How Israel enables discrimination against ultra-Orthodox women
Those praising Israeli democracy must remember that women are constantly discriminated against by ultra-Orthodox parties that are part of the ruling coalition.
On Dec. 18, US Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley took the opportunity of a periodic Security Council debate on the situation in the Middle East, which generally focuses on the injustice of the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory, to attack the organization for being what she termed “a disproportionately hostile place for the Middle East’s most enduring democracy.” Luckily for the top American diplomat, she was not born in an ultra-Orthodox family in Jerusalem, the city whose name she has been citing repeatedly in recent days. Ultra-Orthodox women from Jerusalem do not get to be governors or members of Congress and can only dream of an ambassadorial appointment.
The ruling coalition of “the most enduring democracy” in the Middle East includes two ultra-Orthodox political parties that have never been represented by a woman. They have never had a single female representative in Israel’s local governments either, nor have they ever had a female representative in the Israeli foreign service. On the other hand, the Republic of Iran, notorious for its religious fanaticism, has 17 women members of parliament. Afghanistan, Tunisia, Sudan and South Sudan leave “the only democracy in the Middle East” behind in terms of women’s parliamentary participation.
Israel is among the few states in the Middle East, and the only one in the West, that has for decades practiced gender-based discrimination — in addition to discrimination on grounds of nationality, ethnicity and religion, with which this column has dealt extensively in the past.
Article 6 in the bylaws of the ultra-Orthodox Agudat Yisrael Party — one of two parties that make up the Yahadut HaTorah faction in the Knesset — stipulates that a party member must be an adult male over the age of 18 who observes religious law, fears God and identifies with the party and its goals. Note that this must be a man, not a woman. Rabbi Mordechai Blau, No. 48 on the party’s potential Knesset list and head of the party’s “guardians of sanctity and modesty,” threatened in 2014 that ultra-Orthodox feminists agitating for political power would be ostracized and boycotted, their marriages annulled and their children banned from party-run schools. The Shas Party, which represents ultra-Orthodox Jews of Sephardi (Eastern) origin, also forbids women from running for public office but is careful not to anchor this offensive edict in any official document.
