This article demonstrates the contrasting experiences of military widows in the modern Jewish Orthodox and the Bedouin sectors in Israel. While fallen Jewish soldiers are honored in a fashion similar to martyrs, Bedouin fallen soldiers are perceived as anti-martyrs; their anti-martyr status causes predicaments for their widows. While Jewish war widows are glorified, their Bedouin counterparts are subject to various modes of marginalization and exclusion. The article offers Bourdieusian theoretical analysis of the differing status of the Bedouin war widows and proposes the concept of negative symbolic capital to describe a situation where a social agent not only lacks a certain sort of capital, but instead possesses an intangible attribute which is negatively sanctioned owing to cultural-specific beliefs, values, and circumstances. We demonstrate how widows who possess negative symbolic capital invest much effort in accruing religious capital, in order to cope with their excluded position as widows of anti-martyrs.
We critically examine the officially declared policy vis-a-vis the actual fulfilment of minorities’ equal rights in Israel. According to the theory of democratic exclusion, minority groups are tacitly disadvantaged despite formal policies and laws aimed at ensuring equality. We showcase this phenomenon in a hitherto unstudied minority sector in Israel, namely Bedouin Israel Defence Forces (idf) war widows. Analysis of in-depth interviews has led us to expose a failure to take the unique religious and cultural imperatives and restrictions into consideration, as well as a paradox of Bedouin war widows’ entitlement to equal rights while reporting suffering discrimination, exclusion, and marginalisation. In the name of these silenced Israeli citizens we call this severe violation of civil rights to public awareness and propose some practical suggestions as to how to adjust the provision of treatment and support to their cultural features, in order to truly adhere to the democratic vision.
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