Segregated pavements another step towards Tehran-like exclusion

The Knesset is poised to pass a law permitting gender segregation in Israeli academic institutions. At the same time, it was announced that the city of Bnei Brak will introduce gender-segregated sidewalks. Anyone who sees these as two separate developments is missing the larger picture. 

The Haredim, joined by the Haredi-nationalist wing of Religious Zionism, seek to remake the public sphere according to norms that have no origin or place in Jewish law. And if the High Court tries to stop them? As with draft evasion, we will find ourselves enacting yet more religious basic laws. Basic Law: Modesty, for example. 

Partitions in synagogues, segregated weddings and celebrations, and separate beaches are nothing new. But until about three decades ago, there was no trace of gender segregation in other public spaces, not even in the most extreme Haredi communities. The practice gathered force as the Haredi community grew, and especially as its political power and ability to impose religiously extreme norms on the public sphere expanded. 

It began in the 1990s, when the Jerusalem-based Haredi Community Council (Edah HaChareidis) called for gender segregation on bus lines. From there, it spread into ever more areas of Israeli life. Today, gender segregation reaches almost every sphere of Haredi life ‒ for now, chiefly in Haredi cities. But the downward spiral of excluding women from every public space and pushing them behind partitions, literal or spatial, is only a matter of time. 

The situation is alarming. Beyond the near-total segregation in religious education and other religious settings, it’s spreading to universities, workplaces, buses, shops in Haredi neighbourhoods, clinics, cemeteries, billboards and advertisements, radio stations and newspapers, state ceremonies, performances, and public events. And now, of course, sidewalks. 

As far as the Haredi extremists who now set the standard are concerned, women are best kept out of sight in public. Anyone who thinks this will stop at Bnei Brak’s sidewalks has learned nothing from the past decade. First, it will spill into cities with large Haredi communities and workplaces employing Haredim. Then it will spread across the rest of Israel. 

Israel is a Jewish State, and Jews must be free to live according to their beliefs. Jewish law (halacha) does indeed set boundaries of modesty governing relations between men and women, and in certain settings such as synagogues and beaches, for example, separation is the accepted Orthodox standard. But blanket segregation in every conceivable space is utterly alien even to halacha. 

More important, Israel isn’t a religious state. Alongside its Jewish character, it’s a democracy. Excluding women from more spaces violates the foundational ideals on which Israel was built. In each of these settings, it gravely threatens women’s equality and, in practice, enables their exclusion and erasure from communal life. 

Haredi women are the first to be harmed, whether or not they accept their exclusion. They have no meaningful voice in their community. But as the practice spreads, women throughout Israeli society will pay the price. Once sidewalks are off-limits to Haredi women, they will be off-limits to all women. 

Certainly, these arrangements are subject to judicial review. For years, it was the High Court that curbed and challenged this phenomenon. But as Haredi political power grows, there’s a danger that they will bypass the court as well. 

Basic Law: Torah Study, passed by the Knesset last week to legitimise draft-dodging, will serve as the model. To legitimise gender segregation, they will enact Basic Law: Modesty as soon as they can. That would sound the death knell for life in Israel as we know it. 

Israelis often warn that “Tehran is here”. But unless we halt this headlong charge into the abyss of extremism and exclusion, even the hard-liners of Tehran’s regime will envy the religious standards imposed upon Israel’s public sphere. Preventing that requires firm rules of the game and protection of basic human rights from a majority that may become ever more extreme. 

• Dr Shuki Friedman is director general of the Jewish People Policy Institute and a senior lecturer in law at the Peres Academic Center.