Is Ashdod’s #80 Bus A Public Transit Vehicle Or A Private Route? Israeli News Outlet Claims Discrimination

JERUSALEM (VINnews) — In the perpetual search by Israeli news outlets for stories which they can use to portray the chareidi community in a negative light, one of the touchier issues is feminine segregation. Israeli law prohibits such segregation both in public events and on public transport, and this includes making separate seating arrangements on buses where men sit in front and women at the back.

Despite this, there are many buses in chareidi neighborhoods where this is the de facto practice and both genders seem perfectly comfortable with this seating arrangement, even though they know it cannot be required by law. Moreover there are buses from public companies, which are nominally open to the public but which service private institutions, travelling to and from those institutions.

Such a route is route #80 in Ashdod, which connects yeshiva students to their place of study. The route travels just twice a day, and although technically it is open to the public, it is known as a “students route” and generally only used by men. A woman attempting to use such a route would have to know the exact times twice a day and decide to specifically go for this bus, knowing that it will be full of male students.

Such a woman just happened to be a journalist for the Kan 11 news outlet, who purposely tried to get on the bus with a hidden camera. The woman was told by passengers that the route is for students but insisted on standing near the door and staying on the bus. The driver told her that she could take the regular #4 on the same route and, having obtained her story, the woman left the bus claiming that she was “thrown off” by the chareidi male passengers.

As usual the media and female politicians seized on the story as another attempt by chareidim to dictate the public sphere and marginalize women, but nothing could be further from the truth. The chareidim simply have the numbers and the presence on public transport to establish student routes and these also include women’s routes for female students, who are more than happy to travel separately and would not care for males to join the journey, even if legally they can.

The current “story” only shows how communities searching for ways to maintain a pure mode of transport for their children can be wrongly maligned and condemned for allegedly trying to force segregation like Southern states in the US in the 1960’s. In a society as eclectic as Israel’s, what is required is mutual respect and not attempts to indoctrinate against other people’s value systems.