Theocracy has arrived in Israel. And who is the first target? Women. Of course we are.

If coalition partners have their way, gender segregation will be made legal. Are we really that surprised? They always come for women first.

This morning, Israel woke up to the news that certain religious parties are pressuring soon-to-be-Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu (again) to include the legalization of gender segregation as a condition of the coalition agreement.

So what, you ask?

Separate but equal, you say?

Hmmm. Interesting. You’ve obviously never sat in the women’s section of an Orthodox synagogue. Separate? Yes. Equal? Not even a little.

In an Orthodox synagogue, the men’s section is the shul. It’s where the Torah is, where the cantor is, where people are busy, where they are heard, where they are seen, where they hold the Torah, where they give speeches, where they name babies, where candies are thrown to, where people can speak out loud, where the people actually count. Literally count, for a quorum.

The women’s section, by contrast, is set apart, often up in a balcony, often covered by a wall or a curtain. The people sitting in the women’s section cannot be seen or heard, cannot lead the service, cannot read from the Torah, cannot participate in managing the service, cannot give a speech, and do not even count in the quorum. If women show up or don’t show up, if there is anyone actually there or not, it doesn’t make any difference whatsoever. They are merely observers to where the “real” events are happening.

This is the model that the new government may soon be able to legally adopt in government run affairs. That means segregating out women in events of the Education Ministry, the Health Ministry, the Religious Ministry, or anything else.

Picture that for a moment. The idea is to turn the entire country into an Orthodox synagogue. This should be extremely troubling — especially if you’ve seen this.

This is not a “Separate but equal situation.” This is removing women’s presence from the public sphere.

It is an effort to create women-free spaces. Why? For men. It is about creating spaces in which men can be confident knowing that they will not have to see or hear a woman’s body, face, or voice.

It is where women will have zero power, zero ability to participate, to lead, to carry out professional duties, to have their knowledge and expertise valued.

It is about depriving women of our freedom and right to move around and live fully. It deprives women or professional, financial, and cultural opportunities.

It is about reducing women, again, to silent objects in the landscape, instead of full members of society.

Because let’s be clear about this: Gender segregation will not deprive men of any opportunities — other than the opportunity to hear from or learn from a woman. They will still be able to do everything else that they have always done. just without having women in the room.

Women, by contrast, will be moved to the back of the room or the back of the bus where people do not get up on stage to give a talk or accept an award or sing or emcee an event or read an excerpt from their book. Even women who are smarter, more knowledgeable, or more accomplished than the men in the room will not be in a position to speak to men about any of it.

The already outrageous practice in which some religious gynecology conferences are conducted in male-only spaces with women professors relegated to the space in the back behind the curtain — that will become legal.

Iran, anyone? No, Israel.

This is not imagination or conjecture. Actually, gender segregation in Israel is already happening, even though it isn’t exactly legal. In my book, The War on Women in Israel, I document dozens of cases in which official government or municipal events were gender segregated. I am sharing an excerpt from my book below.

We should not be surprised that when men in power aim for more control, their first target is women’s bodies. We saw this in Iran. We saw this in Afghanistan. We saw this in the United States of America.

Over and again it’s the same story. It’s a very old story, dating back thousands of years. When a new political group wants to assert its power over its nation, all too often the first group it comes for is women.

That’s how it starts. Watch what happens to the women.

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Excerpt from Chapter 2 of The War on Women in Israel

Professor Chani Ma’ayan is an impressive woman. A pediatrician and medical researcher, Prof Ma’ayan has dedicated the past forty years to healing lung problems in children. As Director of the Israel Center for Family Dysautonomia at Hadassah Hospital-Mount Scopus in Jerusalem, which she has been running since its inception in 1981, Prof. Ma’ayan has become a world-recognized expert in children’s respiratory disorders, and has written many books and articles on the subject as well as working with children all around Israel to help resolve their respiratory problems. For all these accomplishments, Prof. Ma’ayan was awarded a prestigious prize of the Health Ministry in 2011 in recognition of her research on Dysautonomia and Jewish law.

All these accomplishments, however, are irrelevant in the ultra-Orthodox world compared to the one most important fact on her resume: Prof. Ma’ayan is a woman.

And so, at the award ceremony in December 2011, she and her co-winner Nurse Naama Holtzer, were asked not to come up on to the stage but rather to send a man in their place. They were also asked to sit all the way in the back, far from where the men in the audience would be able to see them. And so it was. Some guy with no credentials was applauded and honored by a hall full of men, on the bill of the Ministry of Health, while the woman who actually earned the award, the one who actually did four decades of incredible work for children’s health, sat invisibly, anonymously and quietly in the back row. [1].

The pressure to place women at the back of the bus, out of sight of men in the front, is just one expression of religious pressure to create a woman-free world, a public space in which women’s bodies are absent, women’s voice are not heard, and women’s faces are unseen.  It is part of a growing and frighteningly powerful world view which views women’s complete and utter absence is considered a societal ideal. Women are being systematically erased from the public sphere, and there are those who don’t seem to care.

Indeed, what is perhaps most surprising is the extent to which people who are not ultra-Orthodox capitulate to this pressure.  The Health Ministry is an official government body, one of many that have agreed to demands to exclude women. Not only have government and municipal bodies shockingly agreeing to create women-free spaces, but businesses as well. The trend to exclude women, while perhaps a reflection of the most radical religious groups, has been easily accepted throughout Israeli society.

The ready acceptance of demands by religious extremists to create women-free public spaces illustrates some critical issues about the dynamics of misogyny in otherwise democratic and secular societies. Like the Republican Party in America, whose members of Congress have proposed some frighteningly anti-women legislation based on radical interpretations of the Bible to a public that is often more supportive than we would expect it to be, secular societies have not always been as resistant to misogyny in the name of religion as one might expect. The idea of women-free zones, it seems – even when it originates in religious radicalism – is not so objectionable to many men.

Gender segregation spreads

The buses were only the beginning. Over the past 5-10 years (there is no precise record, only anecdotal evidence shared by bloggers, journalists, and some annoyed residents), haredi demands for gender segregation in public spaces have spread to almost every conceivable public space. 

·        HMO clinics. In the city of Beit Shemesh, HMOs have separate hours for men and women, or in one case wooden partitions in waiting rooms, in order to, according to the signs “enable men to avoid encountering women whom they consider immodestly dressed”.

·        Post offices. A post office in the Bukharian section of Jerusalem has separate lines for men and women, and a spokesperson for the Ministry of Communications said that more were on their way. 

·        Banks. The Paolei Agudat Israel Bank of the International Bank Group held a convention for its “customers” but only allowed men to attend and participate.

·        Library. The public library in the Ramat Shlomo neighborhood of Jerusalem has separate hours for boys and girls.

·        The city streets. Signs on certain streets in the city of Beit Shemesh tell women to cross to the other side.[2] Over the holiday of Tabernacles (Sukkot), women in certain areas of Jerusalem are asked – sometimes by the police, enforcing haredi demands – to move to the other side of the street. In 2009, the Jerusalem Day celebrations in the center of town were accompanied by gender segregation on the streets. Unofficial “guards” with yellow jackets stood in the crowd between the men and women and made sure the segregation was observed. When they saw men or women on the “wrong” side, they told them to move over.”

·        Hospitals. In 2011, then Deputy Health Minister Yaakov Litzman announced his intention to establish separate psychiatric hospitals for men and women, starting with separate departments. This announcement was met with enormous opposition from professionals in the field who believe that this endangers the lives of the patients by failing to create a healthy, sustainable microcosm of society during patients’ treatment.

·        Trains and light-rail. Women are regularly asked to avoid certain cars, including ones where men are praying and have unofficially created an all-male Orthodox synagogue on the public train.[3]

·        Municipal events. The Jerusalem municipality asked women to sit at the side of the conference hall at a conference, despite complaints by female members of the municipal council. Committee meetings have also reported to have partitions or “dividing screens”. The Petach Tikva municipality held an educational event for little children with separate seating for boys and girls.[4]

·        The Ministry of Education. At least one conference of the Ministry of Education asked women to sit in the back “so that men would not have to watch the presentation ‘through the women’”.

·        Cemeteries and funerals. Signs have been erected in funeral homes in several cities asking women to sit in a separate section. The Hevra Kadisha (Jewish burial society) in several cities take it upon themselves to impose rules on mourners, forbidding women from eulogizing and forbidding women from going to the grave. There are also signs in some cemeteries telling women to dress “modestly”.

·        Universities. Women were asked to leave the fitness center on campus at the Technion because two religious men walked in and demanded that they leave – the security guards helped remove the women from the treadmills at the request of the men.[5] At the Jerusalem Givat Ram campus of Hebrew University, it is already established practice: women are not allowed into the fitness center when men are swimming.[6]

·        Magen David Adom. A “fun day” event for MDA volunteers was separated into two events, one for “male volunteers and their sons” and a separate one for “female volunteers and their daughters.”

·        Public Conferences. The annual conference of fertility and women’s health run by the Puah Institute was gender segregated, with no women speakers and women participants sitting at the back. The annual Management Forum conference held at the International Convention Center in Jerusalem decided in its sixth year to no longer allow women to attend. Finance Minister Yuval Steinitz, Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat and Bank Hapoalim CEO Zion Keinan addressed the audience during the conference, despite the ban on women, and security guards actively assisted in refusing entry to women. [7]

·        Separate driving courses. The Transport Ministry has opened all-male preventive driving courses for men who wish to avoid studying while sitting alongside women. [8]

·        Private businesses. Some businesses catering to the haredi community have imposed gender segregation, such as a “women only” side entrance to a candy shop, separate elevators at a banquet hall, separate hours for men and women at a supermarket, segregation at an amusement park, and more. [9]

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[1]  “J.J. Goldberg,”Women Honorees Barred From Science Award Stage”, Forward December 20, 2011,  http://blogs.forward.com/forward-thinking/148220/women-honorees-barred-from-science-award-stage/#ixzz2OpaWUwDm; See also, http://doctorsonly.co.il/2011/12/27443/

[2] http://reshet.tv/%D7%97%D7%93%D7%A9%D7%95%D7%AA/News/Domestic/internal/Article,85957.aspx

[3] http://news.nana10.co.il/Article/?ArticleID=854585&sid=126 

[4] http://www.haaretz.co.il/news/education/1.1598005

[5] http://www.mako.co.il/news-israel/education/Article-bc608f50ac83431017.htm&sCh=31750a2610f26110&pId=786102762

[6] http://www.nrg.co.il/online/54/ART2/315/724.html?hp=54&cat=869&loc=4

[7] http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4094000,00.html

[8] Ari Galahar, “New: 'Kosher' preventive driving course”, 07.11.11, 14:10   http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4087740,00.html

[9] Ricky Shapiro-Rosenberg, “Excluded, For God’s Sake: Gender Segregation in Public Space in Israel” 11-29, http://www.irac.org/userfiles/Excluded,%20For%20God%27s%20Sake%20-%20Report%20on%20Gender%20Segregation%20in%20the%20Public%20Sphere%20in%20Israel.pdf

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