JustASC

Maureen Dowd’s column today, about how the Saudis are “chipping away at gender apartheid and cultural repression,” is a maddening example of false analogies in service of insanely unfounded moral equivalencies.

Here she quotes Prince Saud al-Faisal of Saudi Arabia, which she correctly describes as “an absolute Muslim monarchy ruling over one of the most religiously and socially intolerant places on earth”:  

“We are breaking away from the shackles of the past,” the prince said, sitting in his sprawling, glinting ranch house with its stable of Arabian horses and one oversized white bunny. “We are moving in the direction of a liberal society. What is happening in Israel is the opposite; you are moving into a more religiously oriented culture and into a more religiously determined politics and to a very extreme sense of nationhood,” which was coming “to a boiling point.”

(Funny “you” in that sentence, but never mind).

The prince goes on to say, “The religious institutions in Israel are stymieing every effort at peace.”

At this point a fair-minded observer might interject that comparing Israel and Saudi Arabia on gender equality, civil rights, and religious freedom is a little like comparing North and South Korea on food delivery, democratic governance, and technological innovation, or the Cleveland Cavaliers and New Jersey Nets on basketball prowess.   

Instead, Dowd offers this helpful precis on Israeli trends (and I’m not sure if she is paraphrasing the prince or just providng some background of her own):

Israel is a secular society that some say is growing less secular with religious militants and the chief rabbinate that would like to impose a harsh and exclusive interpretation of Judaism upon the entire society. Ultra-Orthodox rabbis are fighting off the Jewish women who want to conduct their own prayer services at the Western Wall. (In Orthodox synagogues, some men still say a morning prayer thanking God for not making them women.)

Let’s unpack this idiocy:

Israel is a secular society that some say is growing less secular

Less secular in what ways exactly? It’s true that the Orthodox rabbinate has a stranglehold on “status” issues like marriage and funeral rites, and that they are alienating diaspora Jews with increasingly stringent standards on conversion. But most Israelis have either accepted this monopoly as a political sop to a loud and parasitic  minority, or have found ways around the most annoying rules. In overwhelming measures, secular Israelis live their lives untouched by the influence of the Orthodox; women are fully integrated (with room for improvement, sure) into Israeli society, including academia, professions, and the military; and non-Jewish minorities maintain their own authority over their religious affairs.

with religious militants and the chief rabbinate that would like to impose a harsh and exclusive interpretation of Judaism upon the entire society.

“Would like to” is the key phrase there. In the United States, the Tea Party movement would like to abolish the income tax, but l still have to file my forms. If by “religious militants” she means the settlers, it’s worth noting that a/ only a minority of settlers are religiously motivated and b/ the troublemakers among the religious settlers are a political obstacle to a two-state solution, but have no influence on, or interest in, the human and civil rights extended to the vast majority of Israelis.

Ultra-Orthodox rabbis are fighting off the Jewish women who want to conduct their own prayer services at the Western Wall.

This sucks, but the rabbanut‘s attempts to turn the Western Wall plaza into an Orthodox synagogue, or segregate buses that drive through their neighborhoods, is hardly in the same league as society whose laws prevent women from driving or travelling alone, imposes a harsh beating on a woman journalist  for her involvement in a TV show in which a Saudi man publicly talked about sex, or only allows female lawyers to appear in court on rare occasions.

(In Orthodox synagogues, some men still say a morning prayer thanking God for not making them women.)

This is only partly true– actually, almost ALL men in Orthodox synagogues say this prayer. Yet even in the fervently Orthodox communities, women often work outside the home (they have to if their husband is a full time yeshiva student), often pursue higher education, and do not need permission from male “guardians” to conduct their most basic affairs, like traveling out of the country or receiving medical care.

And that’s the fervently Orthodox. Among the Modern Orthodox, including the religous settlers, men mostly hold the cards when it comes to ritual and synagogue life, but women otherwise live lives often indistinguishable from secular women in terms of employment, education, and basic freedoms.

And again, for the secular majority in Israel, the religious attitudes among the Orthodox play almost no role in shaping their daily lives or civil society.

And I love getting lectures on Israel’s “extreme sense of nationhood”  from the representative of a government that prohibits the public practice of non-Muslim religions and reserves citizenship for Muslims.

[UPDATE: Brad Hirschfield has a good take on this at Beliefnet, as usual.]