Israel in the news
Feb. 12th, 2007 11:42 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lavendersparkleI'm irritated by the way this story is being treated in the media.
For a start the comparison with Rosa Parks is ridiculous. Israel has serious women's rights issues, mainly domestic violence associated with having a population which has spent a lot of its time in warfare and issues to do with divorce due to a nasty mix up of synagogue and state. However, in Israel women have equal political rights. Israel has female knesset members and female supreme court justices. Israel has had a female prime minister. To compare the Charedim deciding that buses going through their districts should be segregated to the civil rights struggles of African Americans is just insulting to African Americans.
I suppose this is part of my general habit of flinching whenever Israel is mentioned in the media. Even though I'm not an expert on Israel I know enough to see find myself frustrated that the news isn't putting a story into context. I suppose that's always the case when one here's a news story that one actually knows something about. It's very disconcerting because for a second you realise just how warped and simplified even high brow news is and that if they did this with this story they probably do it with all the other stories, it's just you don't know enough about them to notice. I remember a similar feeling when I heard John Humphries claim that the IMF and the World Bank were originally established to 'share the world's wealth a little more fairly' which is completely untrue.
The other issue is the conflict between being a feminist and having an allegiance to a group that feminism is being used to attack. I don't condone the attack and I don't want to belittle it but I also have a nasty suspicion that some people might use the news story to go 'See how they treat women; they're far too uncivilised to have their own state; I'm throwing my full support behind Hamas.' This sounds a little extreme but it does happen in a more subtle way, especially if people have very little background knowledge of what Israel is like. Mix in a little bit of subconscious antisemitism and suddenly people are finding it very easy to judge Israel's actions by standards that they don't hold any other country to.
For a start the comparison with Rosa Parks is ridiculous. Israel has serious women's rights issues, mainly domestic violence associated with having a population which has spent a lot of its time in warfare and issues to do with divorce due to a nasty mix up of synagogue and state. However, in Israel women have equal political rights. Israel has female knesset members and female supreme court justices. Israel has had a female prime minister. To compare the Charedim deciding that buses going through their districts should be segregated to the civil rights struggles of African Americans is just insulting to African Americans.
I suppose this is part of my general habit of flinching whenever Israel is mentioned in the media. Even though I'm not an expert on Israel I know enough to see find myself frustrated that the news isn't putting a story into context. I suppose that's always the case when one here's a news story that one actually knows something about. It's very disconcerting because for a second you realise just how warped and simplified even high brow news is and that if they did this with this story they probably do it with all the other stories, it's just you don't know enough about them to notice. I remember a similar feeling when I heard John Humphries claim that the IMF and the World Bank were originally established to 'share the world's wealth a little more fairly' which is completely untrue.
The other issue is the conflict between being a feminist and having an allegiance to a group that feminism is being used to attack. I don't condone the attack and I don't want to belittle it but I also have a nasty suspicion that some people might use the news story to go 'See how they treat women; they're far too uncivilised to have their own state; I'm throwing my full support behind Hamas.' This sounds a little extreme but it does happen in a more subtle way, especially if people have very little background knowledge of what Israel is like. Mix in a little bit of subconscious antisemitism and suddenly people are finding it very easy to judge Israel's actions by standards that they don't hold any other country to.
