On the Jerusalem-Tehran bus

Now they are going to make gender separation legal. In Hebrew, that's called making the sheretz kosher.
That's why Mick Davis is right. When a dear friend starts behaving strangely and unacceptably, as a dear freind you must point out and criticise the strange and unacceptable behaviour. We have but one state for the Jewish people, we shouldn't want it to be like Iran.

Supreme Court may allow segregated buses
By RON FRIEDMAN AND JONAH MANDEL
21/11/2010
IRAC says court "believed the haredim;" decision may authorize "voluntary separation," as long as riders aren't forced into separate seating.

Will the Supreme Court allow sex-segregated buses to continue operating? Supreme Court Judge Eliakim Rubenstein said in court Sunday that the judges were leaning towards accepting the recommendations of a special Transportation Ministry committee established in order to regulate the operation of Mehadrin buses. The committee was formed in 2008 in response to a petition issued against the separation arrangement by Israel Religious Action Center (IRAC) and others. According to the committee’s recommendations, while the separation is forbidden by law, it will be allowed to continue on a voluntary basis and as long as bus riders weren’t coerced into sitting separately.

“We have read all the reactions of the sides and are inclined to go along with the recommendations adopted by the minister, meaning the professionally decided on effort to balance the sides,” said Rubenstein. “We are aware that the parties have reservations and are of the opinion that the conclusions [of the committee] are balanced.”

The High Court has been deliberating the case, which was filed against the Ministry of Transportation and the Egged Bus Company claiming that the lines are illegal because they discriminate against women, restrict freedom of movement and fail to protect citizens from religious coercion since 2007. The lines were originally established in the beginning of the past decade to increase haredi use of public transportation by allowing them to observe what some consider to be a halachic ruling forbidding men and women to sit next to each other.

The separation was supposed to be regulated on a voluntary basis, whereby both the front and back doors of the buses would be available for boarding and people could choose where they wanted to sit, but the plaintiffs found that in many cases the separation was vigorously enforced by extremist, self appointed watchdogs from the haredi community and cited cases where women who sat in “male territory,” at the front of the bus, were intimidated and bullied into moving to the back or getting off the bus altogether.

The committee’s recommendations, which were adopted in February by Transportation Minister Yisrael Katz, stipulated that there was no legal way to enforce separation, but that it was possible to set up an arrangement that would allow voluntary separation for those who choose it. According to the recommendations, by opening both the front and read doors of the bus for boarding, passengers could decide which door they wanted to board from and, either honor the separation arrangement or not.

The Masorti (Conservative) Movement of Israel's executive director Yizhar Hess spoke out against “an attitude to exclude women from the public realm in the name of multi-cultural values, i.e. assisting minority communities to safeguard their culture, when that defense is interlocked with degradation,” and called the separation on buses “a contemptuous phenomenon.”

The national religious amicus curiae to the petition – Kolech, Ne’emanei Torah Ve’avodah (The Faithful of Torah and Labor), the Ya'acov Herzog Center and Jerusalem movements called on the court not to accept the committee's recommendation to allow the back door to continue functioning as an entrance to the buses, which would allow the separation to be forced upon the women, and said that the Transportation Ministry's claim that the Mehadrin lines would serve as a “pilot” for a future plan to have the back doors open for alighting on all busses is “problematic” and fusion of two unrelated issues.

“At IRAC's behest, the committee's conclusions prohibiting any form of separation were fully accepted. The Transportation Ministry must ensure that there is no coercion or violence against women. The Reform Movement will continue to monitor the implementation of the decision,” read a guarded announcement by IRAC the legal and advocacy arm of the Israel Movement for Progressive Judaism, following the court discussion.

Speaking with The Jerusalem Post, IRAC's executive director Anat Hoffman explained the complexity of the court's apparently impending ruling.

“On the fundamental level, the court accepted the committee's recommendations, which state that separation in public transportation is illegal. You cannot, of course, force people to sit next to one another. But in practice, in the buses, there is a dispute over whether the seating arrangements are indeed voluntary. The justices believed the haredi representatives, who told the court that the Eda Haredit took great measures to curb the violence against women who are 'out of line,' they said they had ads in the newspapers. We saw no documentation of such ads,” Hoffman noted. “The judges also chose to believe Egged that every complaint [about violence against women] will be treated, they don't have the resources to do that.”

“So as far as the practical level goes, there is room for disappointment, since the moment it is agreed that the back door will open, a haredi women has no choice but to embark from there,” she added.