Tel-Chai Nation

The high court's been petitioned to ensure Haredi women will be allowed to run within the framework of the ultra-orthodox political parties in municipality and state elections:

Pressure on the ultra-Orthodox parties has been growing in recent years to allow women to run for election on their municipal and national lists, and this pressure is now beginning to tell, with the High Court of Justice looking seriously at the issue.

A petition to the High Court brought by 10 women’s rights NGOs and represented by the Women Lawyers for Social Justice organization representing Haredi women and others organizations was heard briefly on Wednesday morning, before the justices asked that the judicial panel be expanded due to the importance of the petition.

The petition was originally filed two years ago, and in October 2016, the court ordered Agudat Yisrael, the Haredi political party representing the hassidic community, and the state to explain why it should not ban the clauses in its regulations banning women from being members of the party.

The decision to increase the size of the panel indicates that the High Court is taking the petition very seriously and sees it as substantive and worthy of in-depth consideration.

Without the ability to join the party as members, women are unable to hold office within the party or to be candidates in municipal and national elections.

Esti Shushan, a Haredi activist for female representation in the Haredi parties and founder of the Nivcharot activist organization, said that although the internal cultural battle would be harder to win than the legal one, it was nevertheless critical to remove the formal impediment to women’s representation in the political parties.

“The cultural issue of women in leadership is harder, but at the very least this humiliating clause against women membership should not appear in the party regulations,” Shushan told The Jerusalem Post.

“I want to know that my country doesn’t agree with such a policy. When there will be this clear statement, women will be less afraid to demand representation, that’s what I want to believe,” she continued.

Don't worry, I believe, if anything, that women should be allowed to run on the Haredi lists, even as I still think it would be better for them to abandon the lifestyle, which does not mean abandoning religion. So I wish them luck in ensuring such policies will be canned.

Labels: haredi corruption, Israel, Knesset, misogyny, Moonbattery, political corruption