Amna Knanna shows AACI Seniors some of the wares made by local Wadi Ara women belonging to the ‘For You Awareness’ organization she and her friends founded.

 

Growing up in a traditional Muslim family in Wadi Ara was not easy for Amna Knanna. 

When she was in her teens she began to struggle to break away from the mantle of restraint imposed upon her by her father and brothers.

“My father was a very much the traditional patriarchal figure.  On the other hand he also encouraged me to do things that were not exactly what would be expected - so in a way he was holding me back with one hand and pushing me forward with the other,” Amna explains to a group of Israeli seniors, members of AACI (Association of Americans and Canadians in Israel) attending a 3-day seminar in the nearby Givat Haviva campus for peace eduction.

Amna today lives in the village of Kfar Kara in Wadi Ara with her husband Walid and their sons.  She moved from her home five minutes down the road in Kfar Ara when she married the welder and former elected member of the local municipality whom she met when they were involved in a minor car accident locally.

The five-minute journey from Ara to Kara has taken Amna on a long and twisting road of newfound freedom nurtured by her natural rebelliousness and extremely open-minded and supportive husband.

In her late teens Amna became dedicated to making the women in her home village of Ara more aware of what and how they could improve the quality of their lives.  She began to organize courses to teach cooking, hairdressing and other skills … even how to change a puncture.

The women paid just a small amount of money for each course of enrichment that subsequently dramatically changed their lives and that of their families.

“In a way I used to feel that I wasn’t working with the women but with the men through the women,” says Amna with a laugh.  She admits there was quite a bit of enmity shown toward her by the men folk in Ara when she first began her in-house courses.

“A great deal of pressure was put on my father by other older men in the village and that wasn’t pleasant for him or me but I was determined to succeed in altering the way women were seen and also how they perceived themselves,” she explains.

Head covering became an issue when Amna was still living at home.  To appease her father she wore a head covering when leaving the house but after driving out of Ara she would discard it – generally chucking the scarf on to the back seat of her car but putting it back on her head when re-entering the village.

“I needed to do things my way but also being careful not to be disrespectful at the same time,” she comments.  Prospective marriage partners, another area of father-daughter conflict.  The defiant and increasingly independent Amna, who has seven brothers and sisters, flatly refused to adhere to her father’s wishes on that score spurning all his suggestions of this or that son of the village or from surrounding ones.

However, after the minor car accident and the two drivers exchanging details for insurance purposes, Amna knew she had met her man and how the two eventually came to be married is another story for another time.

Fifteen years ago when Amna married in to Kfar Kara – these days sporting some 16,000 residents as opposed to the 3,000 or so of Ara – she felt alienated.  Large extended families make up the townsfolk and even though she only came literally from just down the road and around the corner, she was an outsider to them – and not only that, her wanting to bring about change certainly rocked the clannish boat.

Kfar Kara is well known for a way above average percentage of medical doctors and university graduates in general, many of whom women. The development of infrastructure and services to the village residents outwardly appear of a much higher standard than most other villages, towns and cities in the Wadi Ara region and the pride the locals have in Kara (‘pumpkin’ in Arabic) runs very deep.

Kara is also the home to the only Jewish-Arab school in the country - Bridge Over The Wadi - that is situated in a Muslim Arab village, the other Hand In Hand organization’s unique schools being in Jerusalem and Misgav in the Galilee.

Even with the above average openness to be found in Kfar Kara Amna met with not so subtle pressure from certain quarters within the community not to interfere.  There was even rejection from within the ranks of the more traditional women of the community in the beginning as Amna went about inviting them to come to her house for coffee and chat.

“There’s a chronic shortage of places for the women to meet with no community or study center for adults and so it seemed natural that we would open up our home to those who really sought to learn and implement change,” explained Amna, reiterating the support her husband has always given her.

A graduate of the Noa/Nuha Center for Women and for Gender Studies at Givat Haviva as well as leadership studies at Bar Ilan University and Na’amat community leadership courses for women, Amna overcame the social pressures by working slowly but surely, eventually in 2003 setting up the not-for-profit ‘FOR YOU AWARENESS’ organization in the ground floor of her Kfar Kara abode.  She hasn’t looked back since and as a framed certificate on the wall attests, received the Knesset Prize for her efforts on behalf of galvanizing Wadi Ara women to develop their natural skills bringing about a better quality of life for themselves, families and community in general.

“Through the activities we have here at the center we hope to eventually see the women take their rightful place as equal partners in all aspects of daily family life, work and society and through education and cultural activities, bring about positive change for future generations.

“We are striving to build a society of equality, no differences between gender, religion or nationality and we will continue to work ceaselessly until we realize that vision,” states Amna with great determination.

The center offers local ladies a diverse program of courses, experiences and study tours, encounters with Jewish Israeli women living in their vicinity and further a field and often host groups of Israelis – such as the 30 AACI Veterans who came from all over the country – and students from abroad attending seminars at Givat Haviva with whom Amna remains in close contact.

A far cry from her humble beginnings in Ara and having faced and conquered the negative attitudes of some of her new neighbors in Kfar Kara, these days Amna Knaana is well respected for her belief in blazing a trail forward for the women of the locality and nowadays receives support from the local municipality as well as foundations in Israel and abroad.

 

Amna hosting a Manhatten family who contributed cameras to the Givat Haviva Art Center's Through Others' Eyes project encouraging Jewish and Arab youth to get to know each other through photography

 

By Lydia Aisenberg