Election parallels – gender issues

As the US voters are lining up to vote, I can’t help but think about some parallels between the dynamics of the US and the Israeli elections already.

Similarly to what happened in the US, the current Israeli election is also ‘historical’. Although Israel has a record of female Prime Minister (PM), Tzipi Livni’s candidacy is still quite unique.  Not only she is female, but she is also young and has limited military experience, which is traditionally important for the Israeli PMs.  She is also heading a really “young” and quite controversial party, which emerged in the center of political map and is lacking the long histories of both “Likud” and “Avoda”.  To a degree this is similar to Obama’s appearance as a young and relatively inexperienced candidate, who started basically with nothing and in about a year became one of the most popular politicians in the US and beyond.  If Livni is smart, she could capitalize on that experience.

Nevertheless, we can already see reactions in the Israeli political sphere.  Gender is suddenly really important.  Soon after Livni declared that she prefers the election blaming the failure to build a coalition on Shas’s excessive demands, the spiritual leader of Shas, Ovadia Yossef, issued a halakha ruling stating that it is Ok for women to govern.  Prior to that, one of the critiques of Shas was that they blew the colatition talks because it is against their tradition to have women in positions of power (indeed, there is and there was not a single woman among Shas’s mebers of Knesset).  It is difficult to interpret such a progressive ruling from an orthodox spiritual leader, other than a gesture towards female voters.

Later, Netanyahu has widely publicised the fact that former army spokeswoman, Miri Regev, has joined Likud.  During the press confernce he was quoted saying: “We are witenessing a wave of people who join or come back to Likud and I am glad that many women are joining our movement” (my translation of the original in HE).  Does it ring the McCain-Palin bell to anyone?