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This article tells the story of one of the first Israeli anti-occupation groups, Women for Political Prisoners (WOFPP), through an ethnography that follows the process of re-assembling the NGO’s scattered archive. The concept of ethno-archiving is used to describe the process of gathering oral histories and assembling documents from the groups’ emergence phase (1988–1993). Focusing on the organisation’s historical importance and its idiosyncratic documentation of Israel’s gender-based violence (GBV) against Palestinian women, including sexual violence, the article chronicles their emergence and early impact, and explains why they were gradually forgotten – partly due to their own strategy of stealth-ness and self-silencing, and partly due to their marginalisation by mainstream liberal activism and NGO professionalism. The article shows that the human rights archival gap of Women for Political Prisoners’ unique materials, as the first NGO to define Israeli practices as torture and the only one to focus on Palestinian women, is inextricably tied to the overall silencing of GBV in Israel/Palestine.
How can the study of Zaydi jurisprudence help us understand the relationship between Imam Yaḥyā Ḥamīd al-Dīn (r. 1904-1948) and the Jews of Yemen? What sources are available for study? What further questions does the focus on dhimma law raise regarding Zaydi law and political thought?
This article introduces two Jewish accounts on the 1948 turmoil in Sanaa/Yemen to a non-Hebrew reading audience. Following the problematisation of both accounts – one by Salim Mansura (1916–2007), the other by Mordechai al-Zahiri (later Yitshari, 1930–) – as a historical source, it gives a chronological overview of the events they describe, and partly witnessed themselves. It covers their narratives on the assassination of Imam Yahya Hamid al-Din, the al-Wazir coup, the countercoup led by Imam Ahmad as well as the subsequent looting of Sanaa and its Jewish quarter. Based on the two accounts, the article analyses whether the looting had a strategic function in reconquering the city and reflects on the question as to whether the looting of the Jewish Quarter in particular was or was not intended by the authorities.
This article tells the story of one of the first Israeli anti-occupation groups, Women for Political Prisoners (WOFPP), through an ethnography that follows the process of re-assembling the NGO’s scattered archive. The concept of ethno-archiving is used to describe the process of gathering oral histories and assembling documents from the groups’ emergence phase (1988–1993). Focusing on the organisation’s historical importance and its idiosyncratic documentation of Israel’s gender-based violence (GBV) against Palestinian women, including sexual violence, the article chronicles their emergence and early impact, and explains why they were gradually forgotten – partly due to their own strategy of stealth-ness and self-silencing, and partly due to their marginalisation by mainstream liberal activism and NGO professionalism. The article shows that the human rights archival gap of Women for Political Prisoners’ unique materials, as the first NGO to define Israeli practices as torture and the only one to focus on Palestinian women, is inextricably tied to the overall silencing of GBV in Israel/Palestine.
How can the study of Zaydi jurisprudence help us understand the relationship between Imam Yaḥyā Ḥamīd al-Dīn (r. 1904-1948) and the Jews of Yemen? What sources are available for study? What further questions does the focus on dhimma law raise regarding Zaydi law and political thought?
This article introduces two Jewish accounts on the 1948 turmoil in Sanaa/Yemen to a non-Hebrew reading audience. Following the problematisation of both accounts – one by Salim Mansura (1916–2007), the other by Mordechai al-Zahiri (later Yitshari, 1930–) – as a historical source, it gives a chronological overview of the events they describe, and partly witnessed themselves. It covers their narratives on the assassination of Imam Yahya Hamid al-Din, the al-Wazir coup, the countercoup led by Imam Ahmad as well as the subsequent looting of Sanaa and its Jewish quarter. Based on the two accounts, the article analyses whether the looting had a strategic function in reconquering the city and reflects on the question as to whether the looting of the Jewish Quarter in particular was or was not intended by the authorities.
