This month Israeli women will be forced to sit at the back of the bus. Separate seating will become the rule for selected Egged and Dan company public bus lines running through ultra-orthodox neighborhoods Mea Shearim and Har Nof in Jerusalem, and to the city of Bnei Brak. Under the new system, men will board the bus from the front and women from the rear door. Women will sit in the back rows. Responsibility for enforcing the seating arrangements lies with passengers.
The decision was made by Israeli Transportation Minister Yitzhak Levy, the man who introduced Shabbat closures of Jerusalem's Bar-Ilan thoroughfare. The bus companies adopted this rule as part of a campaign to strengthen haredi (ultra-orthodox) usage of public transportation. The new rules have been met with acclaim from (male) haredi religious leaders and condemnation from non-haredi women. The Israel Women's Network (IWN), the main women's rights organization in Israel, and Naomi Chazan, a Labor Member of Knesset (MK), have been the measure's most outspoken opponents.
Proponents of separate seating insist that it fulfills several functions. Why should women be separate? It protects women from harassment by men. According to United Torah Jewry MK Avraham Ravitz, "it protects them from being disturbed by men who want to take advantage [of a crowded bus] to push women." Why should women sit in the back? So that the men sitting in the front of the bus are protected from being distracted by the women, who won't be seen at the back of the bus. Out of sight, out of mind. In addition, if women are seated in the rear, it discourages them from developing relationships with the (male) driver.
According to the government, separate seating will be enforced by not being enforced. "Transportation Ministry spokesman Avner Ovadia said that no one would be forced to sit in a certain area . . . Leaders of the ultra-orthodox community promised that those who refused to go along with the segregation would not be harassed." Ovadia, displaying either colossal naiveté or genuine stupidity, seems to forget that the haredi track-record as regards harassing women for "objectionable" behavior or "immodest" dress has gone from bad to worse. In the summer of 1996, brutal attacks by groups of haredi men upon secular women working at the Mea Shearim branches of the Israeli Ministry of Education and Culture were commonplace. Presumably the same women who were beaten up last year are now legally bound to ride to work in the back of the bus. Rachel Benziman, legal advisor for Israel Women's Network, is highly skeptical. "The fact that they call it voluntary is a trick. These haredi communities will not tolerate women who opt not to participate in the new system." The IWN has petitioned the Israeli Supreme Court to rescind the policy and called upon Dan and Egged to refuse to implement it.
Amazingly, the discussion of segregating Israeli buses by gender has been treated as an isolated incident, without references to any of its less-than-illustrious predecessors. For example, the "Committee on Straight Ways" of the haredi town of Betar in the Etzion Bloc launched a campaign for separate seating in December of last year, claiming the support of eighty percent of the population. When asked about the remaining twenty percent, the Committee said that if somebody did not follow the new arrangements, it would be explained to them respectfully, "and God forbid [we] should be incited by provocation." Despite such promises, a resident complained that his wife had been shoved when she would not sit in the back.
Akiva Ovitz (Agudat Yisrael), the deputy head of the Betar Illit local council and the head of the municipal transportation committee, said that "a large section of the population is not participating [in the segregated seating]" among them "the working class, people on their way to work or those going traveling or shopping with their wives . . . On every bus one can see that this is not working." Nevertheless the Committee on Straight Ways insisted that "the separation works with almost no flaws aside from a few points of opposition here and there of people who are not used to it."
Because the road to Betar was rough and twisting, the women of Betar initially refused to sit in the back of the bus where the ride was particularly bumpy and uncomfortable. With the completion of a new bypass road designed to allow Jewish residents of settlements south of Jerusalem to skirt Palestinian populated areas, a member of the Committee of Straight Ways stated that, "it is [now] possible to demand women to move to the back." Betar rabbis David Tzvi Ordentlich and Ya'acov Topik-Aviezri deemed the building of the new road a divine gift from the Holy One, Blessed be He, granted in exchange for the policy of separating the sexes.
The bus companies are certainly not the first to discriminate against women in order to earn money from haredi clients. Community leaders routinely demand that businesses which open in the ultra-orthodox neighborhoods of Jerusalem hire only men. Israeli supermarket chains and banks have agreed to such requests. These demands are not limited to private enterprise. A new post office branch in the haredi neighborhood of Geula agreed to the demand not to hire women as clerks and launched an advertising campaign emphasizing the increased services available to haredi men. The decision was made by Yitzhak Attias, the Jerusalem region's director of the Israel postal service, who declared that "for the achievement of tranquillity with the population of the neighborhood, this branch will not hire women." The legal advisor to the Israel Women's Network, Rivka Miller-Oleshitzky, called the postal service's decision "serious discrimination against women, crude trampling on their rights, and a wound to their honor." Communications Minister Limor Livnat annulled the decision a week later.
Ultra-orthodox rabbis have also demanded that the major airlines flying to Israel initiate flights which run without stewardesses or in-flight movies. While no decision has been reached, the rabbis have already stated that if such flights were available, yeshiva students who did not fly them would not be accepted by their yeshivot. This underscores one aspect of the haredi attempt to segregate transportation. With the state supporting haredi initiatives, religious leaders exercise far more coercive power over people within their own communities who would refrain from observing certain customs. Members of the haredi councils, particularly the Eda Haredit, which negotiated with the Transport Ministry, Egged, and Dan for segregated seating on buses, represent the most extreme elements of ultra-orthodoxy. Therefore each time a private organization or public institution grants such a request, they further embolden and radicalize the ultra-orthodox.
The segregation of Egged and Dan buses is clearly an unacceptable infringement of ultra-orthodox misogyny into Israeli public life. The ease with which it has been effected is frightening and highlights several disturbing characteristics of the Israeli secular public. First, it demonstrates how desensitized some secular Israelis have become to religious impingement in the public sphere. This reflects a more long-standing and serious problem: leaders of haredi organizations are seen as the voices of authentic Judaism. As a consequence, their agenda to consolidate their own power within their ultra-orthodox communities is unwittingly supported.
The new policy has tremendous symbolic importance as well, both for Israeli and American Jews. Buses are, in some sense, the very essence of Israeli public life; a higher percentage of Jerusalem's population rides the bus than in any other city in the world. And American Jews, who have been put in a fighting mood by recent conflicts with Israeli haredim‹most significantly the harassment and assault of egalitarian prayer groups at the Western Wall and the fight over a Knesset bill which would legalize Orthodox control over conversions‹are sure to be further inflamed by the segregation of public buses. When the New York Jewish Week asked feminist activist Letty Cottin Pogrebin what she thought of the new policy, she exclaimed that it evoked "echoes of blacks sitting in the back of the bus . . ." For an American Jewish leadership who came of age during the Civil Rights movement, it will be difficult to understand the new policy any other way.
Mark Wagner recently completed a year of graduate study in Medieval Literature of Islamic Spain at Hebrew University in Jerusalem.