Between local and foreign structures: Exploring the agency of Palestinian women in Israel

Stemming from the literature that examines the importance of structure as a means that produces agency, this article aims to analyze Palestinian women's agency in Israel as negotiation with particular conflicting structures. While Middle Eastern women's agency is structured within Arab religious and cultural resources, Palestinian women's agency in Israel, We claim, is not only structured by Arab cultural and religious resources, but is also structured by Jewish-Israeli spatial-cultural resources. This paper analyses two sources from which Palestinian women in Israel derive agency and examines the interplay between them: (a) Palestinian cultural resources and (b) Israeli-Jewish cultural-spatial resources. By analyzing this agency and coping resources, we seek to conceptualize a more extensive theoretical model that draws on existing Middle Eastern feminist literature concerning Arab women, with attention to the unique realities of Palestinian women's life in Israel and the varied structuring resources available to them.