Jerusalem
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They known as themselves the “Women in Red.” Dressed in crimson robes and white caps, they marched with faces downturned in silent protest towards Israel’s government in the 12 months earlier than the war in Gaza. Borrowing imagery from Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel “The Handmaid’s Tale,” the group meant to sound an alarm: the government’s judicial overhaul threatened to undo a long time of progress on girls’s rights.
Three years later, what the government dismissed as theatrical exaggeration is more and more seen as prescient foreshadowing. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing government, which depends upon the help of ultra-Orthodox events, is transferring Israel towards a extra non secular and conservative future.
Alongside broader efforts to weaken the Supreme Court – lengthy the cornerstone of Israeli girls’s equality – have come particular threats to girls’s rights. Netanyahu’s non secular companions have pushed payments increasing non secular authority over civil life, together with gender segregation in cultural occasions and training. With the facility to break down Netanyahu’s government ought to they withdraw their help, the non secular events have been in a position to bend the secular prime minister to their will.
The decline in girls’s rights is measurable. Israel’s international standing on gender equality has plunged in latest years. In the 2025–26 Women, Peace and Security Index, produced by Georgetown University, Israel ranks 84 of 181 international locations – behind Albania, Russia, and Saudi Arabia. Before the present government got here into energy three years in the past, it ranked 27.
The precipitous drop parallels a sharp decline in girls’s illustration in public life. Today, solely six of Israel’s 33 ministers are girls and few have senior roles. The present government has not made a single everlasting appointment of a lady as director-general throughout over 30 ministries. No lady at the moment heads a main political occasion, and Netanyahu’s coalition consists of two events which have zero girls on their lists.
“The deterioration in Israel’s gender equality ranking is unprecedented, placing us in the lower half of countries worldwide – a stark contrast to decades in which Israel ranked among the leaders and was known as a pioneer in advancing women’s rights,” stated Daphna Hacker of Tel Aviv University’s Faculty of Law and Gender Studies.
Hacker ticked off a checklist of historic accomplishments for girls’s equality in Israel: the 1951 Equal Rights for Women Law, thought-about revolutionary on the time; Golda Meir serving as one of many first feminine leaders in the world in 1969; the army’s obligatory conscription of women.
But Hacker, who additionally serves because the chair of the Israel Women’s Network, stated girls are now “virtually absent” from key selections. “There’s no doubt women’s status has waned in recent years,” she stated. “We’ve never experienced such a backlash.”
One invoice beneath debate at Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, which may very well be finalized in the approaching weeks, would dramatically broaden the authority of state-run non secular courts to deal with civil disputes. These courts, staffed completely by males who rule in line with Jewish regulation, already oversee marriage and divorce proceedings, together with for secular {couples}. Under the proposed laws, they’d acquire energy to rule on monetary disputes, enterprise issues, and doubtlessly baby custody points.
“This bill seeks to place women’s fate in the hands of a religious judiciary that inherently discriminates against them,” stated Bonot Alternativa, the ladies’s protest group that when led the Women in Red. “We will not allow the government to force us into marriage with a system that despises us,” it stated in a assertion whereas its members protested as gagged brides in chains outdoors a rabbinical courtroom in Tel Aviv earlier this month.
NCS has reached to Israel’s Ministry for Social Equality for remark.
Israel’s rabbinical courts are state-sanctioned non secular courts which have authorized authority over Jewish household regulation.
They have lengthy been criticized by Israeli girls as an area of drawback, patriarchy and inequality, particularly in issues like alimony and baby help. The Ruth and Emanuel Rackman Center at Bar Ilan University warned final month that the proposed growth would result in “serious violations of divorcing women’s rights, potentially the most serious that the Israeli justice system has seen in years.” If handed, the brand new regulation would additionally apply to Muslim Sharia courts.
Proponents of the invoice notice that the rabbinical courts used to deal with monetary affairs till Israel’s highest courtroom stripped them of that authority in 2006. Now they intend to override that ruling.
“We will restore what was stolen and return the authorities to the rabbinical courts,” Simcha Rothman, the coalition chair of the Knesset judiciary committee, stated in April. “We need not only to restore the judges but to restore the law to its place.”
The Yachin Research Center, a non secular suppose tank in Israel, welcomed the invoice as “an important step in restoring the place of Hebrew law.”
Moriah, a mom of two women in her late thirties, has been entangled for over 4 years in custody and property battles in the rabbinical courts. “In four years, not a single one of my requests has ever been approved – yet every absurd request from the other side was granted,” she stated, describing an ordeal that has left her estranged from her two younger daughters. Moriah, who opted to not use her final title for her safety, stated her visitation rights had been revoked, whereas monetary rulings pushed her into severe debt with out alternative to reply or enchantment.
“It’s an anti-woman institution,” she instructed NCS, referring to rabbinical courts. “Three male judges sit in front of you, and then the husband and his lawyer, usually a man. You are usually the only woman in the room. It’s a man’s game, built on religious authority, and it’s designed to break you.”
The proposed laws handed its first studying in November with a 63-43 vote. Two weeks later, one other regulation was finalized giving rabbinical courts authority over baby help with out each dad and mom’ consent.
Israel will not be the one nation to reverse girls’s rights in latest years. The US Supreme Court eliminated the protections of Roe v. Wade, and Hungary shut down gender studies programs whereas explicitly pursuing pro-natalist insurance policies.
In Israel, these steps are mixed with what Hacker calls “the most extreme versions of Judaism – both ultra-Orthodox and nationalist – and it has profound consequences for women.” Most alarming is the surge in violence and femicide. So far this 12 months, 44 girls have been murdered in Israel, the very best annual tally in a decade and nicely above the 35 who had been murdered in 2024.
Women’s advocates additionally hyperlink the latest surge in femicide to the surge in gun possession – up 40% because the far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir eased licensing after the October 7, 2023 Hamas assaults. According to information from the Ministry of Welfare, the variety of girls making use of to dam companions’ gun permits jumped from 5 in 2023 to 90 in 2024.
“This is the worst government for women in the history of the country,” stated opposition lawmaker Merav Cohen, who chairs the Knesset committee on the standing of girls and gender equality. “At best, this government is indifferent to the harm done to women. At worst, it’s actively normalizing it.”
“In any normal country, such a situation would prompt the government to declare an emergency, bring everyone together, draft an action plan, increase budgets – because all the warning lights are flashing red.”
Cohen stated the brand new rabbinical courts proposal is a part of a broader pattern inside Israeli society of what she warns is a risk to girls’s rights, pushed by a non secular minority with political energy.
“The religious system is expanding as far as it can go,” she stated. “Israeli women are paying the price of Netanyahu’s coalition and are being dragged back decades.”