NIF CEO Daniel Sokatch
NIF CEO Daniel SokatchFlash 90

The Israel Women's Network (IWN), Israel's major radical feminist group and a flagship New Israel Fund organization, does not seem to like Arutz Sheva's reporting on gender issues.

Elinor Davidov, who is in charge of the field known as "exclusion of women" in the IWN, published a Facebook post Tuesday night blasting the right-wing orthodox website, and focusing on a daily column called "Fighting for the Family".

"This is about Arutz Sheva," declared Davidov. "This is a website that incites against women in general and feminists in particular, every day of the week."

She then went on to quote from an interview with the column's editor, Gil Ronen, in the weekly Zavit Aheret. In it, Ronen was quoted as saying that he would like to "bring back sanity to the relations between the sexes."

"Specifically," he explained, "we would like to see a Committee for Family Matters replace the Knesset's Committee for Advancement of Women's Status and Committee for Children's Rights. These committees create division at the most basic level of the nation, and the strategy behind them is Marxist."

Ronen also called for defunding "gender studies" departments in the universities. He named the IWN and the Association of Rape Crisis Centers in Israel – both founded by the NIF – and the Rackman Center for the Advancement of the Status of Women as organizations that enjoy undeserved legitimacy.

Additional goals enumerated by Ronen in the interview cited by Davidov included: Meting out serious punishment to women who are proven to have filed false accusations against men; ending to the practice of forcing men who divorce to meet their children in supervised "contact centers"; the removal of International Women's Day – originally a communist holiday – from the Knesset's official calendar; carrying out objective surveys about domestic violence, that take into account violence by women, and nixing the current close cooperation between the Police and the State Prosecution, and women's groups.

The IWN was established in 1984 by the NIF, which funded it extensively for many years. It now no longer relies on the NIF for funding.