Women and the Holy City fills a gap in longstanding debates within global feminism about the relationship between gender, war, and religion (e.g., Cynthia Cockburn, This Space Between Us, 1998; Jean Bethke Elshtein, Women and War, 1987). Lihi Ben Shitrit interviews women from three groups, whose stated purpose is to defend their freedom of religious worship at contested holy grounds in Jerusalem. The cases include two Jewish Israeli groups (Women for the Temple and Women of the Wall) and one Muslim group, Murabitat (Islamist women who defend the faith). By claiming their right to visit, pray, and spend leisure time at sites contested by their respective nationalities and religions, these women’s groups beg broader questions about global feminism’s celebration of diversity and difference. Contemporary feminism seeks to include women from outside the Western feminist mold. However, this inclusion sometimes smacks of imperialism and racism insofar as Western feminists try to “save” their non-Western “sisters” who they perceive as unidimentional, determined, and victims lacking agency. Ben Shitrit’s analysis focuses instead on active, willfull women dedicated to solving gendered problems unique to their circumstances.

This genre of feminist research dismantles the longstanding Western feminist assumption of a coincidence between women and peace (e.g., Ruth Roach Pierson, Women and Peace, 1987). Shitrit interviews Jewish Israeli, Arab Israeli, and Palestinian women whose activism often manifests in violent speech acts and extremist ideologies. This unconventional depiction of women as potentially as radical or violent as their men therefore also raises questions about the constraints and opportunities for gender equality within protracted conditions of asymmetrical conflict.

The women described here vehemently defend their holy sites in the face of arrests, beatings, and violence against, all the while raising families and engaging in domestic life at home. Many Muslim and Jewish women activists have been handled harshly by authority figures for “disturbing the peace” and potentially inciting rioting. However, Ben Shitrit argues that women contribute something unique to dismantling intra-national divisions on the basis of their affinities as women. Nevertheless, dismantling divisions from within a nation may also unintentionally result in stoking the flames of inter-state conflict by seeking to eclipse access to religious worship on the part of the “other.”

The book’s central premise is that pious women activists in Jerusalem, whether seeking to ascend to and pray at the Noble Sanctuary/Temple Mount or hold egalitarian services among men and women at the Western Wall, have two primary goals. First, women attempt to remove intracommunal divisiveness to unify their nation around the otherwise innocuous freedom of religious worship. By doing so, women’s activism conflates overlapping divisions within their respective nations among men and women, secular and religious, and other ethnic, racial, and political divisions.

Second, women activists “domesticate” the holy by personalizing sacred space for ribat (defending Islam) and the equivalent Jewish duty to defend holy prayers and rituals in consecrated space. Women’s contestation over religious worship manifests in intimacy, celebration, and recreational activities for families. In this way, the analysis vacillates between portraying the women as strong warriors committed to defeat the “other,” versus women occupying traditional “feminine’ roles of communal, unpaid service such as teaching, caregiving, and cleaning.

Nonetheless, the issue here is not religion per se, but the politicization of religion as a tool for nationalist aspirations and land rights. The enduring puzzle of this book is the seeming absence of empathy between women from either side of the Israeli-Palestinian divide. The category of womanhood is lost in the conflict and, as a result, so too is a unified concept of patriarchy. The commitment of both religious groups to their own religious freedom seems to surpass any sense of unity that would otherwise bind women together. This quandary is the core of women’s activism within protracted conditions of conflict whose adherence to mutually exclusive faiths may surreptitiously perpetuate violence.

The ingenuity of this study is its exploration of gender politics through the underlying and contested lenses of fundamental belief systems that mark Israeli-Palestinian nationalist narratives. Muslim women’s struggles over access to the Noble Sanctuary for Muslim worshippers rivals Jewish women’s struggles over access to pray in precisely the same spot, which Jews refer to as the Temple Mount. Of course, ideally, both groups would take turns praying in the same place. However, in such a politically toxic environment as Jerusalem, violence looms over any otherwise banal affront, real or percieved.

While the book skillfully deals with sensitive issues of freedom of religious worship or religious coercion, as the case may be, it would have benefited from a more rigorous historical context. Framing women’s struggles within the broader political context of Israeli statehood and Palestinian national liberation may have clarified the urgency of the women’s struggles under consideration. First, the Israeli context disproportionately marginalizes women due to lack of separation between religion and state and the monopoly over personal status of the Orthodox rabbinical authority (the strictest stream of Judaism in its adherence to Jewish Law). Second, Orthodox Judaism is reflected in its disproportionate electoral influence. The need to build coalitions in a proportional representation system allows small religious parties to topple the government when their demands are not met. Finally, the primary role of the Israeli military commends masculine qualities as reflected in decorated combat careers. These careers, once limited to men, are then leveraged for lucrative positions in politics and the private sector. This historical exclusion of women from combat catalyzed the successful campaign for women’s “right to fight,” a right that pits Israeli women soldiers against Palestinian women militants on the “battlefield.”

Simultaneously, Palestinian patriarchy plays an equivalent role in women’s lives. Active in a national resistance movement, Palestinian women and men use religion as a basis for national self-determination. However, once women’s “work” is done, they are often sent back to the kitchen. Since the first Palestinian Uprising (Intifada) in 1987, the bankruptcy of secular nationalist regimes such as the Palestinian National Authority (PNA) opened space for Islamist movements like Hamas. After the Oslo Accords in 1993, Hamas was the only Palestinian group commited to continue the fight against Israel. The growing popularity of Islamists prompted many Palestinian women to don the hijab as representing both their faith and nation. However, the infamous “hijab campaign’ in 1988 forced a growing cadre of urban, educated, and secular women to don the hijab against their will, in many cases by the violent hands of morality police or gangs of young men.

Religiously inspired feminism focuses on the collective, while drawing insight from women-friendly interpretations of scripture. Religious feminists seek to emulate the strongest women in the history of their faith. For Jewish feminists, the matriarchs such as Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel, and Leah serve as exemplars. Jewish feminists attest to historical evidence of egalitarian worship. The same logic appeals to Muslim feminists who use the Qu’ran to reinstate early advocacy for women’s rights from the time of the Prophet Muhammed. Muslim women also focus on suras and verses that strengthen women’s rights and seek to emulate Islam’s strongest women, notably the Prophet’s most influential wives such as Khadijah, Aishah, and Hafsah, to name a few.

In an even broader context, the book may have compared freedom of religion as the prototypical civil liberty in Western industrialized states versus freedom of religion in a zone of conflict marked by religious tensions. In conflict zones, women politicize religious symbolism and rituals to strengthen their place in the nation. As such, religious legitimization often manifests in women’s roles as bereaved mothers of soldiers (Jewish Israeli) and bereaved mothers of martyrs (Palestinian Arab) to justify the righteousness of their cause. The author may have clarified that the transition of discussions about religious freedom to mainstream policy agendas often clashes with intra-national, secular defiance.

Overall, Shitrit shows much success in demonstrating the complex array of feminine and feminist strategies to promote gender equality within the confines of a religiously attuned conflict. Indeed, this book opens a door to new discussions about the indivisibility of land in relation to women’s activism outside Western frames of reference.