Jihad versus Milhemet Mitzvah.

As-salaam alaykum
O'Siyo
Salamitsus biyo

These excerpts are from an article I found in JSTOR. For a host of reasons I am conflicted about the issue of the European "Jews" and their arguments with Afrikan Scholars and Muslim Arab and Turkic Scholars. However, I cannot ignore Israel's U.S.-backed actual war against Islam and war against the Palestinians of all faiths. Not to mention Israels' US-backed bombing of Lebanon. Nor can I ignore attacks on Afrikan Jewish scholars such as Dr. Ben Jochannan.

Ma salaam
Maryam

Religious Women Fighters In Israel's War Of Independence: A New Gender Perception Or A Passing Episode?
Lilach Rosenberg-Friedman

Gender and Nationality

In recent years, the study of women and gender has begun focusing on the relationship and interaction between gender and nationality. Studies by Mosse, Yuval-Davis, and others point to the importance of gender relationsin constructing the phenomena of nation and nationality. The discourse of nationhood emphasizes the crucial role of woman in the national enterprise, assigning her a symbolic role in ensuring the nation's survival and safeguarding its honor.4

Accordingly, that discourse, perceiving motherhood as women's principal vocation, largely restricts women to the private sphere. Avdela and Psarra, studying the formation of a new nation, showed that women, identified with motherhood and charged with passing on the new social-national role to their children, were seen as playing a major role in the nation's biological, cultural, and political development.5 National ideologies in different places and times have tended to frame their most prominent symbols along the lines of a gender distinction according to which the men are patriots, and the women are mothers; the former bear the national duty of defense, the latter that of procreation.6 The increased importance of motherhood at a time of national rebirth led to a greater appreciation of women in the new national society, even if their traditional role did not change.7

Studies by Biale and Gluzman draw a connection between Zionism's aspiration to mold a "new Jew," as an antithesis to the "effeminate" Jew of the Diaspora, and the nationalist ideal, which was thought capable of bringing about "correct" gender relations.8 Masculinity was at the center of the national discourse, The male body "became the symbol of the new society as well as the means to establish it."9

The roles allocated to the new Hebrew woman in the national enterprise were the traditional roles of women, which, particularly in times of crisis, took on national importance.10 At the same time, the new national society was supposed to be modern, and so to integrate the concept of equality for women.11 The ambiguous attitude of the society toward the status of women in an age of national revival is reflected, among other things, in the issue of the participation of women in the defense forces.

The Participation of Women in the Yishuv's Defense Forces

As from the period of the Second Aliyah (1904–1914), when they served as members of the Hashomer defense organization, women participated in military activities in the Yishuv, the pre-state Jewish community in Israel. As the Yishuv grew, the need for organized defense grew with it. The Jewish-Arab

conflict, the restrictions of the White Paper, World War II, and the threat it posed to the Jewish community in Palestine all accelerated the formation of a military force. The central military organization in the Yishuv was the Haganah, which was established in 1920 and served as a "people's militia" for the protection of the community. It took instructions from the political leadership and from the 1930s on was supported by most of the Yishuv's political movements. Jewish military activity also took place within the frameworks of the Palmach, the British Army, and the underground resistance movements. Thousands of women were active members of the Haganah and of the other, smaller defense frameworks. The integration of women into the Haganah involved a constant, step-by-step struggle on their part to reach positions of authority and attain new roles.17
Religious Zionists—mainly members of the Hapo'el Hamizrahi movement and members and graduates of the religious Zionist youth movements—began participating in the defense forces about ten years after the establishment of the Haganah. Their activity was particularly prominent in the 1940s, when thousands of young men and women, educated by these movements to serve the Zionist cause, volunteered for military service as a matter of course.22

The religious Zionist women who joined the Haganah did not come from any single type of background. They included middle-class members of the Mizrahi movement, pioneering women who had participated in agricultural training programs in Europe before coming to Israel to join in the projects of the Hapo'el Hamizrahi movement; and young women born in the Yishuv, students and graduates of national-religious schools, and members religious Zionist youth movements, especially Benei Akiva. From the point of view of Jewish law, the aspiration of religious women to be part of the defense effort raises some questions, on both the strictly legal and the ideological levels. Following the biblical injunction that "A woman must not don men's apparel" (Deut. 22:5), the legal debate turns mainly on the issue of women wearing men's clothing and bearing arms.

Does the designation of certain items of clothing as "men's apparel" change in different periods and societies? Should weapons be viewed as always pertaining to "men's apparel" and so forbidden to women in perpetuity, or is their gender-specificity subject to change? Should women be permitted to use arms only in self-defense, or also in the defense of others? What rules apply in a war defined as a milhemet mitzvah—an obligatory war in which all must take part?24

Talmudic sources take a dichotomous approach to the place of women in warfare. On the one hand, the women of Israel were required to do their part in a milhemet mitzvah: "In an obligatory war, all must go out to fight, even a bridegroom from his chamber and a bride from under her canopy" (BT Sotah 44b). On the other hand, the Talmud also unequivocally states, "It is the way of the man to make war, and it is not the way of the woman to make war" (BT Kiddushin 2b). Commentators attempting to contend with this paradox decided that although women are required to contribute to the success of the Jewish army in an obligatory war, it is not their way "to conquer" or "make war." They are must do their part by providing vital services to the fighting soldiers, but "it is not required, nor is it fitting for them to fight on the battlefield."25

Joining non-religious, mixed-gender units posed great difficulties for young religious women, coming as they did from a "protected" world of strict observance. Penina Rosenblatt, who covertly joined the Haganah in the early 1940s, remarked that the few people who were in on her secret saw her as a rebel whose activities betrayed her religious values.34 Within the younger generation of religious Zionists in the 1940s, parental authority no longer overruled other considerations. Religious young women who joined the Haganah tended to keep their underground activities from their parents,partly so as not to worry them, but also because they feared that their parents would try to stop them.35 According to veteran Sarah Adir,

The religious girls integrated into the ranks of the Haganah and were deeply devoted, all the while withstanding pressure from their parents, who objected to their activities because they feared they would go astray.36

According to Tova Ilan, guard duty together with nonreligious young men was problematic for the religious girls, who were exposed to behavioral norms that were foreign to them (and sometimes to the nonreligious girls as well)."38 They were a religious minority within a female minority. Yet despite this twofold "inferiority," they were not deterred from volunteering:

As a religious girl I encountered certain problems, but I did not make a big deal about them. We put the problems out of our minds because we felt that the urgency of the hour called for it. We had the feeling that we had to give, to act within the framework of the Haganah, and therefore the religious problems were shunted aside, and we somehow managed without asking rabbis what was permitted and what was forbidden. Everyone decided for herself.39

In retrospect, the women stated that despite being in secular company,they behaved in accordance with tradition.40The national need prevailed over halachic, ideological, personal, and family difficulties and led to cooperation between men and women and between religious and non-religious fighters. After separate religious frameworks were formed in the Haganah in the 1930s, the "religious problems" were resolved. The first group to be trained for a service in a separate religious company was established in Jerusalem in 1930 and expanded in 1933–34. The Arab riots of 1936 were a turning point, spurring many new enlistments to the religious army company in Jerusalem, which also had a large platoon of women. The Hapo'el Hamizrahi security department, established in 1937, worked on creating and expanding religious army units. In 1939, the religious companies of the Haganah had over 2,000 members.41

During wars, women civilians may join the battle. In Britain during World War II, women demanded to be allowed to do their part in defending their homes.55 The situation in pre-state Israel was similar, especially in the border areas. The location of the religious kibbutzim in three principal border areas—the Etzion Bloc, the Beit She'an Valley, and near Gaza in the south56—entailed multiple security problems and placed them on the front line when the war broke out. Their women members, willy-nilly, became combatants, contrary to what was expected of them. During the fighting they fulfilled traditional women's roles, refused to be evacuated to safer areas, and some of them bore arms, fought, and fell in battle. In the settlements that became battle zones, where women numbered about a third to a half of the members, they built fortifications together with the men.57 Given the identification of women with the home, even mothers could take part in its defense. Nevertheless, family status played a crucial role in the profile of the women fighters. When the security situation worsened, most of the mothers were evacuated together with their children, leaving behind only the young, mostly unmarried women, though some were married without children.

Most of the women fighters who remained in Kefar Etzion were unmarried new immigrants, Holocaust survivors who had arrived in Eretz Israel only a year or two before to begin a new life. The war, however, had another fate in store for them.58 They were all imbued with devotion to the place and a sense that they belonged beside the men, even under fire. The need for recruits to guard the settlements was the main factor that allowed these women to fight in the defense of their homes. Other women fighters, including many of those at Kibbutz Ein Tzurim in the Etzion Bloc, were Benei Akiva graduates, born in the country. Their role in the fighting forces was the high point of a rebellion begun years earlier.

Only yesterday, they were Benei Akiva girls listening with pounding hearts to their counselor's stories about a settlement movement that combined religious observance with working the land. Later, they left their parents' warm homes to go up into the Hebron hills . . . and build settlements under the most arduous conditions. . . . And now they have become fighters.59

Tzipora Rosenfeld, a Holocaust survivor, married and the mother of a child who had been evacuated, refused to concede her right to take part in fighting for her home. Choosing the job of "runner," she joined the defenders. She found her place within the group, which pulsated with a camaraderie for which they would lay down their lives, and she had a place of honor among them. Under siege, a woman symbolized all of life to the soldier, the memory of a good, caring home, a remnant of all that was noble and sublime; her name was whispered by all the men of arms. . . .

She could cast everything aside, even little Yossi, to stay there, bringing her feminine gentleness to the verge of the trenches and the graves and fight alongside the soldiers.65

Apart from her help with the guard duty, her presence was important for morale; it created a warm atmosphere and inspired the soldiers. Emotional support was integral to the women's activity,66 and their presence encouraged the men to show strength and courage. Tzipora, who did a man's joband even guarded alone at one of the posts, became a symbol to the male fighters there. As they said to each other, "If Tzipora is brave enough to guard alone at post number 7, how can you not do it?"67 This case echoes the experience of other societies, in which a female presence in battle has been seen as encouraging the male soldiers' morale and their motivation to try harder.68

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