For years, Israeli women have been pressured into moving to the rear of public buses serving strictly religious Jews. Now, in confrontations reminiscent of the era of Rosa Parks, women are pushing back.
Israeli women protesting a gender-segregation campaign by ultra-Orthodox Jews sat at the front of a bus in Jerusalem on Jan 1.
Read the whole story in Wall Street Journal, posted 5 January
On a cold night in the centre of Jerusalem this week, they sang, swayed and danced, united in outrage at the exclusion of women and growing gender segregation in the public arena."We won't stop singing or showing women's faces or dancing until this ugly phenomenon which is foreign to Judaism or to any democratic society has vanished," said Micky Gidzin, of Be Free Israel, the organisers of the musical protest.
The ultra-orthodox are a growing sector of Jerusalem's population, currently more than 20% but rising fast due to their high birth rate. They demand modest dress, the separation of men and women in public and a prohibition on women singing or dancing in mixed groups because it may arouse impure thoughts.
Read the whole story on The Guardian, published December 9, 2011.
"Todas las mujeres tienen frustraciones. Yo sólo lucho", señaló Hanin Zoabi, palestina integrante del parlamento de Israel y primera mujer en la lista del partido árabe Balad.
"El poder volvió al pueblo tunecino y egipcio", señaló Zoabi, de 41 años, entusiasmada por la agitación política y social de los países árabes de África del norte y Medio Oriente.
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As a female Palestinian MP in Israel's Knesset, this activist has taken up the battle for rights on two fronts.
Haneen Zoubi has that most incongruous of job descriptions: a Palestinian member of the Israeli parliament. She is also the first woman elected from an Arab party to a parliament increasingly dominated by right-wing Jewish men.
While women's rights advocates admit that Livni, who won a razor-thin primary against Transportation Minister Shaul Mofaz on Wednesday, isn't what they would call a flag-waving feminist, they're convinced she carries her feminist credentials proudly - in her business-suit pocket. That Livni ran her Kadima primary campaign on security and economic issues, with almost no reference to explicitly feminist issues, was born out of necessity, the feminists assert, and they don't hold it against her.
Touted as the new Golda Meir, former Mossad agent-turned-politician Tzipi Livni emerged tonight as Israel’s second woman prime minister, less than a decade after she first entered parliament. Israeli television stations announced that exit polls showed a victory for the 50-year-old mother of two in Kadima party elections to choose a successor to Ehud Olmert.
