The Working Group for Equality in Personal Status Issues, a coalition of women's and human rights groups that works to promote the status of Palestinian women citizens of Israel, has just concluded the first round of its campaign against polygamy ─ a project supported by the Heinrich Boell Stiftung Israel office since 2008. Launched through media across the Palestinian minority throughout December 2010, the campaign was geared to publically, and for the first time, broach a critical discussion across the Palestinian minority around the legitimacy of polygamy. Beyond being endemic throughout the Palestinian minority (particularly within the Bedouin population, where polygamous households constitute an estimated 33% of all households), polygamy still enjoys widespread social legitimacy and justification among an even wider section of the Palestinian population.
The Working Group's campaign was a long time in the making, and was itself based on a preliminary research project: an in-depth study of women and men involved in polygamous marriages, which the Working Group conducted with the support of the Heinrich Boell Stiftung Israel office over the course of 2009. Designed to better understand the motivations among first wives to remain married after their husbands take additional wives; among second wives to marry into existing households; and among husbands who tolerate the emotional and financial strife associated with these arrangements, the study gleaned many important insights into the personal dimensions of these marriages, all of which provided valuable material for the campaign itself. Click to download the summary of the study, in English.
The Working Group's campaign, which began in December 2010, capitalized on the comments made by women participants over the course of the study as to the difficulties associated with their marriages─ this through a graphic media campaign in which black-and-white stills representing a wide variety of Palestinian women were coupled with text outlining the feelings of entrapment and vulnerability respondents had expressed, under the slogan "No Excuse for Polygamy." The campaign was undertaken in the Arabic print media, both local and national, in full page spreads, through outdoor exposure (on posters) and across a variety of Arabic print and internet media. The coverage garnered by the campaign was impressive: over the course of two weeks it was covered in no less than 34 national print and online-media with wide reader/browser-ships, as well as through 7 televised and radio interviews on national news stations.
No less encouraging was the hostile opposition which the campaign seemed to fuel. In the few weeks following the launch, local and national newspapers around the country began to feature attacks (submitted by various readers) on the campaign, decrying its message as Western feminist propaganda, and as a clear attempt to undermine tradition and Palestinian identity. In the largely Bedouin south of the country, these traditionalist responses were explosive. The national Islamic Party declared out-and-out war on the Working Group and its goals. Soon after the campaign was launched, a series of counter-adverts began to appear across the Arabic press in the Negev/Naqab region, extolling the virtues of polygamy, alongside messages that can only be described as heavily misogynistic ("It is not easy to deal with women" ran one). Undertaken in the exact style of the Working Group's original campaign, this counterattack has continued to attempt to subvert the campaign's message within the public eye.
The Working Group feels that the opposition to its campaign is just as encouraging as the support it has garnered: extreme reactions indicate that the message is being heard in all corners of society (and not just by its supporting segments), and, moreover, that it is being taken seriously. The Working Group will be following up this part of its campaign with a second stage, to be implemented during 2011 ─ one geared to deepen commitments on the ground through outreach to villages on an individual level, coupled with advocacy work with local and national NGOs dealing with these issues.
ByYotam Keduri, the Development Director of The Working Group for Equality in Personal Status Issues