In an effort to promote women's rights and peace in Israel, professors and activists Hannah Safran and Safa Abu-Rabia criticized the Israeli government's policies in a talk on Tuesday night.
The talk focused on how Israel has failed to create gender equality and how women's rights have suffered because of the ongoing Arab-Israeli conflict.
"In reality, women in Israel are not equal and never were equal," Safran said. Safran is a professor of women's studies at the University of Haifa in Israel.
She noted that Israeli women are not able to divorce their husbands without their consent.
She also pointed out that, until recently, women in the Israeli army were not allowed to serve in certain positions and that men face greater pressures to enlist in the army than women do.
"It was more difficult for my son to consider not going to the army than my daughter," Safran said.
These injustices toward women apply to both mainstream Jewish and non-Jewish Israelis.
The Bedouin people -- a formerly nomadic Muslim tribe -- have also struggled with women's rights.
Abu-Rabia theorized that because the Israeli government took land away from Bedouins, women have struggled to find a new role in Bedouin society.
Bedouin women have "lost hope for any sort of change in their lives because men won't allow them to do anything except for what they used to do," Abu-Rabia said.
In the traditional Bedouin society, women nurtured the family and worked in agriculture.
Abu-Rabia, a lecturer at Ben-Gurion University in Israel, said that she has struggled with her identity as a Bedouin and Israeli citizen.
As a child, she felt that she was "educated from a very Zionist point of view" and said her friends failed to recognize the history of the Bedouin people.
In many cases, regardless of gender, Bedouins are "being discriminated against in any level," Abu-Rabia said.
Safran pointed out that there are different standards for different women in Israel based on their religious and ethnic status. This situation has been worsened due to the recent Palestinian uprising against Israel. According to Safran, before the conflict started, there was a spirit of cooperation between Jews and Muslims, but now there is a "feeling it is 'they' and 'us.'"
The audience was largely sympathetic to the viewpoints the speakers presented.
Rachel Kamel, who is unaffiliated with the University, said she attended the event because, "as a Jewish-American, it is important to get different perspectives about what's going on" in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. She said the event helped her in "understanding the depth of critical and dissident voices."
Likewise, Saul Wider, who is also unaffiliated with the University, thought "the talk was excellent." However, he was "disturbed that there wasn't enough of the Penn student body" at the talk.
The event, which was sponsored by the Penn Middle East Center, attracted about 25 people.
