Discrimination Against Women Dominates Israeli Headlines

Written by Jan Jaben-Eilon Wednesday, January 11 2012

Israel is one of a handful of countries that have had female leaders. Golda Meir was prime minister in the early 1970s. Currently, two major political parties are headed by women - Shelly Yachimovich, the leader of the Labor Party and Tzipi Livni, leader of the Kadima party.

Women are in leadership positions across Israel and so it might be shocking to point out that discrimination against women is currently dominating the headlines of Israeli newspapers and is featured prominently on Israeli TV.

Israel is a complicated country, whose intricacies are exacerbated by the growing size, strength and extremism of ultra-religious Jewish factions. So, it’s not news that in some parts of Jerusalem, for instance, women are asked to dress modestly, meaning elbows and knees must be covered. Also in Jerusalem, advertising companies have willingly excluded females (girls and women) from advertisements in fear that the ultra-religious will damage the buses on which they are posted. Headlines have been screaming about the “exclusion of women” in the public arena.

All of these examples of intolerance, however, were substantially surpassed at the end of 2011 when ultra-religious zealots spit on an eight year-old girl on her way to and from school in Beit Shemesh, a community covering just over a square mile between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. It’s not that the little girl was dressed immodestly; her family of immigrants from North America are observant Jews. But an ultra-religious group of men called her a prostitute because her attire didn’t measure up to their more rigorous dress code. To a TV camera, little Naama cried out that she was afraid to cross a street, even holding her mother’s hand.

To their credit, the top Israeli politicians condemned the despicable acts of some ultra-religious groups, which have included throwing rocks at police and journalists (and sometimes each other) and starting fires in the streets of their neighborhoods of Jerusalem. In Jerusalem and Beit Shemesh, signs not only tell women how to dress, but increasingly are segregating males and females to different sides of the streets.

The Israeli Supreme Court has ruled against this separation but has been lenient on its instructions for police enforcement.

For months, women have been forced to sit in the back of public buses that run in religious areas. Recently one woman stood her ground when an ultra-Orthodox male passenger told her to move to the back of the bus. She refused and he held the bus door open for 30 minutes; the police were called. The police asked the woman to move to the back and when she refused, the complaining man finally disembarked.

This incident prompted U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to compare it to the American South in the 1950s when Rosa Parks, an African-American woman, refused to give up her bus seat for white passengers. Clinton also angered Israeli leaders when she claimed that recent incidents of gender discrimination against female Israeli soldiers reminded her of the situation facing women in Iran.

Certainly, the world is more accustomed to hearing about the plight of women in Somalia or Afghanistan, but the situation in relatively modern Israel may be a warning that no country can let down its guard in protecting equal rights for women.

See Jan’s other stories about Israeli women taking the lead:

• Anat Hoffman, a former Jerusalem city councilwoman, who is now director of the Israel Religious Action Center (IRAC).
  
  
• Ruth Halperin-Kaddan, chair of The Ruth and Emanuel Rackman Center for the Advancement of the Status of Women, Faculty of Law at Bar-Ilan University in Israel and a member of the United Nations’ Committee for the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW).
  
  
• Robi Damelin an activist in the Parents Circle/Families Forums (PCCF), a grassroots organization of bereaved Palestinians and Israelis which promotes reconciliation as an alternative to hatred and revenge.
  
  
• Einat Wilf, who was named by Forbes magazine as one of the most promising women in the world, is a member of the Israeli parliament and a member of the coalition government.

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Jan Jaben-Eilon was a founding staff writer of the Atlanta Business Chronicle. Since then, she has been the international editor of Advertising Age magazine and has written for such publications as The New York Times, International Herald Tribune, Washington Journalism Review, and Consumer Reports. She is the author of soon-to-be-published (There is) Life After Cancer. Jan and her husband have homes in Atlanta and Jerusalem.