Another week will mark the 60-day anniversary of the death of the late Gil Ronen, and if he were with us today, he'd certainly have a lot of insight into the 21st Knesset.
This is especially true of a Knesset that will be devoid of veteran feminists such as Merav Michaeli, Tzipi Livni, Aliza Lavie, and Orly Levy, who for a long time we have become accustomed to seeing set the tone in Knesset committees and legislation.
Their golden age began in the 1990's with the collapse of the Oslo dream and the loss of public confidence in the formula of peace-in-return-for-territories of the Left. The gap was quickly filled with political organizations such as Women in Black and the Coalition of Women for Peace, who continued to strive for clearly left-wing goals, while dressing them in rhetoric about the status of women.
From a system that protects the people from the enemy, the army was portrayed as the "enemy" of the nation's women. All those men serving in the reserves became potential wife-beaters and it was requested their weapons be taken away. The quality of training was diminished to match the physical ability of women fighters and the preoccupation with women's singing went out of all proportion (as if all they do in the army all day is to sing). The IDF found itself constantly on the defense, in what was just another way to divert it from fighting issues, while the family went from being the basic supporting unit to a mechanism whose sole purpose was to oppress the female.
Ronen was one of the first to dare declare that the king has no clothes. He warned that the real goal of political feminism is to attack the Israeli man, the father and the warrior, and to create "divide and rule" between the sexes. Because this is always the way of the Left: To strive to divide and conquer, knowing that divided people will be easier to control.
Is the decline of the representation of political feminism in the current Knesset temporary, or is it evidence of the public's disillusionment with it? It's too early to say, but it is hard not to notice that in this election campaign the gender issue did not constitute an issue, not even for the dying Labor Party that had turned it into a banner, in complete contrast to previous election campaigns. To those who remember how Tzipi Livni clung to the status of women in the 2008 elections, or how Moshe Kahlon on the eve of the 2014 elections held a conference for his party women, with participants wearing We are all Women pins on their lapels.
Moreover, the current electoral system is the first in which the strength of the family unit was explicitly included in the platform of one party (Zehut) and the coalition demands of another party, the Right Parties Union, which demanded the establishment of a division responsible for reducing the divorce rate in Israel and strengthening the family unit.
It is certain that this is more than coincidence that these two trends are happening side by side. So Gil, if you were here with us today, you would see that your labor has borne fruit.
Translated by Mordechai Sones