No, enforced gender segregation in Israel is not about protecting women. Here is how I know.

There is a huge difference between segregation that excludes women from locations of power, and segregation that excludes men from women's private spaces. One is protection, and one is oppression.

Several years ago when I was travelling in Mumbai, I suddenly noticed that I was the only woman in the train car. I asked my traveling partner and he explained that I was in a “men’s car”.

I was shocked! In my entire adult life I had never been in the “men’s section”, and was certain that this was illegal or something.

“Why isn’t anyone telling me to get off?” I asked.

“Oh, women are allowed into the men’s carriage,” he said.

So the “men’s car” was really a “mixed car”. I didn’t understand.

Across the track, I saw a carriage full of only women, the designated “women’s car”. Was that also really “mixed”?

“No, no, that’s the women’s car,” he said. “No men are allowed in there.”

Why? “To protect the women. It’s a response to sexual assault.”

I was a bit confused by this and it took me a minute to understand why.

Coming from the gender segregation cultures of Orthodox Judaism which have since bled into Israeli society, I had a completely different experience of this. In Orthodoxy, a woman would never in a million years be allowed to enter a men’s section, but men can easily enter a woman’s section.

I have vivid memories of this experience, even from my childhood synagogue. In our synagogue, the men’s section was down the middle, and the women’s section flanked the sides of the hall, next to the windows and radiators. I have many memories of men randomly coming into the women’s section to play with the windows or other things. Sometimes men would carry the Torah through the women’s section, which I think was considered progressive (that is, that women should be able to kiss the Torah at all).

But for a woman to go into the men’s section? No way! When a girl had a bat mitzvah, she would stand up in the women’s section at the end of services – so as not to distract the holy service – and the rabbi would get up on the podium and make a speech, and her father would go up and accept the shul’s gift. A female in the men’s section was a no-go. Not to give a speech, not to sit in the president’s chair, certainly not to sit in the rabbi’s chair, and not even to accept her own gift. The men’s section has a very clear role: Creating a women-free space. The central space, the location of power and activity and voice, is the men’s space. No women allowed.

In India, by contrast, the men’s section is not meant to keep women away. Women are free to come and go and nobody will stop them. The segregation is only enforced in the women’s section as a form of protecting women, not excluding them. It’s a huge difference.

By the way, the reason why I remember so vividly the experiences of men randomly coming into the women’s section is because it felt strange. I couldn’t explain it then, but I can now. If women were not allowed to enter the men’s section because we were sexually tempting to men, why are men allowed to be sexually tempting to women? The answer is that women were deemed to be not tempted. It’s like we have no sexual desire at all. That’s what that did to us.

But I digress. I want to return to the difference between segregation on Indian trains and segregation in Orthodox shuls and in modern-day democratic Israel.

The difference in segregation as protection for women versus segregation as excluding women is found in these details. If your segregation is meant to keep women out of locations of power and voice, it is not an act of protection. It is an act of oppression.

This is a crucial issue to keep in mind as Israel grapples with the rise of religious radicalism in the incoming government, whose coalition partners are already demanding that gender segregation be legalized. (It happens on the ground despite having been made illegal by the Supreme Court. And by the way, the new government will likely neutralize the power of the Supreme Court as well, further disarming women. The threat to the courts is its own massive and infuriating topic, which I plan to write about soon.)

All over social media, I keep hearing/seeing the line that this is for women’s protection.

I call bullshit on that. And don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

If women are excluded from locations of voice and power, that is not protection of women. That is men in charge constructing women-free zones, period. Remember the idea of Judenrein, Jew-free spaces? This is the same concept. It is about religious men seeking to walk freely through a world in which they do not have to encounter women –not our bodies, not our voices, not our ideas, not our expertise.

They call it all sexuality. They call us sexual distractions. But that is just a ruse. Women are more than sexual objects on someone else’s landscape. We are whole beings, whole people, with hands to work and brains to think and bodies to move. When they say we are sexual distractions, they are not talking about us. They are talking about their flattened fantasies about what they wish we were – soulless, mindless, sexual performers.

Excluding women the way the Orthodox leadership is pushing for it is not about any of that. It is not about wanting to be free from sexual temptation. It is about failing to see that women are human beings, period.

We cannot let that happen. In Israel 2022, we cannot fall for the scam that women need to  be hidden from view. It is not “protection”. It is a campaign to throw women under the bus. And we cannot have that.

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