From the Liveblog of
Monday, January 8, 2024
MK slams lack of women involved in war leadership
Sam Sokol is the Times of Israel's political correspondent. He was previously a reporter for the Jerusalem Post, Jewish Telegraphic Agency and Haaretz. He is the author of "Putin’s Hybrid War and the Jews"
The lack of women in senior positions, including the war cabinet, is a “serious problem,” Yisrael Beytenu MK Sharon Nir says, arguing that if people in power had only heeded the warnings of female soldiers ahead of October 7, “we might be in a different place.”
“There is not even one woman in the war cabinet,” the former brigadier general, who had previously served as a gender affairs adviser to the IDF chief of staff, declares in a Facebook post, asking how it can be that women “are hardly seen in senior positions” given that they comprise more than half of the state’s population.
“We are in 2024, it’s time that we wake up and stop acting according to dark and gendered stigmas that belong to history,” she says. “It is in the power of women to improve the decision-making processes in Israel and reshape reality.”
Israel declared war on Hamas after the terror group burst across its southern border from Gaza on October 7, slaughtering some 1,200 people — mostly civilians who were massacred amid horrific acts of brutality — and kidnapping more than 240 others.
Following the attack, the Haaretz daily reported that senior commanders refused to heed the warnings of the young female surveillance soldiers tasked with watching the Gaza border in the weeks before the Hamas onslaught, and the soldiers believe sexism was a factor in their being ignored.
Israel Defense Forces female surveillance soldiers, referred to in Hebrew as tatzpitaniyot, belong to the Border Defense Corps and operate along the country’s borders, as well as throughout the West Bank.
