Between care and constraint: Palestinian mothers, guilt, and the politics of school choice

This article explores the affective dimensions of school choice among Palestinian middle-class mothers in Israel, a group increasingly enrolling their children in Jewish-majority schools to secure mobility within a stratified educational landscape. Drawing on Bourdieu’s concepts of habitus and field, alongside feminist theories of affect, we conceptualise school choice not merely as a strategic calculation but as a site of intense emotional governance. Based on 54 in-depth interviews with Palestinian parents residing in Jewish-majority localities, the study reveals that the crossing of ethno-national boundaries generates a specific form of ‘politicised maternal guilt’. This guilt arises from a ‘structural impasse’ in which mothers are forced to choose between academic resources and cultural safety. We identify three manifestations of this emotion: (1) guilt over the child’s potential distress or rejection; (2) cultural and linguistic guilt regarding the erosion of Arabic identity; and (3) socially gendered guilt, amplified by community surveillance and mother-blame. We argue that this guilt is a ‘sticky’ emotion (Ahmed 2013) that metabolizes systemic exclusion into personal failure. Ultimately, the article suggests that for minoritized mothers, school choice imposes an ‘emotional tax’, forcing them to bear the moral weight of living between conflicting national projects.