Transforming “Transformative Accommodation”: Palestinian-Muslim Women’s Maintenance Suits as a Case Study

Abstract

“Transformative accommodation,” one of the most influential models proposed and debated in multiculturalist literature, is designed to strike a fine-tuned balance between minority community culture and the rights of its most vulnerable constituents. This article seeks to challenge the model’s theoretical premises and predictive normative outputs. Drawing on a novel empirical case study—the adjudication of Palestinian-Muslim wife maintenance suits in both Israel’s sharia courts as well as its civil family courts—we contend that multicultural transformation is a bidirectional process. That is, the complex encounter between liberal normativity and indigenous-religious normativity may bring about transformation not only in the minority community’s nomos, as the model envisions, but also in both normative legal systems. The article concludes with an analytical discussion aiming to transform transformative accommodation such that the model may indeed live up to its ambitious multiculturalist goals.