Abuse of women’s rights is being ignored in Israel
Miriam Ziv, Israel’s ambassador to Canada, was in Calgary this week. Wednesday night, she was honoured at the 62nd annual B’nai Brith Dinner, and Thursday, she dropped by the Herald for a visit with the editorial board, where I asked her about women’s rights in Israel. I believe if we’re going to be concerned about the rights of women in Afghanistan, Pakistan and the Middle East, then we have to be equally concerned about them in Israel. I think the matter gets glossed over in the international arena because Israel is a democracy. But it’s precisely because Israel is a democracy that these issues should not even exist.
Israel’s 1948 declaration of independence says: “The state will uphold the full social and political equality of all its citizens, without distinction of race, creed or sex; will guarantee full freedom of religion ... will safeguard the sanctity and inviolability of the Holy Places of all religions.” Sounds great in theory. Too bad it hasn’t worked out in practice.
An increasingly influential group of extremists is doing things like putting up a sign in the city of Beit Shemesh, commanding women to cross the street so they don’t walk on a sidewalk in front of a synagogue. Last summer, these ultra-Orthodox Jewish men, known as haredis, hurled rocks at a woman as she lifted her baby out of her car, because they said she was immodestly dressed.
Prior to that incident, Natali Mashia, 27, was attacked by haredi men who broke the windows of her car, flattened her tires and dumped bleach inside the vehicle. When Mashia, who said she feared the men intended to set her on fire, ran away, she was hit in the head with a rock. It was reported that nobody among the crowd of onlookers tried to help her.
Shortly before Mashia’s ordeal, eight-year-old Na’ama Margolese was spit upon because her clothing was supposedly insufficiently modest.
In a report released in 2010, Hiddush, an Israeli group that fights for equality, found 63 gender-segregated bus lines in Israel, with women riders being forced to sit at the back of the bus. “One of the clearest findings is that women regularly face violence, humiliation and coercion on sex-segregated buses,” Rabbi Uri Regev, president and CEO of Hiddush, stated. This, despite the fact the Israeli Supreme Court has banned the imposition of gender-segregated seating.
Journalist Dina Kraft, writing for the Jewish news service JTA, reported last year that “segregation has extended to sidewalks, grocery store checkout lines (and) dentist office hours ... Some preschools are gender segregated, and one town has separate playground hours for boys and girls. And at a segregated HMO in Jerusalem (there are) separate entrances and waiting rooms for men and women.”
Can you say “Taliban lite”?
The issue I asked Ziv about has received wider coverage. Two months ago, a woman named Anat Hoffman, head of the Israel Religious Action Centre, was arrested and brutalized by Jerusalem police for wearing a tallit — a prayer shawl that Orthodox Jews reserve for men only, but which women wear in other branches of Judaism — and for praying aloud at the Western Wall. Hoffman was charged under the Israeli legal code’s regulation 287A, which provides for a sentence of up to two years in prison for performing a religious act that “offends the feelings for others.” Hoffman was handcuffed, and had her arm twisted so painfully by a police officer that she had to walk bent over, facing the ground. She says she was dragged 15 metres across the floor at the police station, and when she was given food in her cell, it was pushed through an opening in the door and dumped onto the floor.
Writing in the New York-based Jewish Daily Forward, Menachem Rosensaft, vice-president of the American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors and Their Descendants, questioned the silence of Israeli politicians about Hoffman’s arrest.
“But why has there not ... been a massive outpouring of indignation on the part of Israeli public figures, in particular those political and moral leaders who purport to promote civil and political rights for all of Israel’s citizens?” Rosensaft asked.
That’s similar to what I asked Ziv at the editorial board meeting. Why doesn’t the Israeli government do something about women’s rights being violated? Her response centred around the theme that Israel is governed by a coalition that has to consider the various factions in society and work toward compromises. She talked about having conversations and about taking Canadian concerns back to her government. That’s a very ambassadorial response, which was to be expected from a diplomat. But it lets everyone off the hook — from the politicians to the police who arrested and roughed up Hoffman, to the Taliban-like rock throwers and bleach pourers in Beit Shemesh, to those running the segregated bus lines.
There is no compromise on human rights. And having conversations is not enough, unless action follows.
We would consider these abuses bad enough in a country that does not know democracy. They are doubly intolerable and deplorable in Israel, a country that has never known anything but democracy.