Bryan Schwartzman:
From my home studio, welcome to Evolve: Groundbreaking Jewish Conversations.

Yofi Tirosh:
This is the time where we need American Jewish community more than ever before. It's a life and death moment for this country.

Bryan Schwartzman:
I'm your host Bryan Schwartzman, and today I'm speaking with legal scholars and activists, Gila Stopler and Yofi Tirosh. We're talking about Gila's Evolve essay, The Israeli Government's War on Women. This is an intense conversation, there's a lot of provocative statements made, and it's one that I found alarming because it paints the picture of an Israel that seems like it's dramatically changed overnight, although many of these trends have been in the works for a long time. We'll get to the details, but generally it's been widely reported. If you're listening, you probably know Israel has a new coalition government led by once again, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his Likud party. And that party has been joined by several ultra-Orthodox parties as well as the far right Otzma Yehudit party.
Today's conversation is about the potential or likely ramifications for Israeli girls and women as well as the LGBTQ individuals, what these policies could mean. Yofi and Gila make compelling arguments why Jews or anyone with a connection to Israel, anyone who cares about democracy or human rights, or maybe anyone with a daughter or child who's not a cisgendered male should really care, be paying attention, and maybe take some action. Since this is a rapidly developing situation, just wanted to let you know, I'm recording this intro, January 24th, recorded the interview the day before, January 23rd, and we'll put in some helpful links in the show notes on our fireside page, evolve.fireside.fm to bridge any gaps there might be.
Now a reminder, before we start this interview, all of the essays discussed on the show are available to read for free on the Evolve website, which is evolve.reconstructingjudaism.org. The essays aren't required reading for the show, but we recommend checking them out. Now let's introduce our guests. Joining us from Israel, Gila Stopler is Dean of the Law School at the College of Law and Business in Ramat Gan Israel. She serves as the editor-in-chief of the Journal Law and Ethics of Human Rights. Stopler's areas of expertise include constitutional law, comparative constitutional law, religion, state relations, multiculturalism, women's rights, human rights, and democratic erosion.
Yofi Tirosh is Vice Dean and an associate professor at the Tel Aviv University, Faculty of Law. And the former dean of the Sapir Academic College School of Law in Israel's Negev region. Her research on anti-discrimination law, feminist jurisprudence and law and culture has been published in leading international and Israeli journals. Tirosh is a prominent civil rights activist working with policymakers and civil society organizations, and she was listed as one of Israel's 100 most influential people by TheMarker, Haaretz's financial magazine, and that was back in 2020. Her current research focus is on sex segregation in Israel. Gila Stopler, Yofi Torish, thank you both for being here.

Yofi Tirosh:
Thank you.

Gila Stopler:
Thank you for having us.

Bryan Schwartzman:
So there's so much in the news. It's over here, I'm sure in Israel every day about the new coalition. We're hearing a lot of headlines about what it could mean for the judiciary, what it could mean for LGBTQ, citizens of Israel, what it could mean for Palestinians. We haven't heard as much about what these new policies could mean for women, which I'm sure the statistics show slightly more than half the population of Israel. So Gila, can you give us a sense of what your top concerns about the policies of the new government are and what they can mean for Israel's women?

Gila Stopler:
Sure. So I think that first it's important to acknowledge that women's equality in Israel has always been only partial. So there are areas in which religious interests overtake women's equality such as the area of personal laws, marriage and divorce. But we have been, after a long feminist struggle, we have been able to get to a point in which most of the people acknowledge that women's equality should take precedence over religious interests. But for the last, I think 20 years, there's been a struggle, which was mainly over the issue of the segregation of women and the exclusion of women from the public sphere. And this struggle has been going on with relative success, Yofi can tell us more about it, with relative success for women's equality, although not complete one, and now we're really concerned that with the new government, this relative success is going to be completely erased.

Yofi Tirosh:
So generally this coalition is formed by four parties, three of which are by definition either ultra-Orthodox or religious, and one, the biggest one, the Likud party is neither but it's head of party. Prime Minister Netanyahu is willing to sell Israel and his own perceptions of what it means to be a democracy with the rule of law in order to save himself from trial. The three parties during the coalition agreements have managed to demand and have their demands accepted, I think to their own surprise. There is a point in which we felt they don't know what to ask for anymore because they're like children in a candy store and they kind of took all the candies from the shelf already. So one of the issues in which both Professor Stopler and I are very concerned is the demand to legalize sex segregated public activities, which means that it would be okay basically without any limits to hold public concerts, professional training, academic studies in segregation where men and women either sit separately or it's a single sex event.
It could also mean having separate hours in stores, having modesty requirements, which really means introducing, in the name of multiculturalism and cultural tolerance, values and practices that are foreign to most public in Israel. Even many of the ultra-Orthodox and the religious men and women, while they practice those segregations in their synagogues and in weddings, for example, are kind of held captive by their leaders who draw them into practices of self-segregation or sex segregation, sorry, also outside of the community. Israelis are careful or even irritated when on the one hand we present ourself and perceive ourselves as the only democracy in the Middle East. I'm sure your listeners have heard this phrase many times.

Bryan Schwartzman:
Of course, of course.

Yofi Tirosh:
But then when we posed questions like, hey, this looks very much like Saudi Arabia or Iran or Afghanistan, people are very annoyed. But after being annoyed by this version of you can't compare, they don't really have good answers except the false belief that these practices will remain in Mea She'arim and Bnei Brak and in other homogenous ultra-Orthodox areas. But from experience, both Gila and I know that this is not the case, and they become kind of normalizing the entire Israeli public sphere.

Bryan Schwartzman:
De facto we've seen, I mean, certain public buses have been segregated for a growing number in the last two decades. I mean it's been happening not exactly legally, is from what I understand, or the legal...

Yofi Tirosh:
The pretext, just like with other issues is that it's a matter of consent. As long as the sex segregation is not coerced, at least officially then it's not illegal because it's kind of the way to accommodate the preferences of religious women. Of course, life behaves differently than this hypothetical clean rule, and sitting in the back for women is coerced by the community. Today, there are even expansions such as they're waiting in the bus stations in segregation. There are violence incidents where women are either forced to sit in the back and even secular young girls or women are banned from boarding buses if they wear a sleeveless shirt, for example, because they're not modest enough for the taste of the driver who represents the interest of the passengers that he drives, or at least that's how the drivers feel.

Gila Stopler:
If I can just add, so all these incidents have been happening before, so the question is, we have a problem with segregation in the last 20 years. The difference now is that if in the past the government and the court believed that women's equality should at least most of the time prevail, and it was possible for women's rights groups to fight in legal ways to prevent segregation, to go to the court and win cases against segregation. What the new government is doing, what they have been promised is that it'll no longer be illegal to segregate wherever there are people whose religious belief makes them want to have this segregation. Now the question is, who wants this segregation, and who doesn't want it? It'll be okay to prevent people from being able to go inside a store because it may offend the religious beliefs of the owner or of other customers or of workers or whatever. So basically, for the first time, we're going to a kind of regime in the public space, which you were in the United States accustomed to in the days of racial segregation.

Bryan Schwartzman:
And we know from our experience, separate does not mean equal. Separate means inherently unequal.

Gila Stopler:
Yeah. And moreover, it's not only going to be in let's say religious towns, not that there's such... People who know Israel, know how small it is and how each street can be, for example, the street of where my law school is, one side of the sidewalk is Ramat Gan, the other side of the sidewalk is Bnei Brak. Bnei Brak is an ultra-Orthodox city. Ramat Gan is a completely secular city. So just say, there's no real separation between the ultra-Orthodox population and the secular population. And moreover, the whole idea of even initiating this segregation and exclusion is in order to, so the official theory is in order to enable the integration of the ultra-Orthodox population in the Israeli economy, in the Israeli market. So if you want to enable integration, then that means you want to have this exclusion of women in the heart of your economic activity, and this is exactly what they want to do.
So we're going to start seeing ads, wanted ads only for men because in certain officers, they want to give service to religious men who do not want to be provided whatever service by women. So these are things that are going to affect all of us and they actually reverse if equality is and has been the rule in Israel, as in other liberal democracies until now. This is going to be the opposite because just by allowing this very vague religious belief as an excuse for discrimination means that equality is no longer the rule. The rule is discrimination, what I like to call the free exercise of discrimination.

Bryan Schwartzman:
Since you're both legal scholars, can you tell us a little bit about what this judicial override push is, what it has to do with this, and is the whole problem that Israel doesn't have a constitution. I mean, that's on one foot, right?

Gila Stopler:
So basically, for example, in the area of the exclusion of women, we mentioned the segregation in buses in which women were sent to the back and men sat in the front and it was supposed to be voluntary, but in effect it was not voluntary at all because passengers, male passengers enforced that, even violently. Drivers enforced that even violently. And the court, there was a petition to the Supreme Court. That petition to the Supreme Court led to a decision by the Supreme Court that this practice was banned because it violated equality, it violated basic law, human dignity, and liberty, which protects human dignity and protects equality. Now this, for example, this type of judicial decision is a problem for the new coalition. This is just one example. There are many examples of decisions that protect human rights that are a problem for the new coalition. So then the question is what is the solution?
And the solution that they've found and they've already declared, is to insert an override clause in basic law which would basically allow the Knesset to override any decision by the Supreme Court. That law is invalid because it goes against the Basic Law: Human Dignity and Liberty and the rights protected in it. So basically the court says this is discriminatory and therefore it's banned. And then the Knesset says, well, with a majority of 61, which is a majority that any coalition has, the current coalition has a majority of 64 members out of 120. They can just say, well, we don't care that the court thinks that this is unconstitutional. We are overriding the court decision and we are allowing this discrimination, this segregation, this exclusion or whatever to continue. Moreover, it has been leaked that the current changes that the Minister of Justice, Yariv Levin, has talked about are only the first stage.
In the second stage, they're going to annul Basic Law: Human Dignity and Liberty, simply change it into a regular law, which means that basically human rights in Israel will no longer be constitutional, they will not have constitutional value, we will not have a bill of rights, which is basically what the Basic Law: Human Dignity and Liberty has been for us in the past 30 years. And the government will be free to violate whatever rights it wants to violate because the government is in full control over the coalition, which is in full control over parliament. So all the power is concentrated in the executive.

Yofi Tirosh:
So basically what Gila is describing is no protection, no judicial protection for human rights, including women's rights, including inequality who is quickly becoming a provocative trigger word for many facets of the coalition and a parliament that is not interested in women's issues. One of the most vocal Likud female party members, and there are not many of them, we have a coalition of 15% women only. So a lawyer in the coalition, her kind of flag issue is women's alleged false complaints about sexual offenses. We have other women who care about introducing all kinds of government initiatives with a lot of money to encourage family values.
We have in the coalition Knesset members who just in the last term we thought were kind of withheld, but now we know pretty much they managed to sabotage because they're now in power. Very important basic initiatives such as the adoption of what's called The Istanbul Convention, which is meant to provide states tools to combat sexual violence and domestic violence. Another legal proposal, suggested legislation on what's called Financial Violence where one partner withholds any control over monetary affairs in the family. So they sat there and said, oh, this is going to ruin the structure of the traditional family and undermine the authority of the man as the head of the family. When they said that a year ago, we were shocked, but we never fathomed that this will become governing policy of the Israeli government. We really feel Gila, me and many, many other citizens, lawyers, legal scholars, we feel a sense of disbelief of dystopia that is kind of landing on us in a unimaginable speed.
Every headline that we read is more unbelievable than the previous one. So the threats on women are on those issues, on the loss of balance between the three branches of government, but they're also bottom up, I would say. So if we have a Minister of Police, Itamar Ben-Gvir who is both racist and sexist, we pretty much anticipate and are very worried that in his spirit, the police officer in the police station will be hostile to women coming to complain on domestic violence. They'll send them home just like in the sixties, go and make peace with your husband. They won't even investigate in due seriousness complaints of rape or sexual harassment. So it's kind of both from the top and from the bottom that the atmosphere quickly changes to be an atmosphere of animosity towards the idea of sex equality and towards women.

Bryan Schwartzman:
Can you say anything about the importance of representation in government? I mean, you have mentioned that the number of women in serving in this coalition has dropped dramatically from the previous coalition. Israel's ranking globally in terms of women in government really just kind of nose dived overnight and just, I'm a little bit young, but certainly my parents' generation, maybe when it thought of Israel, it thought of Golda Meir and there was this pride in having this strong female leader who had grown up partially in the states. And I know she's not, the reputation in Israel itself isn't quite as high, but I mean obviously today it just 50 years later it seems harder to believe. Imagine Israel electing a female prime minister like that. But in terms of where policy is going, can you talk about the importance of just having women in government?

Yofi Tirosh:
So I'm not that young. I'm 52, and this is the Israel I was born into, the ethos of Israel as an egalitarian state. I was also raised on Golda Meir stories of pioneers and women fighters and educators. And it's a dialectic picture where you have on the one hand, a country where there are three chief justices or presidents of Israel Supreme Court, which are women, which you can't say in the US and in many other countries, and women in the top of the money market in [inaudible 00:23:48], et cetera, et cetera. But on the other hand, you have this incredible regression that we see now. So why does it matter? First of all, it matters because for women in Israel and for men in Israel, when you look up and you don't see women in the leadership, it trickles down to what girls dream of and what they can be and who they should aspire to be. That's on the level of representation.
But then from experience, we know that unfortunately all legislative initiatives that had to do with women's issues were advanced by women. That's just the way it is. We may have had, and we did have men allies, but the advanced laws, and we do have very progressive laws on the books on anti-discrimination and on equal wage and on sexual harassment, on affirmative action for women. The laws are cool, but when this government enters into full force on also like day-to-day issues, not only will it not continue to develop the elaborate legislation on gender equality, but it will turn it upside down and change much of it against women.
And we will simply not have the women in the Knesset to lobby with or to talk to, to say, hey, you need to stop that. There'll be nobody to talk about legislation, about women's health and about welfare. This government is going to be very neoliberal, very free market oriented. So removing a lot of the social kind of safety nets that Israel traditionally still has, although they have been very much eroded in the past decades. So everywhere we look, we see that the fact that women are not there in shaping policies is going to harm not just our equality, but our safety, our chances for prosperity, for autonomy, et cetera.

Gila Stopler:
If I can also add something, so we have to remember that in this coalition government we have out of the 64 mandates, we have 32 mandates of religious, extremely religious parties. Two of them have no women parliament members, and they intentionally do not have any women parliament members. Actually, there was a petition to the Supreme Court against the fact that they did not have women parliament members. And that petition ended with them saying, yes, well, we'll strike down the provision, which says that a member of the party has to be male. So they struck down the provision, but effectively they still don't receive or accept any women members, and they do not have any women parliament members. Now, when patriarchal religion is such a massive part of the government, both physically and in terms of the concept of what the government and what the state should look like, then obviously women find themselves out of the picture.
And those few women who are in the government and in parliament are women who have these patriarchal views and who only help the patriarchal regime. And moreover, you see, when you look at the men and you look at the women, you look at the leaders of this coalition who are all men, and then you look at state institutions that are now standing against this coalition, which is the Supreme Court, which is headed by a woman, and which is the attorney general, who is also a woman. You see symbolically, what you see is they are the ones who we look up to and want to have protect us, and they can do that because they're public servants and they cannot lead the liberal camp, but they are the ones who, I mean they protect the liberal structure of the state, the liberal institutions of the state. And I think it's both very symbolic, but it's far more than symbolic.
So it's not just that they are women and people on the patriarchal side are men, but it also shows the difference between community, which is ruled only by men for men and with the interests of men in mind as opposed to a community which is led by the interests of equality, gender equality, and progress.

Bryan Schwartzman:
Okay. While we have a couple seconds of your time, please take a moment to give us a five-star rating or leave a review in Apple Podcasts. And if you'd like to support these groundbreaking conversations of Evolve on the podcast, the websites, in our web conversations, there's a donate link in our show notes, every gift matters. Thanks for listening, and thank you for your support. Okay, back to our interview with Gila Stopler and Yofi Tirosh.
So we have seen pretty large demonstrations against some of these policies against the override law. What kind of impact is that having so far?

Yofi Tirosh:
Perhaps this is a good moment to mention that the attacks on progressive values apply not just to women, they apply to the equality of LGBTQ plus, and they're very active in the protests and very visible. We're both not kind of political commentators and analysts, but I think Gila will agree with me that on the one hand, those big protests that are growing week by week and thankfully so far has not escalated to brutal police response. And they're pretty civil. We're very uplifted by them, and we feel that a lot of the Israeli public, not just the traditional left, but also people on the right more and more and on the religious right are getting out there and voicing their objection to the initiatives. We're not sure that this alone will do the trick.
We also see a lot of other initiatives in the past few weeks. There are student strikes. Tomorrow, I think, there is a high-tech symbolic strike. And High-tech is what Netanyahu pride himself about Israel as the startup nation. And this is a major source of investments in Israel and of GDP, et cetera, et cetera. And we don't know what will do the trick. There are protests all over the place. Just today, there is a statement by the presidents of the universities in Israel. Every day there is another sector that protests. The sense is that we might find ourselves in more kind of cutting edge movements where we will need to think whether the red lines are so severe that we'll need to consider civil disobedience. I don't know if we're there yet, but it's definitely things that are discussed. And I also have to say as a legal scholar and an activist, and Gila feels the same, that we and our friends, our life has not been the same in the past two and a half months since the elections.
I was just in New York for a few days and I woke up in the morning in New York Times and I found more than 300 messages, WhatsApp messages every day in my activist groups. Even that, just to illustrate the volume of activity, and this is before email and before keeping up with the news and with videos that are unbelievable from the Knesset committees. The rules of the game, the kind of minimal civilized, decorous discourse. Israel is informal, we know that. We're not that polite, but still what we see now coming out of the Knesset is beyond belief in the sense that it's breaking any minimal rules of respect of civility or of even remaining faithful to how you legislate, which is put a text on the table of the legislation.
There's Knesset discussions without a text that discusses what exactly we mean by this legislation. So these things really make me feel that I don't recognize the red line of the other side. I hope that there'll be a moment where Netanyahu and his partner stop and feel that it's time to slow down and start a dialogue and reach some sort of concessions compromise. Because right now the polarity is extreme, and the legislative bleed is really shocking and beyond belief.

Gila Stopler:
So I think that the sense of many people is that the country has been hijacked by a group of extremely nationalistic, religious and corrupt group of leaders who are misusing the majority to throw away all checks and balances and to make their own removal in the future impossible. So it's exactly the same process which happen in Hungary, which happen in Poland, which happen in Turkey, in Russia. Leaders get to their positions democratically and then with blitz of legislation and of measures, are trying to change democracy into an undemocratic regime. So they've already declared in the coalition agreements that they're going to make changes, which will basically not enable the Arab parties to run for parliament, which will mean that the Arab vote would be extremely low, and then the right-wing will continuously win. We see that they have very close ties with Viktor Orbán.

Bryan Schwartzman:
Bryan here, jumping in post recording. Just wanted to clarify, Viktor Orbán is the authoritarian prime minister of Hungary. The European Parliament has called his regime a systematic threat to the rule of law. Okay, jumping back to the interview.

Gila Stopler:
With Viktor Orbán, who actually tweeted when he met with the head of the Tikvah Fund, which is an American fund, which is heavily funding American style institutions like Kohelet, which is the policy institution for the right-wing government. It's purportedly behind the basic law judiciary, which is the basic law that they're going to change in order to actually make the Supreme Court ineffective. And all of these are actually moves that people are looking at and saying, is this even going to be a democracy once they're done with it. So both the speed of what they're doing without any proper consultation, without any proper, even of, like you said, of revealing the text, the actual text of the laws, which they are supposedly wanting to pass. So what's the rush? Why are they in such a hurry? And when you read the coalition agreements and when you think of Netanyahu's charges, you understand why they're in such a rush.
They're in a rush to implement all the religious nationalistic legislation that they've committed to in their coalition agreements. They're in a rush to do whatever they can to get rid of Netanyahu's trials. So this is an extremely worrying time for Israelis. And so it's not surprising that people are going out to the streets and doing other things, which they are hoping will be effective. I don't foresee that things will die down. I think that the clash will only get worse and worse. So I'm not optimistic, but I think that if we give up now, then we actually give up for good. Again, this is what happened in Turkey, in Hungary, in Poland. This is what happens when populist leader wants to take over a regime and make sure that he's immune from losing elections ever again, and this is what they're doing.

Bryan Schwartzman:
I guess along those lines, folks abroad, certainly in the United States, I mean, where by the way, women's rights took a big step backwards with the overturning of Roe v. Wade last year. I guess, certainly Jews and other engaged with Israel who would be motivated and animated by women's rights by, LGBTQ rights and some of these issues, there's been sort of a growing disenchantment with Israel and certainly during Netanyahu years. Sorry, I can't talk today. So I guess I'm just wondering, speaking to folks abroad, why should they be invested in these issues that you're talking about today? And is there anything they can do about it from outside Israel?

Yofi Tirosh:
I totally get the frustration of American Jews who care about Israel. They have all the reasons in the world to be frustrated. Like me, I'm frustrated with the lingering occupation over the Palestinians in the occupied territories and the kind of, no end in sight on this issue. I'm frustrated like them with what's happening in the Western Wall with difficulties of their Jewishness, their Jewish identity being recognized if they converted through the reform or the conservative movement rather than the ultra-Orthodox. There are many, many reasons to be disenchanted by Israel. Having said that, this is the time where we need American Jewish community more than ever before. It's a life and death moment for this country. I would also say something, I've lived many years in the US for my graduate school and after that for postdoc, and I am very familiar and respectful of this kind of dual identity of American Jews who want to be both faithful to Israel, kind of outwardly, as to not ruin the funding for the Iron Dome, et cetera, et cetera.
So to have the American government keep its loyalty to Israel in the security council and with the immense financial support and general friendship. But I think we're at a moment, and I'm going to say something that I know will be very inconvenient to many Jewish listeners. I think we're at a moment where it's time to flip the conception and understand that, I think, one of the only chances that Israel has to curb the dangerous developments that we're facing is if the American governments clarifies that it will remove its dedicated, almost automatic alliance with Israel. And I think that if American Jews are reserved to go to their political representatives and do that, the Israel that will remain won't be worth protecting.
Again, I'm not a geopolitical expert, but I feel like this is a moment to ask the US to pay prices in itself. The US government has a lot of investment, financial investment in Israel with armory, et cetera, et cetera. We know that. But I think this is a moment that both America and American Jews should be willing to change direction and change what they've been doing for decades and say, enough is enough. We care about Israel, but we care about Israel that is a democratic society, not a theocracy, not a semi-totalitarian regime that is oppressive to anybody who is not a Jewish straight man. That's not an Israel that's worth fighting for.

Gila Stopler:
So I think that the question should be divided into two. I mean, there may be people, there may be Jews who say, why should I even care about Israel at all? Which is one position saying maybe I'm a Jew, but I don't care about Israel. I can understand that even though I think whether people like it or not Israel has become part of Judaism. Being Jewish is, we can say, it's a cross you have to bear. It has its good sides and its bad sides, and Israel is one of those, and it depends on how you see Israel, but whether you see it as good or bad, then it could be a good side of your cross and which you're proud of, or it could be a bad side of your cross, which you're less proud of.
And I think we are now, like Yofi said, we're at the point where if we don't fight, then we're going to have a country, which it will be, unfortunately, I have to say, it'll be shameful for any Jew to be associated with. And it's not something which we can disassociate ourselves from. We should do whatever we can to prevent this from happening.

Bryan Schwartzman:
I wanted to ask, as long as I've been following Israel, traveling there, I've heard sort of, I don't know if it's a metaphor, but this idea of the balancing act. That this experiment was a balancing act between being a Jewish state and being a democracy, being a state for all its citizens and a state for Jews, and it would be difficult, it would be messy, but there was a way that this could be more or less in balance. Is that balance gotten so off kilter now that it can't be righted? Do you still see a Jewish democracy holding both sets of values as a possible path?

Gila Stopler:
I think this is an extremely difficult question. I think we as critical legal scholars have said even in the past that this balancing act is not working well. So for example, in my research, I always defined Israel only as a semi liberal country, definitely not a fully liberal country, which is hanging by the thread. Even this semi liberalism has been hanging by the thread. I think if, as Yofi said, we're not geopolitical experts, but the way I see it, what is happening now is that the fact that we have been occupying the occupied territories for 70 years has now, actually we are paying the price because the mindset of the occupation has turned on Israel and occupied us. So the people who are now in government are actually people whose mindset is a mindset of an occupier, and they've occupied us inside Israel. So we are now like [inaudible 00:46:58] has foreseen as early as 1967.
We the occupiers have been occupied by those who are the most extreme among us. You see Itamar Ben-Gvir, you see Smotrich, you see those people who have the mentality of an occupier, and they came to government and they're saying, look, what do we have here? All these liberal leftists women, LGBTQ, we're going to occupy them. We're going to do to them the same thing that we think we are entitled to do in the occupied territories. And we are going to use their advanced knowledge, their technology, their high-tech industry, their productiveness, their progressiveness. We're going to use all those as resources to cement the occupation and to cement the fundamentalist, nationalistic, corrupt regime, which we were holding in the occupied territories until now, and now we're going to implement in Israel as well.

Yofi Tirosh:
So yes, I totally relate to that. Another way of saying what Gila just said is that the practices that we as the Israeli public kind of gotten used to, okay, Gila and I resist occupation, but in Israel it has become almost a non-issue for many of the young people in Israel. But the human rights violation on an everyday basis, the checkpoints, which are based on a logic of segregation, the logic of segregation now migrates to proper Israel privacy violations, tapping your phones, profiling. Many, many practices that were aimed against the Palestinians in the territories are now applied and will be even more severely applied towards citizens of Israel. And I think one final point that is important to stress here is that when we say a tension between a Jewish and democratic state, when we say that this is a complicated, perhaps paradoxical formula that we have been trying to make work, what we have now is not a tension between Judaism and democracy because the coalition's version of Judaism is not Judaism, it's fundamentalism. It's zealous, reactionary fundamentalism, which doesn't remain faithful to the basic premises of what it means to be Jewish.
I'll give you one example. The government wants to give the Rabbinical Courts, which are courts that have authority over family and divorce issues. They want to give them the authority to judge, to rule over civic issues. The Rabbinical Courts, when parties came to them to work on labor issues, for example, on violations of minimum wage or all kinds of mandatory conditions and protections of employees, the Rabbinical Courts have been ruling against the very premise of Jewish law, which is famous for its labor protections, its welfare protection. And I can give you examples of that in any other field. So this is not democracy versus Jewish.

Gila Stopler:
And usually they were ruling against the women who are the laborers, who are the low paid with no social rights laborers.

Yofi Tirosh:
Exactly. And so this is not Judaism that I can relate to in any serious way as Judaism, and I am of the kind, maybe Gila will disagree with me on this point, but I do believe that there's a way to be both Jewish and faithful to the contemporary sensibilities of liberalism and human rights. It's definitely not the way of this government, and they're not making any effort to find this balancing act. They're simply saying, our vision is of a religious law, a religious law regime. And that is unfortunately where we're headed. It's going to have grave consequences on every Israeli, particularly on women, on LGBTQ plus people and on Palestinians.

Bryan Schwartzman:
Is there hope that things won't go this way? I mean, clearly you each must have some hope otherwise you wouldn't be talking, you wouldn't be writing, you wouldn't be trying to change things.

Gila Stopler:
So there's always hope. But I think there's no hope for Israel in general until we resolve the Palestinian problem. Like Yofi said, in the last few years, or even in the last government before this current one, it was as though the Palestinian issue has disappeared from site, but there's no way of continuing a normal life. I think if anything happened with this new government is that it's become completely clear to anybody who can analyze these things, that there is no way of continuing any normal life without resolving this problem, that not resolving this problem has been a poison in our society. And we have been cloaking ourselves with liberalism while at the same time doing unimaginably illiberal things on the other side of the border, which we don't even recognize as a border anymore, and this just cannot go on.

Bryan Schwartzman:
I mean, that's a whole other podcast, but.

Gila Stopler:
Yes, it is.

Bryan Schwartzman:
But solving that, I mean, there has to be people, partners to solve it with. Right?

Gila Stopler:
Yeah, I don't know how we can solve that, but I know clearly, and I think what this point in time has shown us clearly, is that without resolving that, we cannot have a functioning Jewish and democratic state, there's simply no way of doing that.

Yofi Tirosh:
And the plan of the new government is basically, let's linger. Let's buy time. There's no plan, not even a pretense of planning the drawers when there is a partner. So if you ask me, what is the prospect of Israel in terms of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, unfortunately now all I see is one state end to this conflict, whether it'll be with the equal rights to the Palestinians or it'll be an apartheid state officially. I don't know. I hope that we do manage to resolve it somehow in a direction of a two-state solution.
But what's important to realize right now is that it's not on the agenda. They don't care about solving it, and all they care about is pretending as if the present situation can linger forever. With your question about hope, yes, there's always hope. What I learned from years of activism is that even when the people in power pretend like they don't care what the people think, they care very much. And so the best response to attempts to suppress freedom of speech and of protest and of opinion is to speak, which is what we're doing, and we'll continue to do as long as we can.

Bryan Schwartzman:
Thank you both so much. Not necessarily an easy message to hear or pills to swallow, but such an important conversation. I thank you both and especially for going a little bit extra time, but it seemed that the issues seemed so crucial.

Yofi Tirosh:
Thank you so much.

Gila Stopler:
Thank you.

Yofi Tirosh:
Bye.

Bryan Schwartzman:
Okay, bye. Thanks so much for listening to my interview with Gila Stopler and Yofi Tirosh. So what did you think of today's episode? We want to hear from you. Evolve is about curating meaningful conversations, and that includes you. Send me your questions, comments, feedback, whatever you got. You can reach me at bschwartzman@reconstructingjudaism.org. And don't worry, we'll be back soon with a brand-new episode.
Evolve: Groundbreaking Jewish Conversations is executive produced by Rabbi Jacob Staub and edited by Sam Walks. Our theme song Ilu Finu is by Rabbi Miriam Margles. This show is a production of Reconstructing Judaism. I'm your host Bryan Schwartzman, and I will see you next time.