You might think of Israel as a paragon for equality of the sexes.
After all, this is the country whose women fly fighter jets on secret missions into Iran, command combat units, sit on the Supreme Court, and run banks and universities.
But there has not been a female prime minister since Golda Meir left office in 1974, and women are conspicuously absent from the leadership of the parties vying for power in the October 27 general election.
Israel almost had another woman prime minister when Tzipi Livni was formally asked by President Shimon Peres to form a government in 2008, but failed to assemble a coalition. Months later, she led Kadima into the 2009 general election and did something even more remarkable: she beat Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud at the ballot box, winning 28 seats to his 27. But parliamentary arithmetic favoured Bibi, who could command the support of a larger bloc of parties.
So why, more than 50 years after Golda, does Israel’s highest political glass ceiling remain intact?
With an election approaching eyes are on the party lists.
There is no legal quota forcing parties to place women on their lists or to put them in viable positions. Likud has just one woman, Miri Regev, in its top ten.
The strictly Orthodox parties traditionally do not include women on their candidate list. But in a historic first, one has selected a woman to run on its Knesset slate: Dr Nechumi Yaffe, a strictly Orthodox political psychology researcher, is standing for the newly formed Charedi Public party.
Meanwhile, around half the candidates on Naftali Bennett’s list for his B’Yachad party are women.
Eight of the top 20 are female, with three women immediately next in the order after Bennett and his political partner Yair Lapid. But each party does whatever it wants.
Former Jerusalem deputy mayor Fleur Hassan-Nahoum is running for the Knesset alongside retired Brigadier General Ofer Winter as part of his newly launched right-wing political party, Amcha Yisrael; 40 per cent of its list is female.
“By nature, Zionism is a feminist project in many ways,” she says.
“Women could already vote in 1898, when we weren’t even a country. Women could vote in our pre-state institutions when most of the world didn’t give women the vote.”
She believes Israel’s nature as a militarised society is partly responsible for women falling behind.
“In terms of politics, there are two big built-in hurdles that women have that men don’t have. And I’ve experienced them in my political career. The first is the army.
“The army, which is a built-in feeder to politics, is not somewhere where you’re going to find women represented at the very highest levels.”
The second hurdle in her view is religion: “And I say this as a religious woman.
“I could never count on a rabbi supporting my campaign, taking a picture with me, shaking my hand, or giving me a visible endorsement.
“You are not with the power brokers, who are the men on the men’s side – you’re sitting with their wives.”
But for a country at war, can Israel ever be considered “normal”, in politics as much as anything else?
“What made me go into politics was October 7,” says Michal Hirsch Negri, who is number seven on Bennett’s B’Yachad party list. “I think it made most people in Israel stop and rethink their lives and the direction of their lives.”
As for so many Israelis, her life was utterly transformed by the events of October 7. By the day’s end she was a grieving mother.
“My son Roee was 28 years old and serving in the reserves. He had got married just a month and a half before. He had finished his studies in computer science and had started working for a start-up company.
“On October 7, he was a commander in a reserve counter-terrorism unit. When he saw the pictures at around 7.30 in the morning, he decided to get up and bring his team together. Nobody called him. He just did it.
“He went down to Kibbutz Be’eri, and they fought there all day in the neighbourhood. At around 9pm, they entered one of the houses. He insisted on going in first because the battle there was very complicated. There were two terrorists waiting in an ambush inside the house.
“The first person to enter had almost no chance of getting out alive. He turned around to protect his team and save them.”
Negri recalls and celebrates Roee as a son of Israel.
“He loved this country very much. He was raised in a home with the values of Zionism. His grandfather was a Holocaust survivor who came to Israel on an Aliyah Bet ship and worked for the Jewish Agency throughout his life, bringing Jews to Israel. That is the way we grew up.
“When my son entered Kibbutz Be’eri, as his soldiers described it, ‘the gates of hell opened’. He told his soldiers: ‘We are not here for the bodies. We are here to save our people. We are here to save our homes.’
“When I thought about it in the year or two after Roee died, I realised that he was there to save us. I believe that is the reason we are still here. The soldiers who jumped into action on October 7 literally saved us.”
Now Negri has decided to go into battle in politics to protect the Israel for which her son gave up his life.
“I have my own tools to try to save the country and fix the things that I think need fixing. I have experience in leadership, in leading reforms and in making things happen. That is why I chose to go into politics: to try to change things in our country and fix things.”
Negri says her party has equality of the sexes at least numerically.
“In our party, we actually have an equal number of women – strong, excellent, professional women with a great deal of experience, women who have led in many different fields.”
However, the question of who’s in power is a very different matter: “What we see in the present government is miserable in terms of the number of women in the positions where they should be. There are very few women in the most senior positions.
“It starts with leadership. A leader has to understand the quality women bring and the importance of having women around the table where decisions are made.
“If I can speak about our party, Bennett has said that he isn’t choosing women simply because he wants to reach 50 per cent women.
“The reason we have a large number of women is because, in many cases, they were simply the most qualified candidates.
“I think that is the way it should be. But what we still see in other places is that, even where women are better qualified, for some reason they are not chosen. Some leaders still do not understand the importance of having women in these positions.
“That is particularly important at the most critical moments, when difficult and complex decisions have to be made. You need the voices of women around the table.
“It creates a more balanced discussion and brings a different perspective to the way problems are considered.
“Women can also be very direct and professional in the way they approach decisions, rather than allowing ego to dominate the discussion. I think ego is one of the problems in politics.
“I think part of the problem is that we still have men occupying most of the most senior positions, and men often choose other men to be around them. Men can think in a particular way, and the norms of society are still not balanced enough.
“I also think women need to push themselves more.
“If there is a position available and a man and a woman both look at the job description, the man will often look at his CV and say, ‘Yes, I can do that,’ even if he doesn’t meet every single requirement.
“A woman may look at exactly the same position and say, ‘I’m not sure. Maybe I’m not exactly qualified for this.’”
Dr Reut Itzkovitch-Malka, a political science lecturer at the Open University of Israel, believes the problem goes far deeper than the premiership.
“Even if you look at rank-and-file members of the Knesset, we see that there is no gender parity or gender equality in Israeli politics.
“I would say it’s a combination of social, cultural and institutional barriers that prevent women from entering politics, staying in politics and climbing the ladder to the most influential positions, such as prime minister. But it starts a lot earlier than that.
“The institutions are not favourable in the sense that they haven’t institutionalised any kind of quota at the legal level. The overall effect is that fewer women are able to enter the Knesset, and it starts from there.”
It is not that women are legally denied the same rights as men – they are not, in fact Israel has always been a feminist country.
Itzkovitch-Malka believes that “everything else will probably follow once women achieve sufficient representation rather than being so under-represented. That’s what we need to focus on now.
“The question is how we change that. Sometimes you need mechanisms that act as temporary crutches until women are properly represented in the Knesset. One solution is electoral quotas. I would support requiring parties to have, say, 40 per cent of each gender on their lists — and crucially, in viable positions. Otherwise, a party could simply put 20 men first and 20 women after them and claim to have achieved equality.”
For now, politics in the nation which once revelled in the image of Golda Meir seems to be very much a man’s world, at least at the highest level. But Israeli elections are nothing if not unpredictable. Perhaps the day is coming sooner than anyone might expect when women take power in the Knesset - and offer a new approach that could transform the country.
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