Marrying gender, religion, and state in Israel: rabbis and religious feminists battle over securing the nation

This article exposes multiple discursive strategies of securitization and de-securitization in struggles over marriage and divorce in Israel. Asking why this issue evokes metaphors of war, the study highlights links between women’s divorce rights, patriarchal religious institutions, and the Jewish national project, arguing that the sense of danger, urgency, and risk resonates with Israel’s political preoccupation with (in)security. The state’s gendered ethno-national character impacts the everyday lives of men, women, and children–both Jewish and Palestinian. It produces a securitized framing that turns familial ruptures (divorce) into symbolic threats to national security, collective identity, and the gendered social order, and into a crisis of religious or moral authority. The case study analyzes the narratives of Jewish religious actors who are political opponents (male state-appointed rabbinical authorities versus religious feminists), showing how they use similar discursive and affective framings for opposite political ends. By reframing the battlefield(s), stakeholders, and meanings of security, the boundaries between cultural and political, between national, secular, and religious, and between individual and collective become blurred. Overall, the article contributes to critical understandings of the politics of securitization and de-securitization and of feminists’ radicalization, and demonstrates how religion, gender, sexuality, and nationality are co-constructed and challenged in Israel, with possible implications for the Middle East and North Africa region and beyond.