The Great Regression: Women in Israel and the Time Machine to the Middle Ages

I am a man. Israeli. Latino. I am not a woman, and do not pretend to speak for them. But I am a humanist, and humanism has no gender. Humanism analyzes data, observes patterns, and understands injustice. I don’t need to feel what a woman feels to know that she suffers. What must be said is not a matter of identity but of reality. And the reality for women in Israel is being dragged backward as if we’ve stepped into a time machine set for the Middle Ages.

March 8th is International Women’s Day. That is why I am writing this. The country continues its regression while flowers and empty speeches are handed out.

Israeli women were once a symbol of emancipation. This was the country of Golda Meir, a grandmother carved from stone puffing cigarette after cigarette while leading a war cabinet. Today, there is no room for a woman like that, no place for a woman who refuses to bow her head—not with this government, not with these people.

And it keeps getting worse. Israel plummeted 23 spots in the Global Gender Gap Index, from 60th to 83rd in a year. Why isn’t this splashed across the front pages? Why isn’t someone shouting this disgrace through a microphone? Because while women are losing ground, the men who run this country are making sure their voices fade into silence.

The numbers are glaring: Israeli men earn, on average, 22% more than women. The gender wage gap in Israel is among the worst in the OECD. We’re not talking about loose change; we’re talking about lives—meanwhile, women’s participation in the workforce stalls at 64%, trailing behind men. And if being a woman isn’t hard enough, try being a woman and poor. Or a woman and Mizrahi. Or a woman and Arab in Israel.

But that isn’t enough. Because erasing women from the economy and the workplace isn’t enough. They must also be erased from public spaces. Their faces are scratched off billboards in ultra-Orthodox neighborhoods. They are pushed to the back of buses on specific routes. They are barred from running in political parties like Shas and United Torah Judaism. They are banned from public events if the rabbis decree it so. Segregation is no longer discreet—it is blatant.

And in the military? Yes, Israel has female soldiers, but only in units the rabbis approve of. Women are kept out of specific combat roles under the excuse that their presence would cause “discomfort” for religious soldiers. But what happens when that same soldier, the one who refuses to train alongside a woman, takes a bullet to the gut and is rushed to a hospital? What happens when the hands that stitch him back together belong to a woman? Does he refuse treatment? Does he turn his head, shame burning in his throat, as she stops the bleeding? And what does his rabbi say then? That it was God’s will? Exceptions can be made when death is at the door. And what does that make of this absurd rule that a woman cannot stand next to a man—unless she’s saving his life?

The violence doesn’t stop on the battlefield. On October 7, Hamas invaded Israel and used women’s bodies as trophies. There were rapes, mutilations, horrors beyond description. But the UN stayed silent. Western feminists remained silent. The same ones who shout about patriarchy when it suits them.

And who are the women fighting back? Movements like Bonot Alternativa take to the streets to fight against the erasure of women. But fighting is exhausting. Fighting when the enemy is the full weight of a government crushes you. Fighting when the courts are weakened, and laws grow harsher against women’s autonomy makes the battle unwinnable.

There is no more Golda Meir. A woman like her would be erased from history before she even had a chance to rise. The country that once stood as a beacon of gender equality is bowing to men who want women back where they think they belong—invisible.

And tomorrow, on International Women’s Day, while flowers are handed out and speeches are read, the truth will continue to be swept under the rug.