Religious and Misogynist Totalitarianism in Israel

The course “transfeminism” held at our organization, Isha L’Isha — Haifa Feminist Center, is ending in these days. When Donald Trump promised at his inauguration that from now on there would only be two genders in America, male and female, the threat was also felt in Haifa. Yet, alongside that is the understanding that we are in the midst of an anti-gender revolution that seeks to impose its definition of reality on all of us and that we have no choice but to do what we know best — organize, learn, and resist. The wonderful group of participants who gathered at Isha L’Isha to study with Tamar Ben-David, a trans academic herself, included a wide range of genders and identities. Even before anyone spoke, it was clear to us how vital the atmosphere created by our gathering was to us and how important it is to fight for it.

Last Saturday, we, the women of the collective, came together to reformulate our shared vision. Our organization makes decisions by consensus. In a process that lasted several hours, we arrived at the following agreed-upon wording:

Isha L’Isha is a radical and diverse feminist community, operating in a non-hierarchical manner, in line with the politics that its members want to see in the world: A safe and non-sexist world, with women’s and human rights, just peace, economic security, an ecological future, and freedom of choice for individual and collective identity, while opposing all types of oppression, racism, violence, discrimination, war, and occupation. Isha L’Isha is a radical-feminist political school, a model organization creating a fertile ground for the blossoming of projects, ideas, and practices in the spirit of radical feminism.

In fact, as many commented in the concluding session of the workshop on our vision, we reaffirmed the vision that has accompanied us for decades and that, in our view, is also adjusted to the difficult reality in which we currently live. We discovered again that we have a kind of organizational DNA out of which our actions evolve.

We don’t always stop to formulate in advance how our organizational initiatives are related to each other. But this year, with our opposition to the war in Gaza, the call for a just peace, the organization of the struggle against the evangelist right and its impact on our society, the opening of the course on transness and feminism, and a series of lectures on the effects of the war in Hebrew and Arabic, the connection between our various actions is clearer to us than ever before. We are in a struggle against the global Right. One of the main agents thereof is the Evangelical Right that promotes a continuous state of war in the Middle East and finances the vision of a state based on Halacha (Jewish law) held by those who aspire to the expansion of the State of Israel to all biblical territories. This Halacha state, like Christian nationalism, has declared all-out war on feminism, women, and what it calls the “gender movement”.

In Israel, the anti-gender movement comes in many forms: One aspect of the movement is the repeated demand for gender segregation in public spaces. Strangely enough, these demands find support among quite a few liberal publics. For example, when ultraorthodox or Religious Zionist Knesset members demand gender segregation in academia in the name of the rights of ultraorthodox men and women, liberal publics understandingly join this demand and see the aspiration for education as the main issue, and segregation as a temporary folly. The state recently decided to open gender-segregated study tracks for Master’s degrees within its budget, contrary to the decision of the High Court of Justice that allowed segregation for the first-degree studies as a temporary measure that would allow integration into a mixed community in the second-degree studies. Subsequently, missionary Jewish communities that came from the settlement blocs in the West Bank and settled in the heart of cities and towns in Israel with the aim of “Judaizing” them began to hold gender-segregated events in public spaces as well. Gender segregation and national segregation are thus combined into an ideology of Jewish male supremacy.

Over the past few months, we have delved deeper into learning about the influence of the Evangelical Right on Israeli politics. Among other things, we learned about their decisive influence on anti-abortion campaigns, anti-trans campaigns, and campaigns to eradicate prostitution for moral reasons, while ignoring the choice of sex workers.

Organized feminism in Israel developed in the 1970s against the backdrop of the struggle for free abortions. Over the years we have learned in the feminist movement, and especially in Isha L’Isha, about the importance of additional axes of oppression exerted on women, beyond male control, such as class, national, ethnic, religious, and sexual identities, and more. During the time feminism evolved, the trend of religious nationalism developed as well. The US has become a central agent in the creation and export of charismatic Christian nationalism, which generates enormous wealth, controls powerful media outlets and influences election results in many countries around the world, starting with the US itself.

In Israel, the Gush Emunim movement that developed after the 1967 war copied the model of charismatic Christianity. Since the 1970s, the Israeli right, especially the religious right, and the US-American Christian right have deepened their ties to the point of the very dangerous alliance between Benyamin Netanyahu and Trump — an alliance that threatens to pursue the transfer of the Palestinian residents of the Gaza Strip, an ongoing war in our region, dangerous expansion, transfer and occupation initiatives, and the deepening of the religious and misogynistic characteristics of the totalitarianism that has been established since the coup here, on which the Netanyahu government embarked with its establishment in December 2022, and continues to take deeper roots every day.

The two movements, feminism and religious nationalism, emerged in the 1970s in the US and in Israel. Now, in 2025, one of them, namely religious nationalism, is threatening to violently crush the other and jeopardize the achievements of many decades. By understanding the ideology behind Christian nationalism, we also understand the Islamophobic and anti-Semitic threats inherent in it, and the complete dismantling, it proposes, of any possibility for peace between the Palestinian people and the Jewish people in Israel/Palestine.

For us at Isha L’Isha — Haifa Feminist Center, it is more important than ever to join global forces that are fighting for freedom and social justice, for a feminist future, for gender and sexual equality, and for a just peace in the Middle East.