The last news article you read about Israel probably had nothing to do with gender equality or the self-esteem of teenage girls.
An Israeli women’s group hopes to change that. Rina Bar-Tal, chairwoman and president of the Israel Women’s Network, visited San Francisco last month and spoke to the public about why it’s important to know about Israeli life beyond the Golan and Gaza.
“We have other voices, we have other sounds and issues that are valuable to our future,” Bar-Tal said.
The Israel Women’s Network can be comparted to the U.S.-based National Organization for Women or Feminist Majority. The IWN was founded in 1984. It works to advance Israeli and Arab women’s rights in the workplace, Knesset, public schools, kibbutzes and city governments.
For many years IWN focused almost entirely on gaining equality through Israel’s courts. Most recently, for example, the organization won a landmark labor case after an Ethiopian woman was fired from her job because she was seven months pregnant.
Today the organization is spending more time and money reaching out to school-aged girls. The idea is that if teenage girls (and boys) learn to value gender equality during their formative adolescent years, they’ll be more likely to carry those values with them through adulthood and into all elements of Israeli society.
“Especially in Israel it’s so important to bring out Jewish women’s voices, to amplify them,” said Israeli-born Rivka Amado of Berkeley. She was one of 15 people to attend an IWN lunchtime lecture in San Francisco on Nov. 1. The lecture was co-sponsored by the Israeli Consulate in San Francisco, the Jewish Community Relations Council and the New Israel Fund, among others.
Hundreds of Israeli teenage girls are talking for the first time about things like relationships, body image and feminism, thanks to a unique program created by IWN. The organization created the curriculum in Hebrew and Arabic to be linguistically and culturally relevant to both Israeli and Arab teenagers. A comparable program was created for male students to teach them tolerance and respect for women.
“All our female students — poor, rich, religious, secular, urban and rural — say the same thing: that it’s been a tremendous gift, that from the bottom of their hearts they appreciate what we’ve taught them,” Bar-Tal said.
“We believe that if they do something for themselves they will then change the community they live in.”
Bar-Tal lectured to the public at U.C. Davis, the San Francisco Public Library and in Los Altos Hills.
“Israel is much more than the conflict you see on the news,” said Michal Michlin-Friedlander, who coordinated Bar-Tal’s visit at the Israeli Consulate. “I’m very happy that people got the notion that women’s rights in Israel is an issue.”
Bar-Tal and colleague Avital Shachar, IWN president, also met with the Commission on the Status of Women of San Francisco and the Women’s Intercultural Network in an effort to connect to other women’s groups outside of Israel, and to educate them about Israel beyond “The Conflict.”
Women’s issues in Israel are different from those in the United States, Bar-Tal said.
“I have never known one day of peace. That makes for a very different people,” she said. “People who are uptight, uncertain, fearful, people who want to do everything now because they do not know what will happen tomorrow. That has a tremendous affect on the psyche.”
Someday peace will come to Israel, she added. And when it does, the country will have the opportunity to reinvent itself in a way that improves gender equality.
Until then, Bar-Tal added, IWN will keep fighting — in Israel’s courts and classrooms — to empower the country’s women and girls.
Five myths about women’s rights
Rina Bar-Tal, chairwoman of the Israel Women’s Network, spoke at a lunchtime seminar in San Francisco on Nov. 1. She kicked off her speech by candidly explaining five common misconceptions about women’s issues in Israel.
Myth No. 1: Women have equal power in Israeli politics.
Bar-Tal said this is patently untrue, despite Golda Meir’s leadership from 1969-74.
Only 18 out of 120, or 15 percent, of Knesset members are women. (This is equal to the percentage of women in the U.S. Congress.) Only two mayors out of 200 Israeli municipalities are women.
“Golda Meir was not a role model and not a feminist,” Bar-Tal said. “She was in the right place at the right time.”
Myth No. 2: Women are equal to their male counterparts in the Israeli Defense Forces.
Even though service is compulsory for both genders, Bar-Tal said women still hold mostly clerical positions in the IDF. The situation improved somewhat, she added, in 2000 when the Supreme Court ruled that women must be given equal access to high-ranking positions.
Myth No. 3: Kibbutzes promote gender equality.
Bar-Tal said many women still hold stereotypical positions on kibbutzes throughout the country.
Myth No. 4: Jewish Israeli women never suffer from domestic violence.
“Many people think there is no violence in the Jewish home,” Bar-Tal said. “Well, there is.”
Myth No. 5: Educated Israeli women are treated equally in the workplace.
Despite the fact that nearly 60 percent of Israeli women work, they still only earn about 80 cents to a man’s $1. And many are not treated as equals despite a comprehensive 1998 sexual harassment law IWN helped draft.
“We thought that once we earned a high education we’d get equal pay for equal work,” Bar-Tal said. “We do not.”