Israel

HANEEN ZOABI is that rarest of beings, an Arab-Israeli woman who is a member of the Knesset, the Israeli parliament.

Two other Arab-Israeli women have preceded her there. Hussniya Jabara served from 1999 to 2003 with the social democratic Meretz party, while Nadia Hilou, an Arab-Israeli Christian woman member of the Labor party, was in the Knesset from 2006 to 2009.

Israel should adopt a policy of affirmative action and create a ministry for women's affairs, according to the Israel Women's Network, which published its annual report earlier this week.
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The number of Arab women seeking assistance in dealing with sexual assault has risen as a direct result of the intensive media coverage of former president Moshe Katsav's case, according to the Nazareth-based organization Women against Violence.
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For the first time in 40 years, a woman is within reach of becoming the prime minister of Israel, a nation traditionally dominated by macho military types and a religious establishment decidedly lukewarm about equal rights for women. Unlike Hillary Clinton or Sarah Palin in the United States, Israel's Tzipi Livni doesn't talk about cracking any glass ceilings or empowering her country's women.
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While Livni appears to be the front-runner in today's vote, her bid to become Israel's second female prime minister -- Golda Meir held the post from 1969 to 1974 -- is hindered by doubts about her lack of military experience.
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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.
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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.
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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

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.