Alaa Hajyahia

Alaa Hajyahia is a Palestinian research fellow in Meitar Center for Advanced Legal Studies (Summa cum Laude) and a graduate student in the department of Sociology and Anthropology at Tel Aviv University (Summa cum Laude), where she obtained her bachelor’s degree in law and her B.A in sociology and Anthropology (Summa cum Laude). Following her legal internship at the Israeli State Attorney’s Office, High Court of Justice Division and the bar examination, Alaa obtained the positions of editor in the Law Review Journal, and teaching and research assistant in the Law faculty and the anthropology-sociology department at Tel-Aviv University. 

In her LL.M thesis, Alaa aimed to settle the inherent conflict between the support of Israeli Jewish liberal intellectuals for the advantages awarded to the Jewish community under the Law of Return (1950) banning Palestinian refugees from returning to their homeland and their strong opposition to the discrimination of Israeli Arabs in the Nation-State Law (2018). Drawing on both empirical studies and history of ideas analysis, Alaa resolved this apparent contradiction by suggesting that the thinking of these intellectuals is based on a distinction of space, i.e., between Israel and the Jewish diaspora, as well as on a distinction of time, i.e., between present Jewish history and the Jewish history of two millennia of persecutions. 

Recently, Alaa has been working on an interdisciplinary study, focusing on the status of Palestinian women, looking for new ways to address the issue of Palestinian women’s empowerment in Israeli society. Israel has seen vocal demands to strengthen the carceral state in addressing “honor killings” and gender violence. In her research, Alaa intends to challenge the punitive approach, which threatens women’s empowerment, by developing scholarship and policies that rely on critical theories and American race theories, offering community-based, restorative justice and alternative policing strategies for Palestinian women in Israel.