On the theoretical level, Braverman’s is an old argument that has been presented over and over, and refuted again and again. But I would like to refer to Braverman’s references to Israel. Her missive supposedly refers to Israel as well as the United States, but sadly, it is completely misleading in this regard.

In Israel, unlike in certain segments of American society, “our mothers” (in the 1960s and 1970s) were never feminist. Not of this kind, not of that kind, not of any kind. Nor are Israeli female academics feminist today. Braverman’s fantasy of feminist journals and militant, radical feminist academics spitting fire from their ivory towers has nothing to do with Israeli reality. We have not a single feminist journal, nor radical feminist academics. We hardly have women in academia at all. Women in Israeli academia constitute eleven percent of senior professors, and, much like Tzipi Livni, most of them want nothing to do with women or with feminism. Few of them teach feminist theory, and when they do, it is mostly in English. Simply put, not a single Israeli woman academic (other than myself) took a stand in the Ben-Ari scandal and joined the students in their demand that the Hebrew University investigate the complaints—a demand, by the way, which the university has been ignoring for years, and apparently continues to do. It was women activists, journalists, and the public who were outraged and vocal, not academia. The fearsome radical academic feminism that Braverman objects to disappeared from American universities over a decade ago; but it never existed in Israel. Before calling for change, perhaps Braverman should take a closer look at reality. She will find that our mothers had no feminism, which is, sadly, true for most Israeli women still.

Orit Kamir
The Hebrew University ofJerusalem

 

Marla Braverman Responds:

Eyal Ben-Ari agrees with the arguments I set forth in my article but takes issue with my description of his academic career and his sexual harassment case. He denies, specifically, that he is an “outspoken critic of Israel’s ultra-militarized culture.” As proof, he points to his service on various IDF committees and his regular appearances in the Israeli media, where he claims to supply a balanced view of the role of the military in Israeli society. The fact of participation in IDF committees, of course, does not in itself prove anything regarding his ideology; merely that he is recognized for his scholarship on the relationship between the military and civil society. As for the “balanced” view he purports to espouse in his many media appearances, a selection of quotations from various articles he has authored paints a different picture. In “The Psychological Discourse and the Normalization of War in Israel” (2008), for example, he writes that the national psychological discourse “blurs, hides, and ‘purifies’ in different ways the subjects connected to violence, power, and moral responsibility, and as such ‘normalizes’ the reality of war in the daily life of Israeli society.” In the introduction to his edited anthology The Military and Militarism in Israeli Society (1999), he describes how scholarly studies have come to include an examination of Israeli society as “a radical instance of how democracy normalizes militarism of a specific kind,” as well as the development in Israel of a “military mentalite,” or the “extent to which military ways of thinking have seeped into, indeed dominate, everyday life in Israel.” There, too, he asks whether “the adoption and promotion of the military parade by Israel’s noncombatant elites [could] not be a signal that militaristic attitudes… have come to saturate the very thinking of civilian leaders” and explains that the essays included in the volume all explore, in part, “what may be termed an ‘Israeliness-militarism-manhood’ complex that is the epitome of the Israeli hegemony”—with “hegemonic” defined as encompassing “ideas about a socially legitimated and maintained hierarchy between alternative arrangements and the centrality of the state (and its myriad agents) in controlling not only material and state resources but also dominating the very conceptual categories through which Israeli Jews think about the reality in which they live.” Moreover, in his 2005 analysis of Israeli snipers in the Al-Aksa Intifada, he writes that their reasoning for killing “is closely linked to a Zionist text in the sense of connecting their personal understanding to the grand narrative of the IDF protecting the very survival of the Israeli nation-state.” As such, “violence does not only belong to the realm of the pathological but is woven into the fabric of normal everyday life.” These and other remarks may indeed strike Ben-Ari as balanced, but that is a matter of interpretation. What is demonstrable is that his views regarding the militarization of Israeli society are located at one (extreme) end of the political spectrum.

More importantly, Ben-Ari claims that I make a number of “unsubstantiated innuendos” to the effect that he indeed committed the crime for which a file was opened with the Israel Police. Yet a rereading of my essay reveals that I did not, either explicitly or implicitly, point an accusing finger at him. Indeed, as he himself concedes, his case was not the focus of my piece at all. Rather, I referred to those details of his case provided by the police, faculty, students in his department, and the media in the course of an intellectual discussion the point of which was clearly not to determine the veracity of the allegations connected with it, or his guilt or that of any other individual. That is a matter for the courts to take up—if, of course, it is demanded of them.

Last, Ben-Ari points out that he is a professor not of sociology, but of anthropology; and that, moreover, he is a member not of the sociology department, but rather of the department of sociology and anthropology. On this matter I fully concede my error, and thank him for bringing it to my attention.

In accusing me of espousing anti-feminist sentiments, Orit Kamir follows in mainstream feminism’s unfortunate tradition of dismissing all criticism of its methods—even that criticism whose mutual goal is the promotion and protection of women in our society—simply for failing to toe the party line. Dressed up as “empathy” and “solidarity,” the fundamental commandments of feminism she claims I have broken are in truth no more than lockstep conformity, invariably with a narrative of immutable oppression. Yet this insistence on women’s victim status has done them no favors. On the contrary, it has only hampered their efforts to overcome the many obstacles still in their path.

Kamir is no doubt correct that rejecting the advances of a supervising professor—or any man in a position of authority for that matter—can be a difficult thing for a woman to do. Yet recognizing the difficulty of saying “no” should not absolve women of their responsibility for doing so—and not least because such absolution, however unintentionally, frequently undermines women’s belief in their ability to say “no” at all. By nurturing a culture in which one’s powerlessness is a badge of identity, feminism not only creates the expectation of injustice, it also ill equips women to address that injustice and triumph over it. Moreover, while Kamir is also correct that the price of lodging complaints and following through on them can be high, in academia as elsewhere, I would argue that only women who consider their victimization a given would accept the notion that the attainment of one’s professional aspirations can be achieved at the cost of her dignity. Women must reject the idea that passivity is the predictable, even legitimate, response to attacks on their autonomy. Until that happens, no change in the existing “systematic power structure” will solve the problem of sexual harassment in Israeli society.

Yet the truth of the matter is that Kamir’s approach is not only—albeit unintentionally—demeaning to women. Nor is it merely defeatist. It is also, quite simply, spoiled. She and other radical feminists want to eradicate patriarchy. They call for a complete restructuring of society. In short, they talk about a revolution. But revolutions come at a price. In the not-too-distant past, revolutionaries stared down tanks and risked exile to hard labor camps; many paid the price of their cause in blood. Seen this way, feminists should perhaps be thankful that the price of fighting for gender equality is “merely” forgoing grant money and letters of recommendation.

As to whether, in the example of the Ben-Ari case, his colleagues in the department would have ignored all complaints against him, it is impossible to say (although it may be argued that complaints lodged anonymously, as in this case, likely have less effect than those attached to women willing to identify themselves, and to pursue both visibly and vocally the justice of their cause). What it is possible to say, however, is that there exists in Israel the precedent of women in positions of little authority bringing down men in positions of great authority, as the high-profile cases of former defense minister Yitzhak Mordechai and, more recently, former president Moshe Katsav make clear. In both instances, the outcomes were the combined result of progressive sexual-harassment legislation and the courage of the women involved to avail themselves of it.

Finally, in her dismissive characterization of the Israeli feminist movement of the 1960s and 1970s (and, I would add, the early 1980s), Kamir does “our mothers” a great disservice. Israeli feminists such as Marcia Freedman established in the 1970s a nationwide network of advocacy and support for women, including the first battered women’s shelter, the Community School for Women, which provides education in women’s studies and economic empowerment. Freedman also founded the Women’s Party, which, although it did not gain entry to the Knesset, nonetheless proved critical to raising awareness of women’s issues within the Israeli public. She was aided in her efforts by leading feminist activists such as Shulamit Aloni, Alice Shalvi, and Naomi Chazan—the latter of whom, it should be noted, is a professor of political science, and was always a vocal feminist voice from within the academy. Like today’s feminists, they too believed (rightly or wrongly) that Israeli society was sexist, and that women labored under a burden of inequality. Critically, however, their ultimate goal was not to imbue women with a sense of the extent and nuances of their oppression. Rather, they focused their energies on women’s empowerment, and the legal, political, and even religious means of its attainment. Unfortunately, this aspect of feminism has taken a backseat in recent decades, particularly in the humanities departments of today’s Israeli universities, all of which feature a “gender studies” or “women’s studies” faculty, and all of which make wide use of feminist theory in their curricula. To be sure, the disproportionately low percentage of senior female professors in Israeli universities is problematic, and an issue that requires rectification. Yet it is quite inaccurate to argue, as does Kamir, that from this percentage we may draw conclusions regarding the existence and impact of feminist ideas in the Israeli academy. The fact of the matter is that radical feminist theory holds sway there, and is one of the leading critical models through which students are taught to understand their subjects of inquiry. Radical feminist theory also informed the editorial slant of Noga, Israel’s Hebrew-language feminist journal of some thirty years’ standing, which ran its last issue in 2004. And it continues to be the subject of numerous essays published in both liberal and scholarly Israeli journals, such as Theory and Criticism and Israel Affairs, as well as the focus of dozens of blogs by female Israeli scholars (of which Kamir is one).