Israel Matzav

Is Israel responsible for 'Palestinian' wife beating?

Phyllis Chesler reports on her response to a 2010 'study' in Lancet, the prominent British Medical journal (by six professors, no less) that blames Israel for 'Palestinian' wife beating.

The study by Cari Jo Clark and colleagues is more propaganda than science. For example, Clark and colleagues write: “Occupation policies… affect family connectedness, depriving women of regular contact with their families who might otherwise intervene to prevent intimate-partner violence.” On the contrary. Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim families very often do not intervene when a husband is beating a wife. Both the husband’s family and the wife’s own family view this as a husband’s right or as a wife’s fault.

The study has many other weaknesses. First, Clark and colleagues focus only on violence among married couples and omit routine violence against daughters and sisters, including honour killings, even though a 2008 study that specifically addressed honour killings among Palestinians was available.2 Second, they established no baseline, and had no control group in terms of intimate-partner violence in the Arab Middle East where there is no Israeli occupation (eg, in Jordan, Egypt, or Saudi Arabia). Third, Clark and colleagues do not acknowledge that, in shame and honour societies, surveys and statistics about domestic violence are unreliable since women are punished for reporting it. Fourth, they do not attempt to measure intimate-partner violence in Sderot, Israel, where civilians have endured 8000 rocket attacks from Gaza. Finally, they do not factor in the effect of Gaza being “occupied” by an increasingly fundamentalist Hamas and the fateful consequences for women, which include forced veiling and child arranged marriages.

Thus, the study attempts to blame Israel for the indigenous violence against women that is a feature of Arab and Muslim societies, especially today, when they have been radically fundamentalised.

Read the whole thing.

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 9:25 PM