Two steps forward, one step back: Gender relations in contemporary Israel

The chapter concentrates on four main gendered conflicts in contemporary Israel, as represented in public discourse: (1) assaults on women’s body and sexuality; (2) the implications of the neoliberal economy for marginalized women and counter-struggles; (3) women trapped between church and state; and (4) the negotiation of women’s roles in the military. These four points of contention reflect both the need for, and the struggles toward, social change. We show that akin to Western feminist history, in Israel, too, the past few decades have seen significant processes of improvement but also of stagnation and even regression in women’s status. Often, the progress women make leads to a backlash by conservative forces clinging to traditional perceptions of gender roles. In Israel, this back-and-forth movement restricts women from improving their situation in various aspects of social life. In the past years, women’s status in Israel has been affected by the implications of the coronavirus, political instability due to four national elections within 18 months, budgetary freeze and ongoing physical and virtual violence. We thus conclude that Israel’s hierarchical gender regime still provides women with many reasons to protest and struggle in the years to come.