The Handmaid’s March, which took part in the demonstration against the legal reforms and religious coercion in the past weeks in front of the Knesset in Jerusalem, at the initiative of the members of the “Building an Alternative” organization, is probably one of the main images that will be etched in the public memory from this period of time. The dozens of women who marched with a low look, wrapped in red costumes as a tribute to the dystopian novel “The Handmaid’s Tale” by Margaret Atwood, are a painful reminder but also a warning light that nothing is obvious, and that the long struggle for equal rights for women is far from over.
The current government in Israel openly declares its intention to roll back women’s rights a hundred years: to exclude women from the public sphere and from decision-making positions and direct them to fulfill their “natural role” as household managers and those who are destined to bear children.Footnote1 The novel “The Handmaid’s Tale”, and the series inspired by it, seemingly place the events outside the range of possibilities that come to mind at the present time. It seems unthinkable to expropriate a woman’s body and turn it into a kind of living incubator that stores babies raised by women higher than her in status who cannot give birth. It seems unthinkable to ban women from reading and writing. We have wandered far from the time when women did not have the right to vote. We won, at least it seemed to us that we won, this struggle. And here is a government whose statements bring us back, in the blink of an eye, to what we thought we had left behind.
But beyond the obvious warning light – what the “Handmaid’s March” represents to me, is the endless circularity of human existence and human development. Naturally, we would like to think of humanity as developing linearly: the present is built on the past (and on the mistakes of the past), and the future is built on the present. In fact, linearity also carries within it an illusory dimension. The human stratification is great beyond measure, and within it, alongside the visible linear layers – there exist, also culturally, archaic layers that oppose the visible linear progress, and the coordinates it relies on.
Therefore, every step always carries its opposite: the open struggle for women’s liberation hides (even among women themselves) opposing forces that seek to enslave and limit, and the struggle for the equal rights of certain populations always carries with it the opposite wish, to exclude and deny. These forces, currently split between the political right and left, or between religious and secular, exist in every individual and in every culture. Most of the time they are kept in some delicate balance that allows them to exist side by side, or under and beyond each other. But there are historical moments, like this moment in Israel, when the balance is violated to such an extent that thousands of citizens take to the streets. They are not only fighting for democracy. They exercise a power of resistance that is as powerful as the anxiety that is provoked by the exposure of the archaic, oppressive layers, which have come to life and become a visible vociferous agenda.
The terror exercised by dark regimes, as I understand it, seeks to turn three-dimensional into two-dimensional, that is, to create an image of the individual, even in his or her own eyes, as a plane rather than as a space, because the plane enables the exercise of power that the space, by its very essence, regulates and disperses. Therefore, the individual’s possible resistance to the governmental mechanisms of oppression – but also to the internal mechanisms of oppression – is his or her struggle for themselves as three-dimensional. What this three-dimensionality means is that no matter how much terrorism is triggered from the outside – treating it as having its source only outside is no less dangerous: the removal of the oppressive agendas from our self-image, from the familiar spectrum of human phenomena with which we identify – may be precisely the device by which we are recruited as obedient soldiers in the service of these agendas. Therefore, the only antidote that can be used against the automatic cooperation with oppression is the willingness to “host” these oppressive forces within us: to recognize them as an inseparable part of the human and personal spectrum, and to conduct a constant and living dialogue with them as such.
Notes
1 Although these current statements are aimed at Jewish women only, the reason for this is not the current government’s recognition of the rights of Palestinian women, but rather its intention to erase Palestinians’ rights, both men and women, from the entire human map.