On Fighting Apartheid, Dowd Says Saudis Making More Progress Than Israel

In Maureen Dowd, Richard Cohen, the Saudis, Israel and the A-word, Ron Kampeas addresses the issue of apartheid. Here is what he writes about Dowd's conception of apartheid--and how the Saudi's are addressing the issue better than Israel:

Dowd is in Riyadh, and she starts off bemused -- she even says its "wild" -- that Prince Saud al-Faisal, the Saudi foreign minister, is denouncing Israeli religious extremism:

“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.”

“The religious institutions in Israel are stymieing every effort at peace,” said the prince, wearing a black-and-gold robe and tinted glasses.

I first heard this Saudi take a couple of years ago, at a press conference the Saudi ambassador to Washington gave on the sidelines of the Annapolis conference toward the end of 2007: States based on stringent ethnic and religious identifiers were on the way out, the ambassador insisted. What made this such a hoot -- beyond the obvious point of it being expressed by the envoy of a country with a self-definition narrowed not just to faith, or tribe but to a single extended family -- was that the Saudis tried to keep Israeli reporters out of the press conference. Yay openness.

But hey, Saud's a groovy guy -- he wears tinted glasses -- so maybe, Dowd thinks, he has a point. Israel does seem to be moving one way, she suggests, while the Saudis are moving another:

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.)

The word progressive, of course, is highly relative when it comes to Saudi Arabia. (Wahhabism, anyone?) But after spending 10 days here, I can confirm that, at their own galactically glacial pace, they are chipping away at gender apartheid and cultural repression.

Where to start. Orthodox hegemony in some areas has always been an issue in Israel -- but I really don't know who Dowd's weaselly "some" are who say it is growing "less secular." Her own paper just featured, in its weekend travel section, a guide to Israeli eateries serving delicious pork creations, a byproduct of the recent massive aliyot from the pronouncedly secular former Soviet Union.

And even among the Orthodox: It's true, the same, decades-old effort to make their faith more pervasive persists -- but there are also signs of liberalism from within. This is what happens when a religious minority lives among a secular majority: The smaller group's values are more likely to be bent and shaped by the larger group. See under: Srugim.

A few years ago, the Israeli embassy asked local Hebrew-speaking journalists -- as it routinely does -- to meet with a visiting minister, in this case, Eli Yishai, the Shas Party leader and at that time the minister of trade and labor. Only two of us showed up -- I and Shmuel Rosner, then of Ha'aretz. Shmuel tried to extract some statecraft from Yishai -- not an easy task, because matters of foreign and defense policy seem to bore Yishai, which is probably why only Shmuel and I bothered to attend the meeting.

I asked Yishai what else he had done while in the United States, and he said he had fund raised for vocational training for fervently Orthodox women. I pressed him on this -- Shmuel, bemused, thought I was humoring Yishai, but I wasn't -- and Yishai's eyes lit up, as he explained how it had become necessary to bring his community's women out of household confines, to make them part of the workforce. 

So Yishai was using his government portfolio to empower women and Saud is using his government portfolio to ... flirt with Dowd. (He tells her to bring an international driver's license next time she's in Saudi, maybe she can set a precedent, hahaha. Ugh.)

Not that this is the whole picture. The women at the Kotel, the back of the bus issue, the cutting off not just of the Conservative and Reform streams, but of Modern Orthodoxy. These are all vexing issues Israel and Israel's Orthodox need to confront. But to suggest the nation -- and even its Orthodox -- are sliding into theocracy is just nutty.

But this week, and next, Dowd will have plenty of company.

Technorati Tag: Israeli Apartheid.