Israel’s constitutional crisis has focused on the plan to neutralize the Supreme Court as protector of basic rights. Is this also a threat to the status and rights of women in Israel?
Yes, absolutely. In the first place, the Supreme Court has been the major champion trying to enforce legal equality between men and women in Israel. And the current government, the most religiously extreme in Israel’s history, is bent on reversing whatever gains women have made, above and beyond removing judicial oversight.
In perspective, women’s rights should not even be an issue. Israel’s Declaration of Independence promised “complete equality of social and political rights irrespective of religion, race, or sex.” This was backed up by a Women’s Equal Rights Law of 1951. Israel was the third democratic nation to have a women Prime Minister, and three of last four Presidents of the Supreme Court have been women. After a long struggle, women have been accepted as fighter pilots.
But as in other developed nations, overall performance has never matched premise. The pay gap between men and women is rated at 32-42 percent, higher than most OECD countries. More fundamentally, marriage and divorce has remained under the jurisdiction of religious courts, where Orthodox Jewish law guarantees continued patriarchy.
And even before the current government, gender segregation in public spaces was on the rise. Though it was declared illegal by the Supreme Court, forcing women to the back of the bus (or train or plane), as in the U.S. South under Jim Crow, is enforced in haredi (Ultra-Orthodox) areas by social pressure – or physical force. The practice is also spreading to training courses and college classes where religious Jews are present in numbers.
In the government formed last year, fully half (32) of its Knesset supporters are haredim or Religious Zionists. Beyond decimation of the Supreme Court and lavish funding of their institutions, they were promised other measures designed to put women in their place. The power of the religious courts would be extended to areas of civil law. Certain public events would be gender-segregated. Postings of civil service jobs would use masculine, not neutral, grammatical forms (Hebrew being a highly-gendered language). Businesses would be allowed to discriminate against women on religious grounds. Anti-discrimination laws already on the books would be amended to allow gender segregation.
Shas, a haredi party, also proposed to legislate six months in prison for any woman coming to the Western Wall in “inappropriate” clothing. This, however, raised such a storm that the idea was dropped – for now. Israel is not quite ready, yet, to transform itself into the Gilead of Margaret Atwood’s The Hand-Maid’s Tale.
But what we have seen so far is, unfortunately, just the warm-up.
The World Economic Forum now ranks Israel as 83rd of 146 nations ranked from best to worst in its 2023 “Gender Gap Report.” This Is down from 60th in the previous report.
How much lower will it go?
For the past several years, the ultra-Orthodox religious leaders, particularly in Jerusalem, have pushed gender segregation in their rulings--on local buses, even on sidewalks during holidays like Sukkot. The threat of expanding Rabbinic authority--now filled with Rabbis from one or another ultra-orthodox stream--would certainly diminish the rights of women in cases of divorce and child care. Hareidi women have protested these inequities--forming a party to contest the election a few years ago. But some demands this time are curious. Some Hareidi MKs want an army exemption law to be passed under the Basic Law rubric rendering it more difficult, if not impossible for the Supreme Court to rule it illegal. For non-Zionists who claim secular law is not fully legitimate, this is a curious move.