12. The Liberal/Multicultural Nature of the Religious Accommodations for the Palestinian-Arab Minority in Israel: A Curse or a Blessing?

Divorced from Citizenship: Palestinian-Christian Women between the Church and the Jewish State

“…6. While there is a paucity of sociolegal research on both the Palestinian-Arab Christian community (for rare exceptions see Sa 'ar 1998;Tsimhoni 2002;Karayanni 2006Karayanni , 2007aKarayanni , 2018McGahern 2011;Mack 2012;Mansour 2012) and on Palestinian Muslim women (for example, Hasan 2002;Abu-Rabia 2011;Kozma 2011Kozma , 2012, the research on Palestinian-Christian women is almost absolutely wanting. We know of only two works that treat Palestinian-Christian women as a relevant analytical category that is distinct from the larger Palestinian-Arab community.…”

“…In this so-called multicultural structure of group-differentiated rights (Saban 2004;Karayanni 2007aKarayanni , 2007bKarayanni , 2012Karayanni , 2018, divorce rights are particularly compromised across the religious board. 8 Notably, the gendered injustices of both the Muslim and Jewish divorce regimes have been a pivotal theme in both the sociolegal and glocal feminist scholarship (Porter 1995;Capell 1998;Clinton 1999;Lifshitz 2003;Rouhana 2003;Halperin-Kaddari 2004;Yefet 2009Yefet , 2016Kozma 2011;Abou-Ramdan 2015;Shahar 2015;Batshon 2017).…”

“…9 The primary Christian denomination that allows divorce, Greek-Orthodox Christianity, subjects marital exit to a gender-asymmetrical fault-based regime dating back to the reign of the Byzantine Empire in the fourteenth century. The arcane Greek-Orthodox menu of grounds imagines a woman not as her husband's equal but rather as his ward, 10 and goes so far as to explicitly conceptualize domestic violence as a reconcilable form of marital discord (Goadby 1926;Espanioly 1997;Batshon 2012;Karayanni 2018).…”

“…The respective Churches thus enjoy carte blanche authority to appoint the ecclesiastical judges, establish the court hierarchy and judicial review process, determine court fees and juridical rules and procedures, and eschew the publication of their state-enforced court decisions or the legal codes and regulations that govern their rulings (Bialer 2005;Amir 2014;Karayanni 2018). 13 Moreover, unlike the rabbinical courts (and to a lesser extent the Sharīʿa and Druze courts), which are subject to exacting scrutiny by an eminently activist Israeli Supreme Court (Shifman 1995;Maoz 1996;Edelman 2000;Liviatan 2009;McGahern 2011), the ecclesiastical courts are subject to a form of judicial review that is lenient in theory yet virtually nonexistent in fact (Kayan 2018).…”

“…14 These grave rights violations, however, have been lost on a Jewish-centered literature that is almost entirely engulfed in the synagogue-state conflict. As Michael Karayanni argues, this literature depicts the structural differentiation of the personalstatus regime as an "acme of democracy" in which minority groups supposedly celebrate their religious identity and cultural autonomy (Karayanni 2006(Karayanni , 2007a(Karayanni , 2007b(Karayanni , 2012. In Karayanni's view (2018), the multiculturalist discourse is therefore nothing more than a hollow covering employed for legitimizing and rationalizing ethno-religious discrimination.…”