Abortion in Israel: Community, Rights, and the Context of Compromise

In contrast to American understandings of abortion as a uniquely tragic dilemma, the Israeli abortion issue is a tangential controversy in a larger debate over the relationship between the state's national and democratic identity. The divergent paths of abortion politics in Israel and the United States reflect important differences in underlying religious doctrines, geographical size, feminist ideologies, and the immediacy of other social cleavages. More profoundly, the two abortion stories are the product of distinct understandings of the mutual obligations between citizens and their state and of the relationship between individual and collective rights and duties. While these differences may account for the capacity of Israeli activists on both sides to forge pragmatic compromises, the stability of these policies is uncertain both because of changing Israeli priorities and the import of American conceptions of the abortion dispute.     

Partners No More: Relational Transformation and the Turn to Litigation in Two Conservationist Organizations

The rise in litigation against administrative bodies by environmental and other political interest groups worldwide has been explained predominantly through the liberalization of standing doctrines. Under this explanation, termed here "the floodgate model," restrictive standing rules have dammed the flow of suits that groups were otherwise ready and eager to pursue. I examine this hypothesis by analyzing processes of institutional transformation in two conservationist organizations: the Sierra Club in the United States and the Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel (SPNI). Rather than an eagerness to embrace newly available litigation opportunities, as the "floodgate" model would predict, the groups' history reveals a gradual process of transformation marked by internal, largely intergenerational divisions between those who abhorred conflict with state institutions and those who saw such conflict as not only appropriate but necessary to the mission of the group. Furthermore, in contrast to the pluralist interactions that the "floodgate model" imagines, both groups' relations with pertinent agencies in earlier eras better accorded with the partnership-based corporatist paradigm. Sociolegal research has long indicated the importance of relational distance to the transformation of interpersonal disputes. I argue that, at the group level as well, the presence or absence of a (national) partnership-centered relationship determines propensities to bring political issues to court. As such, well beyond change in groups' legal capacity and resources, current increases in levels of political litigation suggest more fundamental transformations in the structure and meaning of relations between citizen groups and the state.     

The other 'awakening' in Iraq: The women's movement in the first half of the twentieth century

The history of the women's movement in Iraq, during the first half of the twentieth century, has received little attention in scholarly work. This essay enlarges upon the topic using common features characteristic of more central women's movements in the Middle East. The emergence of intellectual debate on women's status, establishment of a myriad of women's organizations, evolution of a women's press, women's participation in the nationalist struggle, the adoption of nationalism as a liberating discourse and development of pan-Arab feminism, are shared characteristics which shed light on developments that occurred in Iraq. The essay suggests that the study of seemingly peripheral movements not only confirms similar patterns of development within the region but might also reveal new insights that transcend regional boundaries.