Hope can be a woman’s name, and it can also be a motivating force.

For Amal Elsana Alh’jooj, hope was bestowed upon her at birth when her father decided to call her Amal, which means hope in Arabic.

But as she makes clear in her memoir, the Bedouin feminist, peace activist, and community organizer has turned her name into a verb that means action. Throughout the book, which was first published in 2022 in the U.K. by London-based Halban Publishers, Alh’jooj shows the work she has done to move beyond the limitations set for her by her community, country, and government, and to bring her communities with her.

At the time of her birth, Alh’jooj was the fifth daughter and sixth child born to a Bedouin family living in the Naqab or Negev, a desert region in southern Israel. (In a note on translation, Alh’jooj explains that the book uses both Arabic and Hebrew names for the places she references.) When she was born, her father decided to call her Amal “in the hope that Allah will give us boys after her.”

More sons did follow, but Amal’s conviction that she could achieve more in life than what was expected of her eventually led everyone around her to share in the belief that girls could do more.

In evocative writing that grounds her stories in a sense of place, Alh’jooj vividly describes the circumstances of her life that led her to raise her voice against discrimination and injustice. She is temporarily suspended from school for leading other students down the halls with chants of “Free Palestine!” She perseveres against the disaffected complacency of school administrators while working as a teacher at a school in the unrecognized village of Um Mitnan in the Naqab or Negev, organizing a sports day of traditional events for the children and encouraging them to take pride in their heritage. (Unrecognized villages are Bedouin communities not legally recognized by the Israeli government.) She starts a literacy class for the women in her community, then brings this idea to other Bedouin villages in the region, often having to fight against hesitation grounded in patriarchal ideas – and sexist community members – to establish these programs.

Despite her success and clear aptitude for her studies and for community organizing, Alh’jooj faced obstacles at every turn. First, it was the sexism of her family and community, where she was discouraged from riding a bike or attending high school in the city because these weren’t things that girls could do without risking community censure of their families. Then, it was prejudice and classism when she went to study at Ben-Gurion University because she is not only an Arab but a Bedouin – an underclass whose nomadic culture and way of life is considered inferior by society at large. Once she graduated and pursued her master’s degree in social work, she encountered the frustrations of working for her Bedouin community under a legal framework that didn’t allow for considerations of Bedouin culture in the rules and regulations she was to follow.

Alh’jooj went on to found the Arab-Jewish Center for Empowerment, Equality, and Cooperation (AJEEC), an organization that promotes leadership and social involvement among Arab teenagers and youth, as well as community development in the Arab-Bedouin areas of the Negev. Still, she faced pushback for some of the projects she spearheaded, both from the government and from the Islamic Movement.

In a moment that crystallizes the motivating force of her life, Alh’jooj describes a conversation with the president of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem shortly before she left Israel with her husband and children to move to Montreal, where she completed her PhD at McGill University. He was part of the Israeli government’s education committee that Alh’jooj had invited to tour the unrecognized villages, to see the conditions of the schools there. He was calling years later to give her an award.

She writes: “His words disappeared into the elation that arose within me, not because he was handing me some fancy award with a ceremony, but because he said I had given him hope and that eight years later he still carried that hope within him.”