‘Liberal’ without gender equality

by RAFIA ZAKARIA

“Thousands of ultra-Orthodox Jews gathered at the Western Wall in Jerusalem to protest against a Jewish women’s group that holds monthly prayers there in a long-running campaign for gender equality at the site.” “Police set up metal barricades and deployed in large numbers to hold back the mostly male protesters, who blew whistles and occasionally surged forward only to be pushed back. The women carried empty mantles used to cloak Torah scrolls to protest the prohibition on bringing the scrolls themselves into the women’s section.” IMAGE/TET/AP

“Ultra-Orthodox Jews walk past a sign calling on women to dress modestly in the ultra-Orthodox neighborhood of Mea Shearim in Jerusalem, Wednesday, June 7, 2023. With ultra-Orthodox parties now wielding unprecedented power and playing a key role in a contentious plan to overhaul the legal system, they are aggravating concerns among secular Israelis that the character and future of their country is under threat.” IMAGE/AP//Ohad Zwigenberg/US News & World Report /TEXT/US News & World Report

Ever since Israel began its offensive in Gaza, Israeli propaganda has produced social media content that shows the female soldiers of the Israeli Defence Forces as models of liberated womanhood. Photos of Israeli women parading with their weapons often on tanks and other military vehicles are proliferating as Israel wants to show how they fight side by side with the men.

What is absent from this picture is the crackdown on women’s rights that has characterised Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s far-right Likud party-led government.

In the year preceding the Oct 7 attack, Israeli women’s groups were demanding attention towards how the government was determined to take away the rights of the women of Israel. Interviews given by leaders of women’s groups and even a former minister for social equality in the government preceding the current dispensation provided some insight into what life is like within a country, which is raining death and devastation on the people of Gaza.

In the months immediately following the Likud win and the coming to power of Benjamin Netanyahu, Israeli women so feared attacks on women’s rights that a large number of women’s groups came together to form a coalition to fight back. Among the factors that they found troubling was that out of 32 ministers in Netanyahu’s cabinet only six were women and that two of the parties that had been included in the coalition were so orthodox and regressive that they did not want women to contest elections at all.

A part of the discrimination the women’s groups expected to face was mandatory gender segregation in public spaces. This is because members of the very far right that do not field women to compete in elections also refuse to use public transportation if women are present; they have long sought all public transportation to be completely segregated so that men and women are not in the same bus at all.

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