in Israel, these activists face a religious–colonial–patriarchal trap.

Religion-based personal status laws and religious courts are an intrinsic component of the Jewish character of the State of Israel. The association between one's religious affiliation and the law governing one's personal status issues is longstanding. However, the significance and dynamics of this association cannot be analyzed in isolation from the context of the identity of the state, or the identity of the local subjects in terms of their nationality, religious affiliation, and gender. In the case of Palestinian citizens of Israel, the personal state laws that govern them bear the imprint of the state's hierarchical and discriminatory citizenship regime. This article examines the struggles of Palestinian feminist activists, citizens of Israel, in their attempts to improve their personal status issues, which began in the 1990s and were led by secular as well as religious Palestinian feminists. In doing so, it reveals the complexity of feminist politics at the juncture of religion, gender and colonialism. It identifies similarities and differences in feminist discourses and activities, while delineating the boundaries of these politics. It argues that, in many instances, activists had to choose between 'collaboration' with a colonial regime and 'complicity' with a patriarchal establishment. The paper is based on a variety of sources, including media articles, archival documents, protocols of parliamentary committees, and personal interviews conducted with leading feminist activists.

The continuation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has undoubtedly had an impact on Israeli and Palestinian feminist formulations that developed in parallel, as mirror images of each other, often in opposition and sometimes in dialogue. A crossover study of those movements makes it possible to re-examine the development of anti-colonial and anti-hegemonic feminists, revealing not only the interlocking but also the overturn of dominant/dominated positions between feminist movements rooted in national liberation struggles. This comparative approach aims at analyzing how coextensivity between power relations are captured by feminist collective action, including limiting the forms of solidarity across borders.