Women’s rights in Israel are under danger, warns Prof. Ruth Halperin-Kaddari, a legal scholar and founding director of the Rackman Center for the Advancement of the Status of Women at Bar Ilan University. The risk is coming from their own government, led by Benjamin Netanyahu a host of far-right, ultra-religious parties.

The judicial overhaul led by Netanyahu, Halperin-Kaddari explains, poses great risks to Israeli women, since “the weakening of the power of the High Court of Justice will have a devastating impact on the ability of women to fight back against discriminatory laws.” 

In a conversation with host Allison Kaplan Sommer, she adds that “We have the clear examples of states in Europe who have been through this. It is exactly the way that Poland had gone, as well as Hungary and Turkey. And in each of these states, it was - and it still is - women who are paying the highest price.”1

She applauds the use of the image of the women in Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel-turned-TV series “The Handmaid’s Tale” as having been effective in focusing the Israeli public’s attention on these imminent threats. “The intentions of this government regarding women are very clear,” she says. “I truly fear that all these dystopian visions of the future are totally realistic.”