At the start of the summer, Israel’s social protest movement looked like it would represent a real turning point for women in the public sphere.
Some say it’s because Bob Dylan and Paul Simon performed in Israel this summer. Others say it all started with the Facebook message urging Israelis to stop buying cottage cheese — a daily staple in the Israeli diet that has become outrageously expensive. I prefer to see it as the culmination of many decades of work on the part of NGOs, here in Israel and abroad, which have helped to pave the path to a healthy democracy in Israel.