Unrecognized

In 1998, when Mona Al-Habanin was twenty-eight years old and pregnant with her sixth child, she stood before a council of al-Naqab Bedouin shaykhs and faced the most difficult decision of her life: give up her children or be responsible for more killings in her tribe.This book tells the extraordinary story of Mona Al-Habanin (b. 1970), the first Bedouin woman to run for elected office in Israel's Negev Desert. Through Mona's life, it illuminates Indigenous Bedouin women's traumas and resilience while documenting a genealogy of contemporary Palestinian Bedouin feminism. It traces her journey from desert tent dwelling through forced dislocation, her community's struggles with violence against women, and her battle for her children—against state-sanctioned tribal justice rooted in British colonial paradigms and Zionist settler-native relations—and to her turn to fierce and irreverent activism, taboo-breaking, and political trailblazing. This book tells the story of an unrecognized community under siege and of a new form of Indigenous feminism that bravely defies the violence of silencing.

Lihi Ben Shitrit is the Henry and Marilyn Taub Associate Professor of Israel Studies and Director of the Taub Center for Israel Studies at New York University. She is the author of Righteous Transgressions: Women's Activism on the Israeli and Palestinian Religious Right, Women and the Holy City: The Struggle over Jerusalem's Sacred Space, and editor of The Gates of Gaza: Critical Voices from Israel on October 7 and the War with Hamas.Mona Al-Habanin is a Palestinian Bedouin women's rights activist, politician, and writer based in the township of Rahat in Israel's Negev/al-Naqab Desert. She is the founding director of Amerat Al-Sahra, a women's rights organization in Rahat, and is the recipient of the prestigious Rappaport Prize for Pathbreaking Women (2013).