"To be led/ To walk with a humiliated head without seeing where.../ Without speaking. Because it is forbidden./ Without hearing well. Because the hat wraps around your ears./ After 10 minutes you lose orientation... In our first round... The crowd cheers and cheers/ In the second round less. In the third round, we're already part of the landscape.../ How quickly we all get used to the oppression of the other/ I was a slave."
This is how a participant in the slave performance described the unstable emotional state she enters during the protest. From flesh-and-blood independent women, the "slaves" become an object, an object, a performance designed to be looked at. They renounce individuality in order to illustrate the oppression of women who are covered and policed in a religious and ultra-Orthodox society. The image that became the concept was meant to scare us all about the future. But even now, this is a cynical use of women, their bodies and souls, to promote interests unrelated to them, in a protest led mainly by men.
The latest media buzz is about the exclusion of women. An event haunts an event, and every case is covered and explicit, loaded with the right agenda. A bus driver asks girls to cover themselves and sit in the back; A journalist publishes an angry post about ultra-Orthodox Jews who asked her to change seats on the flight; A "helpline for cases of exclusion of girls, girls and women in the public sphere" is established, and much more. Although there is no institutional directive excluding women or new government decisions on the issue, it seems to be a burning national problem. The storms did not subside even when the government condemned the cases documented, or when the drivers were immediately suspended. Not even when the transport minister declared that the issue would be dealt with severely. Exclusion of women is in the house.
The presence of specific struggles at the forefront of the public stage is always associated with money. The Me To campaign, for example, which swept mostly women from powerful strata, was passionately promoted by the media. The image of the slave, which in the recent wave of protests has become a feminist symbol and a bourgeois Israeli icon, has also been largely adopted by women from wealthy strata, and is therefore proudly marketed outward. At the same time, it is directed inward towards women who are not part of the same group of belonging. Since the Ashkenazi left still has a monopoly on feminism, most non-Ashkenazi women, certainly those who are not identified with the left, are not perceived by the public as a feminist authority. For right-wing politicians, the situation is even worse: they are referred to daily as "slaves" and, worse, are naturally seen as such.
Let me be clear – the oppression of women exists in Israel, as in all societies, both conservative and liberal. But the attempt to take ownership of it, frame it and commercialize it independently of reality does not promote feminist ideas. On the contrary, it empties them of content. The use of women's pain to strengthen opposition to the government by selling branded objects of slaves (cloth bags, notebooks, etc.) only emphasizes the moral vacuum of feminism in Israel.
Women look at other women and see that they are slaves. Facing them are the right feminist models: the president of the Supreme Court, the attorney general, and the less institutional but Ashkenazi model, mother of five, and Prof. Shikma Bressler. The mothers and grandmothers of some of us, who are often personal models of power, have never been desirable social models. They did not occupy key positions in the movement and were not perceived as worthy of taking part in shaping the feminist agenda in Israel. Although the representation of the slaves is relatively marginal, the statement that emerges from it attests to the racist and anti-feminist perceptions rooted in the feminist movement in Israel.
So what leads strong women to take part in a performance that requires them to strip themselves of symbols of status, identity and personality and undergo total objectification? There may be an extreme urge to experience oppression of (other) women; Solidarity is not there. The prolonged exclusion of many women, entrenched in the boundaries of class and color, has condemned a detached, separatist and self-centered feminism. Feminism in Israel has become narcissism.
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