passed a bill outlawing polygamy, and then for the
next 45 years it ignored it.”
According to Oren, “By failing to apply its laws,
Israel has not only eroded a once overwhelming
Jewish majority in the Negev but created an unbroken
swath between Gaza and the Hebron Hills, essentially
bisecting the Negev. Taking advantage of Israeli indif-
ference, both Hamas and the PLO have constructed
mosques and madrassas throughout the Bedouin
communities and provided the teachers, many of
them Israeli Arabs from the North who radicalized the
Bedouin. It is scarcely surprising that Bedouin involve-
ment in terror attacks such as that which killed four
Israelis in Beersheva in March 2022 is rising.”
In response to this threat, Oren called upon Israeli
society to make a “new deal” with Israeli Arabs, where
the state will declare war on any form of discrimination,
promote Arabic-language education in Jewish schools
and Hebrew-language education in Arabic schools,
and enforce the law in Arab-populated areas of the
country, so that polygamy, unauthorized construction
and smuggling will be clamped down upon.

“In contrast to the past, when Israeli Arabs
protested against the presence of the police in their
villages, now they protest in favor of greater police
presence. And as the recent elections showed, Arab
politicians are harnessing their newfound power not
to delegitimize the system but to influence it. These
trends offer opportunities that must not be missed
and which, if catalyzed by policy, can make Israel
2048 a truly cohesive state,” he said.

Women’s rights
In his book, Oren discusses the difference between
how outsiders perceive Israel and how Israel is in
reality. “Growing up in America in the 1960s and 1970s,
Israel looked to me like the paragon of women’s
rights. There were photographs of short-skirted
women soldiers marching proudly with their Uzis, the
kibbutz women in their kova tembel [hats] working
the fields, and women who appeared to be self-confi-
dent to the point of brashness. There was Golda Meir.

Israel looked like a feminist forerunner. Only when I
came here did I begin to see the deep discrepancy
between the myth surrounding Israeli women and
their far less-than-egalitarian reality.

“Though the IDF was one of the only armies in
the world to draft women, it strictly limited them
to noncombat roles, many of them clerical. Sexual
exploitation by male superiors was commonplace.

Similarly, on the kibbutz, relatively few women worked
in the fields but rather [most] remained in the commu-
nal kitchens and children’s houses,” Oren wrote.

“And if the Israeli women were outspoken, their
candor did not translate into equal career opportuni-
ties. Golda might have been prime minister, but she
was only one of three women in her 56-seat party.

Beneath these disparities lurked even darker injus-
tices such as polygamy, female sex trafficking and
honor killings.”
Oren said that Israel has progressed much since
Young Jewish men holding Israeli flags dance at Damascus Gate in Jerusalem’s Old City, during Jerusalem
Day celebrations on May 29, 2022.

then, but still women earn 70% of what men do.

“Between college-educated men and women, the
gap is even wider. Though women have traditionally
dominated the banking sector, the percentage of
women on boards of major banks is under 20%. The
percentage of women in the Knesset falls far behind
that of the Swedish, Norwegian and Rwandan parlia-
ments. There has yet to be a woman head of the
Mossad or Shabak [the Shin Bet] or a woman minister
of defense. Women cannot serve as Knesset members
for any of the ultra-Orthodox parties,” he said.

Furthermore, “Women in Israel are afflicted by a
scourge of societal evils such as family violence,
female sex trafficking, genital mutilation and the
marriage of minors. Each year sees the recurrence of
the so-called honor killings in which an Arab woman
accused of sexual improprieties is murdered by a
male family member. Honor killers have traditionally
received relatively light sentences,” Oren said.

“Israeli women seeking a divorce must work
through the Chief Rabbinate, which reserves the
right to grant a divorce only to the husband. Refused
by their spouses, hundreds of Israeli women become
agunot, unable to remarry and receive alimony
and child support. In religious sectors, women are
increasingly excluded from public spaces and events.

Their images on billboards are defaced.”
He continued, “Such discrimination is outlawed by
a list of Knesset bills and Supreme Court decisions,
all of which are flagrantly ignored. Israel must be a
state that relentlessly fights sexual harassment and
public exclusion, and that eliminates the scourges of
agunot and genitally mutilated women. It must treat
the killing of women to preserve their family ‘honor’
as exactly what it is, premeditated murder, punish-
able by life imprisonment.”
Oren hopes that Israel in 2048 will be a far more
egalitarian society not only for Diaspora Jews and
minorities but also for women.

“I am not a prophet,” he proclaimed in his talk.

“My vision is not in any way sacrosanct. This [book]
is my vision. It is 22 chapters that cover every field
of Israel’s future, educational policy, social policy,
foreign policy, Israel as a state for Jews, Israel for
the Palestinians, Israel for the Arabs, gender issues,
environmental issues, etc. It is all there.

“The idea is to get people here and, in the
Diaspora, to engage with my vision. You can get
angry with it. You can throw my book at the wall.

But still engage with it and facilitate a discussion on
what kind of future we want for our grandchildren
and great-grandchildren. I look at the issues Israel
is facing now and it did not take a prophet to see
these issues coming. If we thought about them 10
years before, we might be in a different situation.

Here is your opportunity to think about the future,”
Oren said.

Gil Troy
Historian Gil Troy also spoke at the book launch.

He said it was not really Jewish to think about the
future. In all their holidays, Jews like to time travel
throughout different periods of history, but they
never visit the future.

“Nevertheless, Zionists do not just live in the
present and do not just root ourselves in the past, but
we also think about the future, roll up our sleeves and
make it better.”
Therefore, even though it goes against his Jewish
instincts, Troy said the book makes him excited as
a Zionist, for Theodor Herzl always thought about
the future and worked to make what he aspired to
happen. “This is not just a book launch,” Troy said. “It is a
conversation launch. It asks what Israel should look
like and what we will do to make it happen." ■
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