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Israel at 70:A Gender Perspective Naomi Chazan (bio) Israel is and has always been a gendered society. Since 1948, despite women's involvement in the formation of the new state and the myth of their full incorporation in its evolution, gender inequality has been an integral part of the dynamics of Israeli development. Gender gaps, however persistent, have taken on different forms over time. They provide a revealing guide to the changing state of the State during the past 70 years. The shifting nature of gender relations therefore supplies a particularly powerful tool both for understanding Israeli transformations and for identifying specific trajectories of change. This analysis examines the four main periods of gender relations in Israel (1948–73, 1973–2003, 2003–15, and 2015–) in order to outline dominant characteristics and to highlight significant social trends. It argues that continuous gender gaps accentuate the growing contradictions inherent in Israeli life and help to pinpoint gender-rooted alternatives. As gender relations have become more fragmented and contentious, Israeli society as a whole has become more atomized and unruly. With all the considerable progress gained by women in education, health, the workplace, and recently even in the political realm, women, however empowered, still do not enjoy substantial power. They remain objects rather than subjects and their overall impact on the public sphere is still less than consequential. For them, as for many other weak groups at the sidelines, real gains are still elusive as deep, yet shifting, socioeconomic and political structures and arrangements continue to sustain ongoing inequities. This is why tracking the status of women is so accurate a lens through which to view key trends in the country and, simultaneously, to unveil the sources and contents of discontent in its midst. [End Page 141] THE FIRST WAVE (1948–1973): STATISM, SOLIDARITY, AND MARGINALIZATION Israel's formative years coincided with a retreat of women from the public domain. During the heady years leading up to the creation of the state, women acquired basic political rights in the pre-state institutions of the Yishuv and assumed an active role in the struggle for independence.1 Once the 1949 ceasefire was declared and the country began to gear up for the heady tasks of state-building, most women found themselves relegated to the private sphere. Locked into supportive roles (often voluntarily), they undertook secondary tasks shunned by the state mostly related to childcare and social services. They therefore became an important part in the creation of the new establishment, but (Golda Meir notwithstanding) were mostly excluded from its decision-making nexus. The initial gendering of the Israeli state was an integral component of the drive to consolidate common institutions designed to nurture a homogeneous model of the new Israeli, liberated from the shackles of the past and capable of meeting the monumental challenges of integrating successive waves of immigration, developing the fledgling economy, and physically defending the infant country. The young, blond, fighter-pioneer became its embodiment. With little room for the cultivation of differences, women under the guise of the promotion of gender equality—as proclaimed in Israel's Declaration of Independence—were harnessed to this overriding goal.2 It is hardly surprising therefore that the 1950s and the 1960s were marked by regression in gender equality on almost all fronts. Women's integration into the labor market dropped from 30% to 25% during Israel's first decade, mostly in the undervalued and underpaid service sector. New female immigrants, mostly from North Africa and the Middle East (not to speak of their counterparts in the Arab community within Israel), were almost totally absent from wage employment. Even in the socialist kibbutzim, women found themselves back in the kitchen and the nurseries.3 Compulsory service for men and women in the IDF was, from the outset, unequal in gender terms: women were formally excluded from combat roles and given mostly clerical, canteen, social service, and gardening duties. The systematic reversion of women to the private sphere was carried out with the active collaboration of all the main women's organizations, mostly associated with political parties: the Histadrut-based Council of Working Women (Mapai), the Mizrahi Women (National Religious Party...
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