Between Two Worlds: How Sarab Abu-Rabia-Queder Turned Personal Struggle Into a Mission for Equality

October 29, 2026 in Israel, Scroll

The first Bedouin woman in Israel to become a professor, Abu-Rabia-Queder has built a distinguished academic career examining the complex intersection of gender, education, cultural identity, and social inequality.

“No one is going anywhere, and we’re not leaving,” is a rather frank assessment of the challenge facing Israel and its Arab and minority populations. But when that woman is Prof. Sarab Abu-Rabia-Queder, the message carries significant weight.

Abu-Rabia-Queder is the first Bedouin woman in Israel to attain a professorship. Her academic career has developed around the relationship between gender, minority status, education, employment, and institutional power. The Peres Center for Peace and Innovation awarded her a Medal of Distinction in 2022, and in 2024, the Weizmann Institute of Science awarded her an honorary doctorate in recognition of her academic achievements and commitment to inclusion and social justice.

Yet her path began long before those distinctions, in a family where education was already breaking boundaries.

Growing up between Arab-Bedouin and Israeli society, Abu-Rabia-Queder learned early that belonging could be complicated. The languages, customs, and expectations of different cultures are all part of life in modern Israel – where secular and religious Jews, Bedouin, Muslim, Christian, Druze, Haredi, and Ethiopian communities all intersect – but so do the tensions that emerge when those worlds meet.

Today, as a professor at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and a leading scholar of gender, education, and minority communities, Abu-Rabia-Queder has turned those experiences into a body of research that challenges conventional thinking about equality and social mobility.

Her personal story, as told during a recent gathering in Bethesda, provides an important starting point for understanding her research: she grew up navigating two cultural worlds, with an intimate understanding of both their connections and their contradictions. That experience shaped her interest in how people cross cultural boundaries – and what happens when the expectations of family, community, education, and the wider society collide.

A Childhood Between Cultures

Her father, Dr. Younes Abu-Rabia, was Israel’s first Bedouin doctor, and his commitment to education helped open possibilities for his daughter that were far less accessible to many women in her community. Abu-Rabia-Queder grew up speaking Arabic and Hebrew, but that bilingual, bicultural experience was not simply a matter of language. It gave her firsthand exposure to different social norms, expectations, and understandings of belonging. “This is where you experience the gaps,” she recalled.

Her schooling brought those differences into sharp relief. After attending elementary school in a Bedouin town, she moved to a Jewish school in Beersheva for the seventh grade (as the Bedouin educational system was poor and neglected and crime was escalating). The transition exposed her to gaps in educational systems and, as she later recounted, experiences of verbal and physical hostility.

After high school, her Jewish friends all enlisted in the IDF, and Abu-Rabia-Queder wanted to pursue a degree in education. Her options were to attend a program in Nazareth near family, or remain closer to home in the Negev at nearby Ben Gurion University. She chose the latter and it marked the first time she stepped “out of her tribe and kin.” Soon she was recruited as a teacher at a Bedouin school in Rahat.

Her path was far from easy. During the first intifada (1987–1993), a period of violent Palestinian uprisings, terrorist bombings that killed hundreds of Israeli civilians and caused profound economic and psychological upheaval, Abu-Rabia-Queder said she faced repeated “loyalty tests,” pressured to declare her political allegiances. With the support of fellow staffers standing up for her, she was able to continue her studies.

Around this time, she started on the path of activism by studying gender and engaging with Bedouin women from other tribal affiliations. “There were fewer girls everywhere,” she recalled, and the types of after-school activities that they were allowed were scant. Some would engage with the outside world by day, but return to their family homes overnight.

Her scholarship grew out of questions that were both personal and sociological: How do women establish autonomy? How do they reconcile educational ambitions with community obligations? And what happens when institutions welcome minority students in principle but fail to address the barriers they face in practice? It all proved a rich vein of academic study that Abu-Rabia-Queder turned into her master’s degree.

As part of her PhD research, Abu-Rabia-Queder examined the pioneering Bedouin women who pursued higher education, navigating exclusion within Hebrew-speaking Israeli universities while negotiating tribal expectations at home. Their path to education came at a deeply personal cost: many relinquished the possibility of marrying outside tribal boundaries rather than force their fathers into another battle. In giving up one social norm to advance another, they became role models for their communities – and agents of profound social change. Abu-Rabia-Queder met and married a Bedouin man from outside her tribe. The couple is now raising three sons, the eldest of whom already appreciates the concept of “feminism.”

Finding the Gaps – and Doing Something About Them

More recently, her work expanded to include traditional Haredi, Arab, and Druze women on campus; that the societies could have so much in common in challenging the boundaries of their communities to pursue higher education came as a surprise. The histories, beliefs, and circumstances of these groups are distinct. Yet each was creating their own path in patriarchal structures.

She has also conducted research on Ethiopian women’s journeys into higher education, examining their struggle between institutional racism and changing identities. In May 2021, a time that coincided with further unrest in Gaza, she was asked to be the vice president of Diversity and Inclusion at the university.

Again, the tensions of the conflict entered the campus environment, and Abu-Rabia-Queder responded with two projects. The first is a “Committee Against Racism,” which offers an address for students to lodge complaints – from microaggressions, to Arabs being chased by Jewish students, to damaged property – and propose solutions.

The second is a “Shared Space Lab” to help minority populations meet and speak about their fears and pains, integrate, and foster relationships they wouldn’t otherwise find. It is also tasked with heightening awareness around inequity, discrimination, and the need for mutual respect and understanding.

The wounds of October 7, however, run deep. Abu-Rabia-Queder has spent her career studying the gaps that remain stubbornly present. Yet she continues to bring people together, convinced that understanding begins with a willingness to listen – even when the conversation is difficult.

Having spent her life navigating different cultures, she knows that living together doesn’t require agreement on everything. It requires making room for one another.

“We have to learn how to live together,” she said.

In today’s Israel, that may be the hardest lesson of all.