Choice as Everyday Politics: Female Palestinian Citizens of Israel in Mixed Cities

The paper analyzes everyday life as an arena of politics and choice as a form of everyday power. The paper discusses the theoretical debate on choice and everyday life as depoliticization mechanisms and claims, as opposed to the prevailing theory, that choices made in everyday life form politics of small things. In the various choices that women make and the way they conduct their everyday lives, they offer an alternative sociopolitical order based on a conscious, intentional choice. The experience of Palestinian woman citizens of Israel living in cities of mixed Jewish and Palestinian populations serves as the field of study. I argue that the choice to live in a mixed city and everyday life in this city constitutes an alternative life space for Arab-Palestinian women that allows them to express their opposition to both their own society and the larger Jewish society and, at the same time, serves as a setting for social change. Arab-Palestinian women utilize the space of the mixed city to forge new ways for themselves and their families to structure gender relations, feminine identity, class identity, and Palestinian national identity in a largely ethnonational and gendered unequal society.