At a time when the subject of women’s rights is dominating in the media and conversations, as more and more women are feeling emboldened enough to tell their stories of the harassment and assaults they have suffered, an article about Arab and Jewish feminists fighting sexual violence and patriarchy should be welcomed.
The problem is, Julie Bindel’s article in the International Business Times does a disservice to the issue by politicizing it and using it to attack Israel. I guess this is only to be expected from someone who accuses Israel of apartheid and is pro-BDS.
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Bindel speaks to a number of Israeli and Palestinian activists, and seems to promote a false equivalence between the challenges faced by Israeli and Palestinian women:
Palestinian girls can be married at age 15, rape in marriage is not illegal and the legal system is ineffective when it comes to dealing with so-called “honour crimes”. Palestinian women are also impacted by Israel’s occupation of the West Bank.
But there is a massive problem of violence and discrimination of Jewish women, which is rarely acknowledged.
On the subject of honor killings, she states that in Lod, Arab women make up 38% of the 104 women reported murdered, even though the entire Arab population there is 21%, and that most of the Arab women murders remain unsolved. From Palestinian women living under the threat of being murdered by their own families, Bindel then turns to an issue affecting Jewish women and girls – the rise in religious fundamentalism. She quotes Ronit Piso from Isha L’Isha (Woman to Woman) Haifa Feminist Center, saying “Today most of the schools of even the moderate orthodox educate girls and boys separately… This gives permission for a type of gender apartheid.”
In fact, single-sex schools are common around the world, and not just for religious reasons. Studies have shown that students achieve better results in single-sex schools compared to co-eds.
As for LGBT [lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender] rights in Israel, it seems that the only thing Bindel wants readers to know is that the group Aswat, which was started by a group of Palestinian women, is
the first LGBT organisation to function openly in the Middle East, and… opposes efforts by the Israeli government to paint Israel as a tolerant country when it comes to gay rights – which many gay activists refer to the ‘pink-washing.
Evidently the irony was lost on Bindel, that reportedly the first Arab LGBT rights organization in the Middle East was started by Palestinians in Israel – where hundreds of gay Palestinians seek refuge from the danger they face in their communities.
For Bindel, it is not enough just to equate the struggles that women face in the vastly different Israeli and Palestinian societies, and to brush over the persecution of gays in Palestinian society while accusing Israel of “pinkwashing.”
She talks to an Israeli activist, Iris Stern-Levi – who is also a BDS supporter – who “believes that feminism must be part of the struggle to end the Israeli occupation in Palestine.” But this “intersectionality” is conflating and politicizing two completely separate issues, that ultimately only mitigates the very important issue of women’s rights.
It gets worse. The Palestinian feminist activist Nivine Sandouka “focuses on the way the Israeli occupation effects women,” for example, if a woman wants to leave her village and work or study elsewhere, “she will be prevented from doing that because the male community will be afraid that she is going to cross check points on a daily basis, and because she is a woman she holds the family honour.”
How exactly can Israel’s security checkpoints be blamed for Palestinian women being oppressed by their “male community”? These activists are seriously misguided if they really believe that removing checkpoints will lead to an improvement in how Palestinian society treats women.
The issue of equality and respect for women is a global one that applies to Israelis and Palestinians alike, albeit to different degrees. But taking a genuine problem, politicizing it by highlighting and downplaying selected aspects, and projecting blame where it is not due, will contribute nothing towards solving it. Writers and activists who actually want to make a difference might like to focus on the problem itself instead of letting themselves get distracted by their hatred for Israel.
