ANALYSIS: Countering the Masculine Security Mind-set

What actually is security? Pot-bellied generals with a big pair of binoculars, missile bases, fully stocked weapons warehouses. These images come to mind upon hearing this question. This is how we are used to thinking about this concept.

But security is not just a matter of armies and borders and live weapons. A slightly different perspective relates also to the individual's space, at home, on the street and at work, as deserving to be safe and protected. And this vision is today lacking from the perception of security issues.

On Thursday, the nonprofit organization Itach − Women Lawyers for Social Justice will present an opinion pertaining to gender to the Turkel committee, which is looking into the events of last May's Gaza flotilla in which nine people were killed. Despite the organization's call for a woman to be appointed to the committee and a High Court of Justice ruling that this call is justified, a woman was in the end not included. Among other reasons, it was claimed that the five senior female jurists approached by the committee declined to participate in it.

Hence, the review into the Israeli authorities' functioning during the flotilla is being carried out from a purely masculine perspective. The organization is submitting an opinion whose gist is publicized for the first time here, in the hope that it will move the committee's members to look at the events from a slightly different perspective.

The law, in any case, is on their side, our side: both Israeli law and international law. This month marks 10 years since UN Resolution 1325 of October 2000, which stipulated that it is obligatory to include women in decision-making processes in matters of peace and its advancement. After the Security Council passed this resolution, Israel in 2005 passed a refreshing amendment to the Equal Rights for Women law requiring adequate representation of women from the range of population groups in public committees.

All this is well and good, but in practice not much has changed: Most decision makers, and certainly in the area of defense, are men. Women's representation does not even come close to the definition of “adequate,” and certainly not when it comes to representation from among a variety of population sectors. In the words of the Itach legal opinion: “The military conflict and the occupation of Palestinians dictates the masculine discourse about security and there is no other ... The only women who are heard in public forums are those who have adopted the masculine discourse ... The feminine discourse which includes words such as listening, empathy, problem solving by taking into account the needs of the other, not only are not present, but also no one is even aware that this is an alternative.”

Women, so it is claimed, can make a big contribution to conflict resolution. In order to illustrate this, the opinion presents examples from around the world: In Northern Ireland, a coalition of women made a decisive contribution to the effort to achieve the Good Friday Agreement in 1998. Widespread organization by women contributed to the end of the bloody conflict in Liberia in 2003. In Spain, a national program is in operation to increase the representation of women in peace negotiating teams. In Nicaragua, a women's revolution within the police force led to a noticeable improvement in protection from gender-based violence.

In Israel as well, there are Jewish and Palestinian women's groups striving for peace ‏(including Itach‏) and which, if we allow ourselves to be momentarily optimistic, may one day yet help to create a different reality here.

Another important issue stressed in the report is that women and children are currently the main victims of wars, as was also determined in the 10-year-old UN resolution. Apart from the violence that the general population endures, women and girls also face sexual violence. The fact that rape is both a personal and national weapon is to me one of the worst and most inconceivable phenomena of society.

Among other things, the authors of the report present an interesting finding whereby in times of terrorist attacks, far fewer women seek help as a result of sexual assault and domestic violence. The explanation is that “social norms direct women to make their top priority the good of the public and the family, and not their own personal welfare and benefit.” Women who nonetheless seek help “report extraordinary difficulties, including a worsening in the mental state of victims of sexual assault, against the backdrop of overall uncertainty and worsening domestic violence against women and children.”

Israeli society, the report states, “focuses on what is perceived as an existential threat from the outside and in so doing, ignores the growing threat from arming from within. The process of securing the public space is steadily eating away at the civil arena and individual civil rights. The ‘intelligence community' is turning into an increasingly vague entity, undefined by its borders and identification marks.” Thus a substantial number of the many women murdered in Israel, many of them by their past or present partner, are slain by weapons that are licensed.

All this is far removed from the routine discourse about the Iranian nuclear program, Ahmadinejad, Nasrallah, etc. That discourse, so it seems, is often used to blur the real situation that women, children and also men are in and live through daily. It may be reflected in a daily sense of a lack of security: from provocations on the street, to harassment on one level or another at work, to restrictions on freedom of movement stemming, for example, from a fear of going out in the evening. There is not a single woman who has not experienced it and most women experience it many times.

Security in these areas ‏(and also that of children at school who encounter bullying, and lesbians, homosexuals, transgenders and bisexuals who are exposed to it‏) is no less important than what we are used to thinking of as security. True, it is hard to think of it this way in a country where every time anyone dares to question the standard perception, they immediately pull out the existential threat we supposedly face and do not forget to mention the Holocaust. However, broadening our horizons in this area, including also taking into account the gender issue, may lead us to other places that are less blood-soaked.

The Turkel committee to review the flotilla incident will not include a woman, and it seems that this too is not the heart of the matter: It is much broader. It is not a matter of the appointment of a woman or two as a fig leaf on committees and bodies that preserve the existing order. It's a matter of making a change, even if it is a gradual one, from a society where national or ethnic groups squabble over who is equipped with bigger equipment, to a society where the welfare of an individual ‏(even if he is a woman!‏) and the community, their safety and security and their right to live with dignity always top the order of priorities.

Utopia? Naivete? Perhaps. We can always dream.