Who Would've Thought? ‘Palestinian’ Women Resist Israeli ‘Occupation’ in Fake Academia - by Sheri Oz

But what the heck! It looks good to have a source for claims in academic papers and of course nobody expects the reviewers to actually open up the source citations.

Sheri Oz..
Israel Diaries..
09 March '20..

This is Part I of a three-part series critiquing a single article that uses ‘analysis’ of women’s ‘resistance’ as a vehicle by means of which to vilify Israel.

The article is called Middle Eastern Women between Oppression and Resistance: Case Studies of Iraqi, Palestinian and Kurdish Women of Turkey; it was written by Khodary, Salah and Mohsen of Egypt. and was published in the Journal of International Women’s Studies in February 2020. The one good thing I can say about this is that the journal is ranked in only the third quartile and comes 68th out of 131 journals specializing in gender studies. Still, you can be sure that it will be cited in future studies and therein lies its danger.

The article begins by stating the obvious, that war and hostilities affect women negatively. They claim that in some countries life expectancy has gone down since the Arab Spring. This is not surprising, in fact, because violent uprisings lead to the deaths of many people. They cannot make a similar claim for the Arabs in the Palestinian Authority (PA), however, because life expectancy has been increasing steadily over they years, so they have this to say:

The intersectionality and interplay between gender and other identities also intensified the impact wars and conflict had on particular women groups, such as the female Arab population in Israel and the Kurdish women of Turkey, compared to the rest of the population (Na’amnih et al. 2010). (page 204)

Aside from the fact that Khodary et al‘s article is supposed to be about women in the PA and not in Israel, this may sound profound to some. However, when you turn to the paper cited here as support for this statement, you find that it is about the gap in life expectancy between Arabs and Jews in Israel and nothing else (and certainly no mention of Kurdish women or Turkey). Na’amnih et al do not talk at all about intersectionality, nor about war and conflict. All they say is that the gap between Jewish and Arab life expectancy for both men and women decreased between 1975 and 1998 because of improved infant survival rates but that it increased somewhat between 1998-2004; the difference in 2004 was 3.2 years for men and 4 years for women. This time it was mostly related to health problems in those over 65 years of age and issues of smoking, obesity, medical compliance, genetic predisposition and accessibility to health care; none of these were related to the issues addressed by Khodary and her colleagues. But what the heck! It looks good to have a source for claims in academic papers and of course nobody expects the reviewers to actually open up the source citations.

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