7. Summing Up - Some Positive Pointers.
All of the issues that we have mentioned here may contribute to answering
the question that was raised earlier:
Why is it that, despite seemingly enlightened legislation, the gap is
still so great between what was promised in the Declaration of Independence
– freedom and equality for all regardless of gender, and the reality
that we see around us today?
It is clear that a great deal more remains to be done.
Let us conclude by asking whether there are any optimistic signs that can
be pointed to today in this regard. We have painted a picture of women’s
situation is Israel that is not overly encouraging. Nevertheless, there are
indeed a number of aspects of the general picture that are encouraging. Let
us briefly mention four important developments.
1. We have already mentioned the fact that the number of women elected
to the present Knesset is eighteen. This replaced the thirteen women
in the previous Knesset, which was far greater than the number elected
to any earlier Knesset. The current eighteen represent seven different
parties, and significantly, include for the first time in recent years a representative
of a specifically religious party, the Mafdal (National Religious Party) which
faced a vociferous demand from its women members to place a woman on the party
list.
The women of the present Knesset are divided by many different aspects
of personality and ideology. However, many of them have stated that they intend
to try and work to improve the situation of women and there are plenty of
precedents for women of very different parties working together on a common
agenda.
2. We have pointed out the importance of the army as a premier
national institution in the country. Within this context we have emphasised
the problem of the limited number of jobs (often secondary and secretarial)
that women have traditionally performed in the army. This has done much to
influence the image of women in the eyes of the country as a whole and the
self-image of women.
In the last few years, partly due to recourse to the Israeli judicial system,
many more professions in the army have begun to open up to Israeli women.
Women can now be air force pilots and ship’s captains, and there are
women who have completed both courses, something unthinkable just a few years
ago. There are women integrated into combat forces in a training capacity,
training recruits for armed combat.
Only about three years ago, no more sixty percent of army professions were
open to women. Today the number is closer to eighty per cent. A decade ago,
some forty per cent of all women soldiers were in clerking positions. Today
the number is around twenty per cent. In Summer 2003, the first group of women
combat soldiers whose length of service will be three full years, like that
of male soldiers, was admitted into the army. The plan is for these women
to continue with full reserve duty when they leave the permanent army.
These are major changes. The issue of women actually being involved in military
combat has not yet been resolved. This is due to the reservations and questions
that were mentioned above, but there is no doubt that the boundaries of “productive
labour” for women in the army are being extended all the time.
3. There are a number of women’s organisations that
are doing excellent work in the field of lobbying and raising consciousness
regarding the need for changes in the attitudes towards and legislation regarding
women. The Israel Women’s Network, set up by Alice Shalvi
in 1984, is the primary advocacy organisation in this respect and it has achieved
some important results. Its voice is listened to in the corridors of power
and its research gets high profile publicity.
We have mentioned the Knesset Committee for the Status of Women,
set up in 1992 and in addition the government created in 1998 an Authority
for the Advancement of Women. Israeli Universities have developed departments
of gender studies and continue to sponsor valuable research in subjects that
have been neglected up till now. There is a real chance that the cumulative
effect of all of these institutions will change the situation of Israeli women
in the future.
4. Within the Orthodox religious world, there is an extremely
important development going on. In the last two decades or so, increasing
numbers of institutions within the Modern Orthodox world have started to offer
a deep text-based Jewish education for women.
Options open to high-school students have greatly increased in this regard,
and there are now a significant number of Yeshivot and Batei
Midrash open exclusively to women. Universities routinely offer higher
education in Jewish studies to women and many women avail themselves of the
opportunity to study for a doctorate in Talmud, for example, whereas, a generation
ago, such a thing was almost unheard of. This has had a number of significant
results despite the fact that the “movement” is still largely
in its infancy.
Firstly, there is the beginning of a large group of Orthodox (and non-Orthodox,
needless to say) women, knowledgeable in Torah in a way that was inconceivable
at any other time in Jewish history. Women who have been educated in this
way will certainly insist on making their presence felt within the Jewish
world, and among other things will attempt to enfranchise their fellow women
Jews and to claim a new status within the Jewish world. We already see the
first important results.
There is a large number of talented Orthodox women, knowledgeable in Judaism
and educated in Jewish sources, who are making their way out into the Orthodox
world as representatives of women before Rabbinical Courts and as advisors
to women on Halachic issues in the area of family purity.
This has the potential of causing major change to develop within the institutions
of Israeli Orthodoxy and forcing the rabbinic leaders to begin to deal seriously
with issues that they have been free to ignore or to merely pay lip-service
over the years. Already the subject of Agunot is being examined much
more seriously by watchdog organisations that suggest Halachic solutions
to the problem of women and divorce. Just recently, family violence and sexual
abuse within the Orthodox world have started to be placed on the agenda by
Orthodox women.
It is clear that the era of passivity in public affairs on the part of Orthodox
women has passed never to return. There is another interesting development
that is worth mentioning within the Modern Orthodox world. Still at the a-typical
radical fringes of that world, but arousing increasing interest, there are
a few strongly “egalitarian” Orthodox synagogues in Israel, primarily
in Jerusalem, which are exploring the limits of expanded women’s roles
inside the ritual service, within the limits of the Halachah. These
developments within the Modern Orthodox world are certainly an important and
interesting development that promises much for the future.
When we assess the situation of Israeli women today, there remains a great
deal to be achieved in order to even approach the equality promised in the
Declaration of Independence. A society that prides itself on its democratic
character and purports to model itself, in social terms, on the examples of
the Western democracies, clearly has a lot of self-examination to do in everything
connected with the situation of women.
There are those who would say that the situation is gloomy and getting worse.
There are others who will point to the various factors with which we have
closed and say that there is indeed room for hope.
It might be, that both positions are tenable in the present reality. It might
be that Israeli society rests on a kind of a knife edge in relation to women’s
position. The knife can fall both ways. For those who believe in the words
of the Declaration of Independence and would like to see the country drawing
ever closer to the vision of those words, let us hope that the knife falls
in the right direction and that a better world for the women of Israel is
indeed on the way.