What Israeli Palestinian Women Want

“Men feel most comfortable when their women sit at home and think only about cooking, clothes, how much money they will bring, how much they can get from them,” Aisha Sidawi says as she cooks in her pistachio-green kitchen. “They think that’s all she needs.”

These are the opening words of Crossing Borders, winner of two first prizes at the 2007 Jerusalem Film Festival and highest honors at the Other Israel Film Festival in New York, dedicated to portraying the lives of the Arab citizens of Israel. Director Bilal Yousef has turned his camera on the deeply entrenched gender inequality defining the lives of many Muslim Israeli Arab women. The 28-year-old Yousef, whose strength lies in his quietly beautiful journey into the human heart, follows Sidawi and her friend Umayma Abu-Ras, two 30-something Israeli Arabs, as they try to find their voices in their heavily patriarchal society.

Sidawi is a wife, mother and homemaker who runs the Community of Learning Women Center in Taybe, an Arab town outside Kfar Saba, a wealthy Jewish Tel Aviv suburb. Her husband, focused on the Arab-Israeli conflict, encourages his wife to become more politically conscious. But when she does, women’s equality becomes her passion. This leads to the growing marital tensions that are an undercurrent of the film, in which Aisha is seen either at home or at the women’s center—always empty except for her.

When she receives a call that an Arab woman’s association in the Negev has been burned down, she drives south to see the damage. “They know who did it but they can’t do anything about it,” she says, her head in her hands. “What kind of a society is this? We should live in a woman-only society.”

Sidawi’s friend Abu-Ras, a school teacher, is even more outspoken, her feminist fury ready to boil over. Still single, she lives at home with her parents, who want her to marry and have a family but nonetheless support her independence. “Why shouldn’t women go to work?” says her mother. “It’s not embarrassing.” But a working woman, she warns, “mustn’t cross the borders.”

Abu-Ras used to teach in Kfar Saba, and still goes there often. Women, she says, cannot go out for coffee in Taybe, so she drives to Kfar Saba, where she sits alone in a café full of young fashionable Jews who toss their blonde hair, smoke, laugh.

Abu-Ras goes further when she dares to throw her name in as a candidate for Hadash, a left-wing, primarily Israeli Arab political party, for a seat on the Taybe city council. The filmmaker asks how women are responding to her candidacy. “At first they said my picture was pretty,” she replies. “After that they said it was great.”

On election day, she enters the school to vote. It is filled mostly with men, many in prayer. “In our school, instead of installing air conditioning, building a library or a laboratory, they built a prayer room,” she notes. Abu-Ras’s female teenage students hesitate to approach her, not sure whether to walk through the prayer room.

Later, we see her looking on anxiously as men tally up the votes. Abu-Ras has not won a seat. Some of her former male students, now part of the Islamic movement, celebrate their victory. She drives slowly through the crowded streets, clearly upset. She didn’t expect to win, but she wanted at least to see women state their opinions, “even if they vote for men,” she says. “But that’s not going to happen.”

Meanwhile, Sidawi, typing on the old computer in the women’s center, is thinking about leaving her husband. Yousef asks why, for the first time in the five years he has known her, she has started wearing makeup. She smiles and says, in the film’s closing words, “See? It’s nice, isn’t it.”

Westerners might consider these words unfeminist. Does lipstick mean liberation? Does it mean she is going to doll herself up to leave her husband? The truth is, it doesn’t really matter. This last shot of her at the center, rather than at home in her kitchen, shows that she is committed to her new life.

The universality of women’s wants is delicately shown when Sidawi’s husband calls her. She hangs up, clearly disappointed. “He wants something,” she says with exasperation. “I knew he wanted something. I wish he would call me once for no reason, just to hear my voice.” And in the end, that’s what both women want—for men, in both their personal and political lives, to want to hear their voices.—Karin Tanabe