Published: 21 February 2020
Last updated: 4 March 2024
FAR REMOVED FROM HERDING sheep in the Holy Land, where she became a prominent Israeli Bedouin feminist, Amal Elsana-Alh’jooj now heads the International Community Action Network (ICAN) at McGill University in Montreal.
Her path to the French-Canadian city is an unlikely personal journey: After shepherding as a five-year-old Muslim girl outside her sun-scorched, ramshackle Bedouin village in the Negev desert, she eventually received her PhD in social work at McGill and now speaks widely in international forums while also pursuing a postdoc at Harvard University.
“When I was a shepherd early in my life, this was a result of my grandfather… My mother saying she didn’t need me in the kitchen, so my grandfather said, ‘We need her to herd the sheep.’
So my first career really I would say was as a community organiser, as someone who would organize and take responsibility, was as a shepherd,” Elsana-Alh’jooj tells The Times of Israel in a recent interview at a café in the Montreal neighbourhood of Notre-Dame-de-Grace, where she lives with her husband and their 17-year-old twins.
“I remember myself waking early in the morning, taking the 50 sheep, three cows, and a donkey, and I used to have Loksie the dog, and going barefoot in the morning when there’s dew. In the morning, it’s still wet and then after that, all the kotzim [thorns] are becoming harder and you walk on them and it’s so horrible. It’s not easy,” she recalls from a world away.
FULL STORY Far from her village, rare Bedouin feminist fights for Israeli women and peace (Times of Israel)
Photo: Amal Elsana-Alh’jooj leads an identity workshop with ICAN fellows at McGill University in Montreal, 2018. (Courtesy)
