It is rare to see Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked smiling, let alone laughing out loud. However, Sheikh Ibrahim A-Touri, the leader of the Bedouin community in the Negev, caused the minister to burst into spontaneous, hearty laughter when she visited Bedouin towns and villages in March and spoke about an initiative she was promoting to curb polygamy. What made Shaked laugh? The honorable sheikh's explanation on the logic, as he saw it, behind a polygamous lifestyle: “You’re a beautiful woman, a real dish, but one can’t keep eating the same dish all the time, even if it’s superb. … The difference between myself and your husband,” the sheikh went on, “is that when he wants a different dish, he has to sneak off to some hotel room, whereas I go openly and proudly to the home of my second or third wife. So, honorable lady minister, which of us has more respect for women?”
The immense cultural-social gap epitomized in this exchange reflects a small measure of the difficulties entailed in dealing with polygamy in the Israeli Bedouin community. Yet Israel’s government is the one encouraging this phenomenon, even as it issues declarations condemning it. Shaked is the standard-bearer for this cause. Two years ago, along with then-Attorney General Yehuda Weinstein, she announced measures against polygamous marriage, but not much happened. In January, she presented a new plan and even got the government to adopt a resolution on the matter, but still, nothing changed.
At the end of March, the Beersheba family court rejected the petition of a 54-year-old Bedouin man seeking recognition of three of his children for child benefits. At the hearings, it was revealed that the man has 56 children from seven women, three of them Palestinian.
The judge in the case, Alon Gabizon, wrote that Bedouin men prefer Palestinian women because of the lower dowries they have to pay for them and the women’s total dependence on them since the women's families are not in Israel. He compared it to human trafficking and pointed to the absurdity of the state’s support for polygamist families. “The state itself enables the polygamous man to marry another woman, bring more children into the world and perpetuate poverty,” he wrote.
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