You’re soldiers. She’s a paramedic. Get in the APC

Let’s get this straight: The army jailed a handful of male soldiers for refusing to sit in an armored personnel carrier with a female paramedic. The soldiers were part of a regular combat unit, not an ultra-Orthodox one, and therefore required to obey the rules under which women serve alongside men. Bezalel Smotrich, a government minister, publicly condemned the army’s move, even though the soldiers’ refusal had supposedly compromised their mission.

The woman, unnamed in the article, was not asked how she felt about the soldiers’ rude boycott.

She was not there to sing, and the men were not required to touch her. There would be no orgy in the APC because a woman sat on one of its benches. She was there because she possessed special training. Her seat was not a perk. She was not there because she had breasts or a vagina, but because she, like the men, had a role to play in whatever action was planned.

I have to wonder: If, God forbid, the APC came under attack and some of those men were injured, would they refuse medical care from this woman? Would she be given their gracious permission to touch them in order to stanch bleeding or treat a burn?

Azar Nafisi, in her memoir “Reading Lolita in Tehran,” writes about meeting with male staff at the Iranian university where she taught. The men would avoid looking at her – some ostentatiously keeping their eyes on the windows and walls, others looking down with a hint of embarrassment. She, as well, learned never to look a man in the eye or offer a hand, but she also learned to read these men, and the sects and groups to which they belonged, by the ways in which they kept their eyes off the pale patch of skin or the wayward strand of hair peeking out from her scarf.

She also writes of the girls she taught, who laughed out loud at the idea that a single strand of hair or the sight of an ankle encased in a colored sock could send a man into the throes of uncontrollable sexual urges. She writes of sexual predation in the corners of the university – of young women afraid to speak out. This despite the myriad rules that kept men and women separate and women shrouded in black from head to toe.

I can’t help but see the parallels.

My dear young Orthodox males: You have simultaneously awarded this young woman, and others like her, both immense power and complete negation. Is she a goddess before whom you are helpless? A succubus who will come to haunt you at night? The problem is that in giving her this power, you also take away her humanity. In refusing to sit in the same space she occupies, you take away her own right to participate.

Or, to put it another way, as an Israeli woman, I see a hundred years of progress getting flushed down the drain.

I see in your action – and the army’s response – the clash of our two Israels. In my Israel, women have served in the armed forces from the very beginning, and their valor was sung and praised no less than that of the men. You and I live in a country that was built by women and men working together to plow fields and tend cows and chickens. In your Israel, however, religion increasingly dictates how life should be lived by all citizens in our Jewish state.

I do try to respect your religious beliefs. I am willing, for example, to agree that the entire army must eat kosher food, despite the fact that only some of its soldiers adhere to the rules of kashrut. I do understand that your display of religiosity poses a vexing question: Why do the handful of ultra-Orthodox soldiers serve in special units in which women are verboten, while regular religious soldiers – who supposedly believe in the same set of laws – must get crammed into armored vehicles with women who – gasp – are treated as equals and allowed to take up space?

I can live with kashrut, with giving religious soldiers time to pray and such. But in your treatment of this unnamed woman, you are treading on my own dearly held beliefs, which are no less vital or historically grounded than yours. In fact, I see yours as regressive. Your form of religion has become decidedly more rigid and less humane with time. With the support of government ministers, you are leading us down a slippery slope that can only end in the abuses that Iran visits on nine-tenths of its population.

So this is where I draw the line. This woman – this person – has a job to do that is no less critical than yours. You can put your hands in your lap. Don’t look her in the eye. But you do not – I repeat, you do not – have the right to take away her humanity.

Your APC is a place where the basic social order that built this country is still the rule. Your refusal to share that space with a woman is a direct affront to that order, and it is not trivial. It does not simply involve your personal belief that women are somehow less than you or that they possess particular unnatural powers. It does not simply involve the way some rabbi or other instilled the fear of strange women in your brain, or the particular interpretation of religious texts to which you adhere. It goes to the heart of the balancing act by which we are both a Jewish country and one in which all citizens, female and male, are equals.

I cannot control what teachings you are fed in your kollel or your synagogue. I cannot tell you how to live in your home. But for the two or three or ten years you serve in the army, you are required to live within the social structure laid out for you, with officers and training and life in close quarters with your unit. Just as you must learn to obey orders, fire weapons or drive army vehicles, you must also learn to serve alongside women. Cheer up. Your regressive beliefs are not hardwired into Judaism. It requires only some real respect for all human beings – a belief that does not contradict the Torah in any way.

Guys, you are in a fighting unit, getting shelled by enemy guns and hit by drones, getting sent into dangerous, uncertain situations against well-armed enemies on all sides. Is a woman sitting in an APC truly what you have to fear?