Human Rights 2012: A long way to go in Israel

Google the phrase “human rights in Israel and the Palestinian territories” and you’ll get 39.1 million hits, most of them describing human rights violations.
In Israel, dozens of organizations are devoted to causes listed under the umbrella of human rights, some focused on Israeli society while others are concerned with the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, regarding which several experts have said there is some good news for the past year, starting with an unlikely place: Israel’s weeklong aerial bombardment of the Gaza Strip last month.
Yuval Shany, the dean of the law school at Hebrew University told The Media Line. In Israel, women constitute a large part of the work force. Excluding Arab and ultra-Orthodox women, 80 percent of the remaining secular Jewish women are working — one of the highest rates in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), an international group comprised of 34 nations to improve economic and social well being. But Israeli women still earn about 25 percent less than men.
Some 5000 people marched through Tel Aviv on Friday as part of an event organized by The Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI). ACRI President Sami Michael spoke about discrimination against women in Israel.
“A society that excludes women from the public sphere is sick and will never truly flourish,” Michael told the crowd. “Our society becomes more and more violent, more and more racist every day. And women — who make up half of the human race — pay the highest price of all, with their bodies and their souls.” Michael said the wage discrepancy in Israel between men and women is among the highest in the Western world.
“We cannot tolerate this situation,” he said. “Women are entitled to the same pay, not a shekel less.”
Several ultra-Orthodox political parties, including Shas and Yahadut HaTorah, do not allow women to vie for seats in Parliament. Francis Raday, the director of the Concord Center for International Law in Israel, has appealed to Israel’s Election Committee to disqualify any political party that does not allow women on their elections slate.
“Israel ranks 67 out of 144 countries in terms of the number of women in Parliament,” she told The Media Line. “Only 17.5 percent of Parliament members are women, compared to 26 percent for the OECD. When you look at ministerial positions, it is even lower at just nine percent.”
Some Middle Eastern human rights organizations, such as B’tselem, devote themselves exclusively to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. B’tselem says the number of attacks by extremist Jews on Palestinians, including the burning of mosques, increased in 2012.
“There is a great deal of hostility to human rights and a lack of understanding of the universal nature of human rights,” Jessica Montell, the executive director of the B’tselem organization told The Media Line.