5. Statehood – Promise and (Lack of) Fulfilment.
The Declaration of Independence adopted at the time of the birth of the
state in May 1948 was an enlightened document. Its intentions were wonderful
and they were declared in ringing, almost messianic, tones.
“Liberty, justice and peace as taught by the Hebrew prophets…full
social and political equality of all of its citizens, without distinction
of race, creed or sex…”
These were only some of the promises of the document. In many senses, it
could be argued that the story of the State of Israel over the past fifty
odd years is nothing less than the attempt of one of the most complex societies
in the world, from the point of view of ethnic diversity and conflicting cultural
views, to live up to those stirring phrases. In sphere after sphere, we see
how reality has fallen short of ideal.
This is true for almost every aspect of Israeli life and it is certainly
true of the question of women’s place in the society. The promised equality,
which did not, as we have suggested, exist in 1948, remained beyond the reach
of women and indeed of the society as a whole. The situation remains the same
today. This is not to say that there have not been some very important advances
over the years, but taken as a whole, despite some valiant efforts, the situation
today falls far short of the promises of the Declaration. Equality has not
been achieved. To examine every aspect of the story would take far more space
than we have here, but we will attempt to point to some of the most important
aspects of the story over the last half-century and suggest some of the reasons
why proper equality for women has never been achieved. We now abandon a step-by-step
chronological perspective and talk of the fifty odd years of statehood as
a whole.
Let us take the opportunity here to note that while we are focusing in this
article on the question of Jewish women, the moment that we talk of the State
of Israel rather than Jewish society of pre-state Mandate Palestine, we are
talking about all women, Jewish and Arab. It should be noted that the Arab
population of Israel is a little under 20% of the state’s population.
As citizens of the State, they are influenced by all of the trends that influence
the rest of the population. They are under the control of their own extremely
conservative religious leaders rather than the rabbis to whom we will refer
in the analysis below, and their non-participation in the army makes that
part of the following analysis basically meaningless for them. However, the
situation of Arab women is in many respects very much behind that of the Jewish
women of Israel, and that should be borne in mind during the rest of this
survey.
In our survey of the situation of women in the State of Israel, we should
begin by noting that in the early years of the State, and indeed at intervals
since then, some very important legislation has been passed which has certainly
regulated legal improvements in the situation of women in Israel.
- In 1951, the Act for the Equality of Men and Women was passed. This followed
the National Service Law, which mandated two years of compulsory military
service for men and women alike, and the Compulsory Education Act which
provided for compulsory education for all boys and girls up to mid-teenage
years.
- In 1964, the Equal Pay Law was passed and two more important pieces of
legislation were passed in the late 1980’s:
- The 1987 Equal Retirement Age Law and the Equal Employment Opportunities
law a year later.
-
Three month paid maternity leave for all women was guaranteed by
law and other impressive social legislation, such as the provision
that allowed mothers to use paid sick leave days to look after their
own sick children, also became law.
- In addition to this social legislation, religious law also improved women’s
lot. For example, in the first years of statehood, polygamy and child-marriage
were outlawed in Israel. Those who immigrated with more than one wife were
allowed to maintain the arrangement. However, all new cases were forbidden,
apart from some very specific cases, where the Rabbinate was authorised
to intervene. As a result, polygamous marriage is extremely rare among the
Jews of Israel. (1)
All in all, the social legislation looked like a dream for would-be egalitarians,
and therefore it should perhaps surprise us that the 1975 Commission of Inquiry
on the Status of Women, set up by then Prime Minister Yitzhak
Rabin, found so much that was problematic in terms of women’s status
in the society. All in all, when the Commission presented its final report
to new Prime Minister Menachem Begin in 1977,
it had no less than 241 recommendations for the improvement of women’s
status.
In the social and legal realm, there are still a large number of areas where,
even in the legal sphere, women are in a clearly disadvantaged situation.
- For example, paid maternity leave for which women cannot be fired from
their work is very important, but there is nothing to prevent employers from
firing the women as soon as they come back to work.
- Another example is the fact that the state does little to enforce the payment
to women of alimony and child support that have been agreed by the courts,
in the case of divorce. Women almost always get to keep the children but
often they are left with inadequate payments to take care of those children.
The situation of such women – and many others – worsened considerably
when welfare payments were drastically slashed by the Treasury in Summer 2003.
Single mothers were among the worst hit by the cuts in payments, causing a
dramatic and much publicised demonstration and “sit-down strike”
outside of the Knesset. The major goal of the Treasury was to push
more people – in this case women – into the employment market
and welfare payments were used as a means of pressurising women to look for
productive work.
The specific and much debated problem of the plan happening in 2003 was that
the economy of Israel was passing through years of high unemployment with
work opportunities very limited, making it extremely difficult for newcomers
to find employment in the market. That, one can suggest, is a seasonal problem,
connected with the temporary economic state of the country.
The more problematic aspect, however, and one that caused considerably less
debate was the fact that the earning opportunities for unskilled women especially,
were extremely limited. Women’s wages in the unskilled market are so
low, that even if the mothers in particular were to find work, many of them
would be forced down to a basic poverty level. This would make their own efforts
to support their family very problematic.
Historians and sociologists will not be surprised by the seeming anomaly
in the poor situation of women in general despite the large amount of legislation
specifically aimed at improving their lot. It is well known that when a society
passes law after law in a specific direction, it can be interpreted in two
opposite ways. Sometimes the laws do, indeed, represent the highest values
of the society and the large number of laws represents the progressive detailing
and legal patterning of trends already present in the society.
However, at other times they represent a consistent attempt of the society’s
lawmakers to return, time and time again, to things that are not happening
in the society, in efforts to try and right those wrongs through legislation.
In addition, we know that often there exists an enormous gap between the statute
book and the actual situation of society. Anyone who wants proof of this has
only to look, for example, at the different laws for Jewish emancipation in
late 18th and 19th century Europe, and the ways that whole societies often
opposed the laws of their own legislature in terms of their social attitudes.
There is no denying the good intentions of the various laws for the equality
of women, but they did not create that equality. The full and equal integration
of women into the society and economy of Israel simply did not occur in the
ways that the founders of the state had suggested in their messianic declaration.
5A. Examining the Facts. Economics and Politics.
Let us examine a few recent facts in the economic and political field to
prove the point. Economically, the picture is quite clear. In 2002, the average
woman’s wage for a job was 40% lower than a man’s for the same
job. In the public sector in 2002, only 32% of senior management and 10% of
managing directors of companies were women. The average monthly wage of senior
women in management was a good NIS 1500 lower than men’s.
In the public sector, despite the fact that women comprise 60% of all state
employees, the higher up one goes in the civil service “dirug”
(status ranking which is linked to earnings) the fewer the number of women
that can be found. In 1999, for example, at the highest level (dirug A) only
7% were women. At the second level, 9% were women and at the third level 15%
were women.
In field after field, women are under-represented at the top levels of management
or professional achievement, despite adequate representation further down
the scale. The statistics bear this out for all the major areas of Israeli
economic and professional life. The positions of High Court judges, surgeons,
specialist doctors and university professors, for example, are far more male
dominated in terms of ratios than the positions of judges in general, doctors
in general or university lecturers in general.
In local leadership and political representation, the story is similar. The
case of Golda Meir as prime minister was often seen to be an example of women’s
high level involvement in Israel’s political system and the system’s
openness to women’s participation. However, since 1978, when Israel
began to elect city mayors directly, only four of the hundreds of mayors elected
were women, including two elected in 1998 and still in office in 2003.
Women have usually comprised 7% to 9% of Knesset members with numbers not
changing noticeably over time (2). In 1999, the numbers went
up appreciably to 11.7% (13 M.K’s), as opposed to 7.5% in the outgoing
Knesset, and the current Knesset provides the largest number of women yet
elected - 15% (18 M.K’s). Out of 13 permanent parliamentary committees,
women are in charge of three. This is encouraging in numerical terms.
However, an examination of the committees headed by women is instructive.
The most important committee is the committee for Immigration, Absorption
and Diaspora Affairs, while the Committee for Science and Technical Research
and Development is, at best, seen as a relatively marginal committee. In addition,
not unsurprisingly, a woman heads the Committee for the Advancement of the
Status of Women. However, in the most important committees, women are seriously
under-represented. The Committee for Foreign Affairs and Defense has, for
example, only one woman out of a total of 17 members, while the Finance Committee
has two women out of the same total of 17 members.
In the government, the numbers are smaller, with only nine women having served
as cabinet ministers in the first 16 Israeli governments. Today, there are
three women in ministerial positions (education, environment, absorption)
out of a total of 23 ministers in the current government. Only one woman functions
as a director-general in a government ministry (education). In a survey of
international political representation and education conducted in 2002, Israel
ranked only 54th in the world in terms of representation of women in parliament
despite the fact that it ranked in ninth place in the world in terms of academically
qualified women in its population.
5. B. Women in Society – The Social Situation.
Beyond economic and political categories, the picture is bleakly similar
in relation to the general situation of women in Israeli society today.
- Issues of sexual harassment and violence against women are too common
in Israel today to require statistical proof. Thousands of women are regularly
harassed verbally or physically in the work place and the street. Despite
the recent promulgation of a strict law against sexual harassment, abuse
is endemic and is seen by many in the society as a harmless and acceptable
norm. (The promulgation of the law is yet another case of legislation running
after a flagrant social abuse and attempting to alter a social norm through
legislation).
- Cases of family violence are currently at horrific proportions and the
last three or four years have seen dozens of murders of women by members
of their family or former lovers.
- Rape cases have become a commonplace, including many cases of group rape
and gang rape. Israel has become an international centre of traffic in women,
with hundreds of women being sold as sexual slaves each year.
All of this is depressingly familiar to even the casual reader of the
Israeli press and needs no expansion here
How can one explain the very clear picture that modern Israel presents, a
picture of blatant inequality for women in a largely male-oriented society,
despite the good intentions of the founders who signed the Declaration of
Independence in 1948?
The subject is complex and would need far more space than we have here to
survey comprehensively. However, a number of suggestions can be made, which
can serve as the starting-point for those who wish to investigate the issue
further.
Despite the efforts of certain feminist thinkers to create an idea of an
idealised primeval society, where goddess worship was dominant and societies
were organised according to the needs of women, the truth is that just about
all human societies that are known to us have been, and continue to be, organised
principally by, and for, men.
One of the great stories of modern history is the attempt of women collectively,
with the help of liberal male elements in the society, to restructure society
in a fairer, more egalitarian way. There are places where that has proved
easier and others where it has proved more difficult, but it has never been
achieved, even minimally, without some kind of struggle. The nature of the
struggle basically consists of the ability of women and the enlightened circles
in male societies to convince others that they, and the society as a whole,
would be better served by greater equality. In some places, there have been
fewer obstacles to overcome and in others, the obstacles have been overwhelming.
Israel, it can be suggested, is in a strange situation in this struggle.
Because of the ideological basis on which much of the society has been built,
and the progressive legislation that has been accepted, it should have had
a relatively easy ride to a situation of greater equality. There have been
many women, including relatively organised groups of women, who have understood
this as their interest, certainly since the early years of the twentieth century.
The antithesis, however, seems to suggest that the presence of other, conservative
factors has been so strong that the ability of the society to change substantively
has been hindered to the point of neutralising much of the strength of the
forces of change. The next section will consider what some of those forces
might be.
1. However, there are not infrequent cases of
Bedouin men taking more than one wife, despite the essential illegality of
the act under state law.
2. In the first Knesset, there were twelve
women and in the ninth (which opened in 1977) there were ten: in the current
sixteenth Knesset, as mentioned, there are eighteen. It is interesting to
see the spread of parties. In the first Knesset, nine of the twelve women
represented the two socialist Zionist parties, Mapai and Mapam: in addition
there was one woman each from WIZO, the General Zionists and Herut. In 1977,
six represented the Ma’arach (the Labour party), two represented Herut,
and Shinui and the N.R.P. each had one representative. After the 2003 elections,
women represented seven parties. The Likud led with seven, followed by Labour
with four, Shinui with three, with one representative each from the N.R.P.,
One Israel, Meretz and Israel b’Aliyah – subsequently absorbed
into the Likud. Out of the twelve women in the first Knesset, all were immigrants
from Russia, the Ukraine, Serbia and Poland. Out of the ten women in the ninth
Knesset, three were born in Israel, three in Lithuania or Poland, one in Germany,
one in Iraq, one in Syria and one in England. In the eighteenth Knesset, fourteen
of the eighteen were born in Israel, and of the other four, three (from Iraq,
Russia and Rumania) came to Israel as young children while the last was a
mature immigrant from Russia.