I am a social historian of the modern Middle East, currently specializing in the history of medicine in the region. I started my academic career with women’s history, first in Morocco and then in Egypt. My work has since zoomed out from the female body to broader questions on the history of medicine, medical knowledge, and the medical profession. It also zoomed out from national to global, transnational, and regional questions: the flow of people, objects, and ideas, and then to the relationship between the region and international organizations: the League of Nations, the World Health Organization, and the International Committee of the Red Cross. I am zooming in again in the last few years, this time on Israeli and Palestinian history.
My MA thesis (Tel Aviv University, 2000) and early publications concentrated on the Moroccan feminist movement. It employed the Gramscian notion of “passive revolution” to explain their political success. I argued that King Hassan II’s choice to co-opt the feminist struggle brought the most substantial changes to women’s legal status in the country up to that point. I was particularly interested in how these women employed Islamic and Moroccan national history to claim equal rights. I later used these insights in my work with Palestinian feminists in Israel. I was interested in how local feminists engage with Islamic law, state law, and the public to make substantial change.
My Ph.D. dissertation and subsequent book took me to Egyptian social history. It examined how the police and doctors’ forensic examination of female bodies in pre-colonial Egypt (1850-1882) transformed the familial and communal treatment of women on the margins – slaves, prostitutes, and adolescent girls suspected of having lost their virginity. Based on one research year at the Egyptian National Archives, I argued that the police stations and forensic examinations made the gaze of the state palpable in everyday life, and that it was multiple individual choices to turn to the police that made the state into a concrete presence in Egyptian life. A father who asked the police doctor to examine his daughter’s virginity, a slaver who resorted to the police for protection against an abusive enslaver, a woman who came to the police with her aborted fetus following a physical assault and asking for her assailants to be published – all created the meaning of the neighborhood police station and brought into being the effect of the state.
From the state, I turned to international organizations as my main unit of analysis. My initial purpose was to follow the protagonists of my dissertation to the colonial era. My search for sources brought me to the League of Nations archives and two research projects – on the history of traffic in drugs and traffic in women in the Middle East and the colonial world more broadly. Looking at the region from Geneva allowed both a transnational perspective – tracing processes that transcended national borders, and an international perspective, looking at how international norms were formed and how they affected realities on the ground.
These twin projects led me to my 6-year ERC project, titled "A regional history of medicine in the Middle East." It examined, first, the role of doctors in conceptualizing social problems and their intellectual and political roles outside the clinic. Second, it conceptualized the region as a unit of analysis, which enables and is constituted through the regional mobility of people, objects, and ideas. Thirdly, it explored the history of health through the perspective of international organizatoins. It explored regional, intra-Ottoman, and cross-border histories of epidemics, medical professionals, and medical knowledge. In addition, my team and I compiled an online database of 10,000 medical professionals who worked or studied in the Middle East from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries.
I have worked on four collaborative research endeavors for the last six years. With Nicole Khayat, we work on the intellectual history of Arab medical doctors. We examined how these men (and some women) used the press to disseminate medical knowledge and how they saw the role of the medical profession within Arab society more broadly. Our articles situated these writings within the broader intellectual and political process of the Arabic literary revival (or nahda). Our work highlighted the often-overlooked role of physicians in Arab intellectual and political life.
With Yoni Furas, we authored a book on the social and political history of the Palestinian medical profession, currently under review. The book maps the social origins of this professional group and their place within urban communities. We examine their relationship with the mandate authorities and their Jewish counterparts, unionization, and this professional community’s collapse in 1948. We argue that the unique conditions of the Palestine mandate created a professional community embedded in regional professional networks, which had very little power within a state or semi-state structure. Coupled with a professional competition with a ten-fold Jewish medical community and their late unionization (in the last years of the mandate), these factors contributed to their relative weakness in 1948.
With Benny Nuriely, we examined the history of Israeli medical education from 1949 until the late 1970s. Our articles examine how the Hebrew University shaped the demographic composition of the Israeli medical profession, its graduates’ employment patterns, and how this policy affected the student experience. We also examined debates surrounding the Israeli Anatomy and Pathology law (1953) – and showed how it brought to the fore questions such as whose lives were protected and whose were not, the importance of informed consent and the relative power of the state, the religious establishment, and the medical community.
With Leora Bilsky, we explored the history of plunder in the 1948 war as a case study in both legal and social history. As a legal scholar, Bilsky examined debates over movable property as constitutional to property rights in the new state of Israel. My contribution concentrated on citizens’ petitions to the Ministry of Minorities as a lens for examining the material history of Palestinian property. Our first article was published at the beginning of 2024 and won the best article award of the Israeli Society for the History of Law. A second article, concentrating on the petitions as a claim-making and right-claiming venue, is currently under review.
Finally, I am currently working on the involvement of international organizations in the 1948 conflict in Palestine/Israel as a formative moment of the Palestinian refugee camps and of post-WWII international organizations. The history of Palestinian refugees usually skips this the foundation of the refugee camps, while the history of the international aid organizations concentrates on the agenda of development and the Cold War context from the 1950s onwards. In addition, some research has dealt with the ICRC’s work in the refugee camps but did not look at how refugees saw these interventions and how the ICRC personnel interacted with other players on the ground – including aid workers, Palestinian volunteers, and hosting country representatives. This article examines early interactions between aid workers and the ICRC and the spatial organization of the early refugee camps. A second article, on medical aid to the refugees is in advanced writing stages.