It was a Zionist act: Feminist politics of single-mother policy votes in Israel

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It was a Zionist act: Feminist politics of single-mother policy votes in Israel☆

Anat Herbst a,b, Orly Benjamin b

a Open University, Israelb Bar-Ilan University, Israel

a r t i c l e i n f o s y n o p s i s

Available online xxxx The notion “political opportunity structure” serves feminist scholarship to analyze the condi-tions under which achievements are gained in the realm of social policy. This framework hasdrawn attention to the configurations of access to state institutions, stability of political align-ments and relationships with allies. Using this framework, we examine whether Israeli parlia-mentary feminists relied on a political opportunity structure in two historical periods in theshaping of Israeli social policy regarding allowances to single mothers. Our analysis showsthat feminist MPs created a political opportunity structure in 1992 by left–right cooperationand a third discourse, in between the misery discourse and the rights discourse, constitutingsingle mothers as Zionists. In 2002, feminist MPs maintained left–right cooperation but havenot developed an in-between discourse. We argue that, in neo-liberal times, feminist parlia-mentary activism has to become more sophisticated by using discursive leverage to create po-litical opportunities in order to protect past achievements.

© 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Introduction

The current social policy in Israel regarding state supportfor single-parent households is the result of two major legalactions: feminist mobilization that successfully promotedthe 1992 Single-Parent Families Law and the neo-liberal mod-ification of this law introduced by the Ministry of Finance in2002. The 1992 law was the first statutory declaration of thesingle-parent family in Israel and established its social rights.The 2002 economic reform was a policy change that tookplace outside public debate, demonstrating the neo-liberalnormativity that was dominant in the Finance Ministry.

Earlier commentators (Ajzenstadt & Gal, 2001) surveyedthe 1992 Single-Parent Families Law within the context ofother Israeli legislation establishing women's rights, but didnot point to the exceptionality of this legislation as the out-come of feminist politics. Like historical legislation in theareas of maternity leave, child-care services and old age in-surance for housewives, the 1992 law has been considered

a piece of legislation that had little effect in terms of challeng-ing gender inequalities. We depart from this neglect of thefeminist effort involved and examine parliamentary feministactivism through a discourse analysis of public speeches atthe time of the 1992 (and the 2002) legislation.

We use this analysis to examine the ways in which femi-nist politics successfully utilized a political opportunity struc-ture for political influence when constituting single mothersas a legal category, but have not recruited a similar politicalopportunity structure in 2002. The question we pose is this:if, following O'Connor and colleagues (O'Connor, Orloff, &Shaver, 1999), women-oriented public policy is developedand embraced by exploiting political structures of opportuni-ty, and if, as O'Connor (1998) explains, the less visible andless accountable budgeting policies are responsible forchanges in social policy, what measures may assist in recruit-ing a political opportunity structure for protecting pastachievements from neo-liberal cuts in the allocation of allow-ances? By directing attention to the ways in which feministpoliticians have been using discourses related to singlemothers' rights, we can shed light on this question, clarifyingthe connection between available discourses and their polit-ical deployment.

Women's Studies International Forum 35 (2012) 29–37

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Following Lazar (2005), as a feminist discourse analyst ofthe dialog between opposing discourses, we propose to focusnot only on the social forces that operate as allies for thewomen's movement, but also on any discursive leverage(Clegg, Courpasson, & Phillips, 2006) that becomes instru-mental in the mobilization of allies. Whereas existing studiestend to emphasize traditional allies, such as unions, we areparticularly interested in the recruitment of non-traditionalallies, such as right-wing politicians. We consider this prac-tice crucial for making political gains under anti-welfaregovernments.

State policy for breadwinning moms

It is common knowledge (Lewis &Hobson, 1997) that rais-ing children in low-income marriages or out of wedlock is apoverty risk factor for women. The social construction of gen-der roles and control over material resources is responsiblefor covert poverty and financial dependency inside and out-side marriage (Korpi, 2000; McLanahan, Casper, & Sorensen,1995; Pahl, 1988). Women's labor market precariousness(Vosko, Macdonald, & Campbell, 2009) reproduces singlemothers' economic inferiority and, in turn, reinforces the nor-mative heterosexual, monogamous model of the family(Fogiel-Bijaoui, 1999).

Feminist scholars argue that reducing poverty among sin-gle mothers requires state commitment to expand genderequality. Such commitment can be demonstrated throughany combination of the following: providing quality jobs(above minimum wage, with pension and health entitle-ments) suitable for mothers; applying a universal policy forall families with children, including family allowances; offer-ing publicly funded day-care centers and a long school dayfor all children; and providing services for the elderly(Christopher, England, Smeeding, & Ross Phillips, 2002;Kilkey, 2000; Lister, 1994; Millar, 1996). In the context ofgrowing neo-liberal welfare regimes, such measures tend tobe replaced by selective allowances (based on mean tests)that commonly deprive recipients of a stable income (Korpi& Palme, 1998).

Previous research has analyzed the institutionalization ofwomen's and mothers' rights and their public images as con-sumers of welfare services and allowances (e.g. Helman,2011). Our study advances this research interest through dis-course analysis; specifically, we aim to facilitate the under-standing of how particular discourses become important ingenerating a political opportunity structure that supports in-creased state commitment to single mothers. In connectingdiscourse analysis to the political arena, we focus on feministpoliticians' use of discourses. Although such politicians havebeen working on these issues for quite a while, their strug-gles against these processes is often recognized as limited.For example, Banaszak and colleagues (Banaszak, Beckwith,& Rucht, 2003) argue that, in many First World countries,women's movements remained low key with respect to wel-fare reforms (see also Mink, 1998). The authors do not attri-bute this weakened power to feminist political forces, butrather to reconfigurations in the state apparatus and instate–civil society relations. Nevertheless, they argue thatwomen's movements have not completely lost their powerduring neo-liberalization. Likewise, in Latin America, Craske

(1998) describes how, during state reconfigurations,women's movements gained both political representationand beneficial institutional changes, including women's min-istries, women's offices in public sector organizations andsome gender equality-oriented legislation. These achieve-ments are not limited to Latin America (Randall, 1998), sug-gesting that issues understood as women's issues continueto mobilize feminists despite the reconfiguring of states andprocesses changing political opportunities (Banaszak et al.,2003). Our aim, therefore, is to explore the attempts of fem-inist politicians to utilize political opportunity structures inorder to assess how specific discourses enable feminist polit-ical influence.

Meyer and Minkoff (2004) have presented a thorough re-view of attempts to apply Tarrow's (1983, 1994) notion of po-litical opportunity structure, which has been embraced byscholars of feminism and the state (e.g., O'Connor, 1996,1998; Randall, 1998; Sperling, 1998). They insist that diverseapplications must be distinguished by introducing the ques-tion: political opportunity for what? Further, they argue thatthe opening and closing of the political opportunity structureshould not be understood as subject to external forces alone,but rather as shaped within the interaction between opportu-nity, mobilization and political influence. Following this lineof reasoning, we focus on how parliamentary feminists activelygenerate an opening of the political opportunity structure andon what resources are needed to deflect a possible closing.

O'Connor et al. (1999: 202–203) investigated changes inthe political arena for feminist politicians by means of an an-alytical framework conceptualizing five dimensions in thepolitical opportunity structure: feminist mobilization; anti-feminist mobilization; party configuration; social forces un-derstood as political allies to the women's movement (tradi-tionally, unions); and the institutional context. Of these fivedimensions, the one that is perhaps most amenable to the in-fluence of interaction is that of social allies, as these can berecruited using discursive measures. In order to include thispossibility in our own framework, we propose to trace theapplication of discursive leverage, i.e., the use of less progres-sive discourses to mobilize ad hoc support. Non-traditionalallies, such as right-wing politicians and Members of Parlia-ment, can be particularly significant once they agree to votefor a pro-welfare policy. This practice may be crucial for mak-ing political gains under anti-welfare governments.

The Israeli case

Israeli commentators have argued that welfare policiessupportive of women between the 1950s and the 1990saimed at serving national-demographic orientations ratherthan gender equality (Ajzenstadt & Gal, 2001). The encour-agement of Jewish (preferably middle-class) mothers' fertili-ty is widely seen as the real motivation behind legislationsecuring women's entitlement to paid birth leaves and birthallowances (Berkovitch, 1999; Izraeli, 1992).

Local feminist organizations have mobilized their effortsover the years to minimize the price paid by Israeli womenfor their secondary-earner status and indeed Stier (2009) re-port significant proportion of dual-earner households in Isra-el: 64% of Jewish and 20% of Arab households, of them 34%contribute equally to the household income. Feminist efforts

30 A. Herbst, O. Benjamin / Women's Studies International Forum 35 (2012) 29–37


to secure equality for working women in Israel have focusedon legal measures to integrate women into traditionally maleoccupations, promoting anti-discrimination statutes and af-firmative action practices. Although marriage and divorceare still governed almost completely by religious codes,women's organizations – including Na'amat,1 WIZO2 andthe Israel Women's Network3 – women Members of Knesset(Israel's parliament) (from here on — MPs), women in themedia, women at the universities and feminist activistshave promoted progressive laws in these areas (Berkovitch& Moghadam, 1999; Scott, 2001). The women's organiza-tions, especially Na'amat, have utilized their relationshipwith women politicians and the press to promote empathyfor the single mom issue (on use of the press, see Gray, 2004).

Influenced by global feminist initiatives (Berkovitch,1999), several significant laws were adopted between 1985and 2000 with the declared aim of protecting women (partic-ularly employed women) from discrimination and enhancingcommitment to gender equality. Importantly, Berkovitch(1999) assessed that no feminist mobilization in Israel hasbeen strong enough to promote or protect feminist achieve-ments in ways that transform women's daily experiences. In-deed, little feminist activity has targeted the series ofrestructuring transformations which have been introducedsince 1977.

With the establishment of the first right-wing Israeli gov-ernment in 1977, the state's welfare orientation began toshift towards a neo-liberal one. Restructuring evolvedthrough monetary reform (1979); the signing of the GATTprocurement code (1983); legislation defining the indepen-dence of the Central Bank (1985); a loan conditioned on eco-nomic reform (1985), leading to systematic downsizing ofthe public sector; the Arrangements Law (1985), enablingpolicy change and entitlement cuts under emergency regula-tions; and the Compulsory Tender Law (1992), regulating theemergence of the local “contract state” and prioritizing out-sourcing in most governmental actions.

The Arrangements Law is particularly important for thepresent study, as its imposed character enabled the 2002 pol-icy change which we discuss below. This law includes a blocof policy changes, initiated by the Finance Ministry, that areattached to the budget for the upcoming year. In otherwords, without approval of the Arrangements Law, the bud-get cannot be passed. Thus, all members of the ruling coali-tion are forced to vote for it, so as not to leave the statewithout a budget. The individual policies making up the Ar-rangements Law are rarely discussed in Knesset (Israel's par-liament) and the law has routinely passed withoutparliamentary scrutiny.4

Methodology

Critical discourse analysis, aimed at identifying justifica-tion structures in the field of action, was conducted on thefollowing sources accumulated between 1989 and 2003: abody of parliament committee protocols; parliament discus-sion protocols; meeting protocols and correspondence ofwomen's organizations; articles in local newspapers (Davar,Ha'aretz, Yediot Aharonot, Ma'ariv); Na'amat Archives; Ar-chives of the National Insurance Institute; Central Zionist Ar-chives; and eleven semi-structured interviews in 2006 with

women activists. Interviews lasted between one and twohours.

The analysis follows de Goede's (1996) study, comparingmeanings of relevant categories in North America, where asimilar policy reform was introduced in 1996, to thoseemerging in Israel several years later. To assess emergingforms of speech in terms of their relationship with feministor conservative discourse, we adopt Lazar's (2005) feministdiscourse analysis. In light of work in critical discourse analy-sis (e.g., Hajer, 1995: 42–72) that highlights the contributionof focusing on accepted ways of talking to the analysis of pol-icy making, Lazar (2005) provides a feminist understandinginto these issues. She focuses primarily on how dominant dis-courses appropriate categories of oppositional feminist dis-courses by way of subjugating them, in order to maintainthe appearance of talk as rational. In other words, even if crit-ical of the limited feminist potential of the process, Lazar isinterested in how feminist categories (here understood asdiscursive resources or fragments of discourses) becomenon-threatening. Indeed, she sees this mechanism of appro-priating feminist categories as confining their ability to seri-ously undermine or challenge conservative meaning. At thesame time, it is important to study emerging forms of speech,as they have the potential to generate more reflexive institu-tional arrangements. We follow Lazar's (2005) understand-ing here in examining how feminist categories permeatedaccepted forms of speech in Israel, both in 1992 and in 2002.

The 1992 Single-Parent Families Law

The 1992 Single-Parent Families Law was preceded byseveral publications, including a 1971 report on poverty,which indicated that every fourth family of a divorced orwidowed mother lived below the poverty line and everythird family was at risk of poverty. Twenty years later, con-solidating this “misery” discourse, the National Insurance In-stitute published another report, Poverty among womenwithout a partner 1980–1989 (Kristal, 1991), showing that di-vorced mothers lived under harsh conditions of poverty.

In debating the proposed legislation for single-parentfamilies, the emerging discourse of misery became dominantin the ways of speech about single mothers developed byMPs:

People living in the inner cities are, and I deeply regret to saythat, are often living in single-parent families. You can findamong them widowed men and women, divorced men andwomen. You can find there many women raising a childout of wedlock. I'm not sure why that is, but it could be con-nected to the daily realities of those living in poverty at thebottom of the social strata, who are often drug users, drugaddicts, people with repeated incarceration experiences,and therefore the rate of divorce among them tends to behigher, and I regret to say that it's higher than elsewhere(Eli Ben-Manahem, December 10, 1991, first reading ofthe Single-Parent Families Law).

Why would the speaker mention twice that he regrets toput forward his observations? We suggest two possible ex-planations. First, in the form of speech he develops, he relieson a series of stigmatizing categories which he – the MP who

31A. Herbst, O. Benjamin / Women's Studies International Forum 35 (2012) 29–37


considers himself the representative of the inner city –wouldrather avoid. Second, it is possible that his reluctance to de-scribe the misery of troubled families in poor neighborhoodsis related to the accepted local assessment that, in the 1980s,Israel managed to develop a social security system that pro-vided a respectable living to all its citizens, a convention hedoes not wish to contradict. For our analysis, it does not mat-ter which interpretation is stronger, as both suggest that mis-ery and the multiple pathologies derived from the “culture ofpoverty” are the discursive resources used to reinforce hiscase.

The various reports on poverty mobilized women's orga-nizations, encouraging them to approach decision makerson the matter. Four major women's organizations were activein the Labor and Welfare Committee discussions prior to theformal vote: Na'amat, WIZO, the Women's Lobby and Emu-nah,5 allowing no MP to escape the moral obligation for theexpected vote (parliament Archive protocols, 1989–1992).

Masha Lubelsky, the leader of Na'amat (the women's sec-tion of the Labor Movement), demanded accelerated actionon the issue from the Knesset's Labor andWelfare Committee(Zaltzman, 1991). Na'amat's legal counselors led the prepara-tion of the bill, allowing it to represent the voices of grass-roots organizations and single-mother activists, such as theUnmarried Women's Organization. Na'amat's counselorswere open to these voices, as many such women applied forits pro bono legal aid services or were mothers of childrenin Na'amat's day-care centers (Author, 2009). Influenced byactivist voices, in 1989 Na'amat announced the establishmentof Mehad, a roof organization for single mothers, publicly de-claring at a press conference its intention to promote legisla-tion that protects single mothers from poverty. In this way,feminist mobilization reinforced the social visibility of singlemothers and increased the legitimization of their claim to so-cial entitlements. Further supporting this visibility, Lubelskyinitiated a public call to all mayors to offer a 50% discounton all education-related payments to children from single-parent families. The press voiced these steps, and a loud pub-lic discourse was generated.

The election of 1992 created a unique political configura-tion, leading to the appointment of Ora Namir – a Labor MPwho had persistently promoted the issue of support for singlemothers – as chair of the Labor and Welfare Committee andlater the Minister of Labor and Welfare.6 Further, three left-wing feministMPs (AnatMaor, Yael Dayan andNaomi Chazan)and amore experienced left-wingMP (Tamar Gozansky) coop-erated in the establishment of a parliament Committee on theStatus of Women and became its members.7 This unique com-mittee was explicitly committed to the issue and provided anopen route for women's organizations into the Knesset's rou-tine activity.

Whereas earlier reports on support for single mothers pub-lished by the National Insurance Institute and a few MPs hademphasized misery, the discussions and debates in the LaborandWelfare Committee and later in the Committee on the Sta-tus ofWomen introduced a new discourse to the Israeli reality:one of rights and entitlement. One female LaborMPwas partic-ularly quick to embrace the emerging discourse:

We need to aspire to construct universal rights systems thatwill respond to a broad range of issues. Until we generate

openness and tolerance in the wider society, there is a needto legitimize and a need to increase social awareness of thesingle-parent family… There are childless single women whowant to raise a child, but economically, they cannot do that,and they prefer the lifestyle which they have chosen, and soci-ety has to accept them and do everything to enable them tolead their lives in dignity and provide for the children theyhave chosen to have (Shoshana Arbeli-Almozlino, December10, 1991, first reading of the Single-Parent Families Law).

A very clear rights discourse emerged, sharing no catego-ries with the dominant misery discourse. Completely discon-necting single mothers from any stigmas and pathologies, thespeaker insisted that protecting a woman's right to give birthoutside of marriage implies protecting her standard of living.The justification of this argument was anchored not in socialmarginality, but rather in the need to legitimize and generateopenness and tolerance. This was echoed in the tactics of thewomen's organizations, as voiced by a past leader of Na'amatin a 2006 interview:

We were aware that the articulation of the upcoming lawwasn't optimal — we realized that we were leaving out theagunot [women whose husbands refuse to grant them a di-vorce, who are left with no clear status by the rabbinicalcourt] and we knew that some of the benefits that were im-portant to claim did not receive their due place. But we fig-ured it would be important to get a foot in the door andestablish the notion of a single-parent family (Ofra Fried-man, March 12, 2006).

Here, too, the speaker uses a rights discourse to justify theversion of promoted law, while realizing its limitations. The“foot in the door” justification demonstrates a political tacticin which feminists promote a category of entitlement (in thecurrent case, the category of “single mothers”), accepting thatit has to be wrapped in a non-feminist form of speech thatresonates better with the hegemonic discourse.

Against the backdrop of a rights discourse consolidatedwithin women's groups and in their negotiations with politi-cal forces, as well as the accepted forms of speech dominatedby the misery discourse emphasizing poverty, a powerfulthird discourse emerged. What made this discourse powerfulenough to serve as leverage for recruiting enough allies in theparliament to pass the proposed legislation was the way itwove together categories from the misery discourse, catego-ries from the rights discourse and a third type of categorythat is nationalistic in meaning.

In the midst of the neo-liberal restructuring process in Is-rael, waves of immigration challenged the already dominantspirit of welfare withdrawal, which contradicted the state'scommitment to Jewish immigrants. The 1992 policy changein support of single mothers was clearly at odds with therestructuring process. In this sense, it can be conceptualizedas a victory of feminist politics using a rare political configu-ration and opportunity. A letter by the spokeswoman ofNa'amat demonstrates this third way of speech:

During 1990, more than 7,000 single-parent families, mostlyheaded by women, immigrated to Israel from the Former So-viet Union (FSU); the majority among them have no source



of income, as they do not meet the entitlement criteria forstate allowance because their duration of stay in the countryis shorter than 24 months. Hundreds of divorced immigrantshave applied to the rabbinical courts for alimony entitle-ment, but recently the Ministry of Justice instructed the Na-tional Insurance Institute not to enact those entitlements….Thus, hundreds of divorced immigrants who are no longerentitled to an absorption allowance remain without anysource of income (Carmel Eitan, July 1, 1991, letter to themedia, accessed from the Na'amat Archives).

The writer's emphasis on no source of income secures thepresence of themisery discourse. Her emphasis on legal proce-dures, and the blocking of these procedures, resonateswith therights discourse. But most importantly, she does not relate tothe category of single parents as a whole, but rather empha-sizes a new way of portraying the regarded population. Theyare no longer inner-city inhabitants or single women who pre-fer to have a child out of wedlock: they are immigrants.

Immigrants from the FSU were part of the wave of immi-gration that generated a 44% increase in the number ofsingle-parent families in Israel, from 57,000 in 1989 to82,000 in 1994 (Central Bureau of Statistics, 1989, 1994). Fur-ther, 28% of the immigrants from Ethiopia who arrived in Is-rael during the 1980s were single parents as a result of thedifficult journey into the country (King & Efrati, 2002). Iden-tifying the single parent as an immigrant thus became a pow-erful discursive resource during the readings of the law, evenfor extremely right-wing MPs:

I'm confident that those who will be particularly satisfied withthe law will be the high percentage of immigrants amongsingle-parent families…not only immigrants from the FSU, butfrom Ethiopia as well… If being a single parent is a problem,then being a single parent who is also an immigrant is manytimes more of a problem (Geula Cohen, December 10, 1991,first reading of the Single-Parent Families Law).

Emphasizing thedouble jeopardy of being a single parent andan immigrant provided important leverage, as it correspondedwith the historical commitment of the Jewish state to Jewish ref-ugees. The emerging discourse, however, framed the category ofsingle parenthood as even more nationalist, corresponding withthe ultimate criterion for female citizenship in Israel:

At the beginning of 1991, about 100,000 children are beingraised in 60,000 single-parent families…. About 60% of thesefamilies live below the poverty line…. Mister Chairman, Mem-bers of the Knesset, the issue is of great pain to these single-parent families and we are not permitted to ignore it…. As a so-ciety, it is our duty to do everything we can to alleviate and easethe lives of single-parent families raising a new young genera-tion for Israeli society (Ra'anan Cohen, December 10, 1991,first reading of the Single-Parent Families Law).

After generating the resonance between the single parentand the Jewish refugees, the nationalist framing is further sub-stantiated by the resonance of the older meaning frameworkthat constructs women's rights of citizenship in Israel(Berkovitch, 1999), namely, one that equates the Jewish Israeliwomen with her womb, conceptualizing the womb as a

national resource. The speaker subjugates the category of pov-erty and the category of rights to a focus on the children:the new young generation of Israeli society becomes themajor discursive resource justifying single parents' entitlementto support.

It is important to note that this nationalist discourse, whichconstituted single parents as taking part in the Zionist projecteither as immigrants to the country or as raising its future gen-erations, developed its public presence as a rationale to such anextent that, even after the 1992 vote, it was still widely used.For example, in discussing the need to amend the SingleParent-Families Law in the Labor and Welfare Committee, oneof the representatives of the National Insurance Institute raisedthe argument: “Perhaps immigrants are abusing the entitle-ment, perhaps they calculate the benefit of coming to Israelwithout a partner. Would it still be just to include [such an im-migrant] in the category of entitled women?” Amir Peretz, oneof the MPs present in the discussion, answered immediately:“Of course it is just. She performed a Zionist act. She separatedfrom her husband for the matter and sacrificed her family onthe homeland altar.” Clearly, the nationalist justification con-tinued to be relevant and powerful even after the vote.

The emerging nationalist discourse enabled the political op-portunity structure that brought together allies from both theright and left wings to support the 1992 legislation, at a time ofrare welfare-related legislation (Doron, 2003; Gal, 2005). Theneed to offer an appropriate standard of living to about onemil-lion immigrants generated a public panic revolving around thepossibility that coming to Israelwould be translated into povertyfor the numerous single-parent families among the immigrants.The Single-Parent Families Law thus came to be seen as an ur-gent measure for dealing with the range of issues presented bythe challenge of immigration. In this sense, the “in-between” Zi-onist discourse demonstrates what we call discursive leverage(Clegg et al., 2006): a discourse that has the power to recruitallies among right-wing forces so that a political opportunitystructure can be generated and acted upon. The political struc-ture of opportunity generated by the Zionist discoursewas use-ful in exploiting public worries about immigration, so that thelaw could be legislated. Such discursive leverage was not gen-erated, as the analysis below shows, in 2002.

The interim period, 1992–2002

In 1994 the Single-Parent Families Lawwas expanded to in-clude agunot (women whose husbands refuse to grant them adivorce) and mothers who were legally separated from theirhusbands. Significantly, married immigrants whose partnersdid not join them in Israel were now defined as entitled tothe benefits accorded by the law. War on Poverty laws werealso amended during this period, so that single mothers be-came entitled to expanded allowances.

During the interimperiod between 1992 and 2002, addition-al grassroots organizations were established by single mothers,such as the Israeli Association for Single-Parent Families inNeed, the Immigrant Single-Parent Families Organization, theNational Forum for Single-Parent Families and the National Coa-lition for Single-Parent Families. In 1995, several MPs led byNaomi Chazan established the single mothers' lobby at theKnesset.



The cooperation between these organizations and the MPsfurther reinforced the rights discourse, which reached newpeaks in the Committee on the Status of Women. This wasdemonstrated in a series of amendments and bills aimed at an-choring rights. In 1998, MP Naomi Chazan drafted a bill aimedto equate the rights of single mothers with those of widows;the latter, according to the National Insurance Law, were enti-tled to occupational rehabilitation, including vocational train-ing, assessment, academic training and maintenance fees, andtheir children were eligible for special grants. In 2001, just ayear before the neo-liberal reform that significantly cut supportfor single mothers, MPs Naomi Chazan and Marina Solodkindrafted a bill offering a minimum income guarantee to singleparents when they pursued academic studies (according tolaw, those who studied were not entitled to the guarantee),so that single mothers could afford higher education andleave the vicious cycle of state financial support. Just threemonths before the first reading of the economic reform legisla-tion, feminist MPs raised the right for mobility:

I believe it is scandalous to treat the ownership of a car as lux-ury — it is necessary for employment mobility, general mobil-ity and family visits (Yael Dayan, Committee on the Status ofWomen, July 16, 2002).

The MPs thus continued their attempts to expand singlemothers' rights in various directions. It was against this back-ground that the vote for welfare reform (the Budgets Lawand Arrangements Law of 2002) took place.

The 2002 vote: the welfare reform

Feminist MPs continued to promote this powerful rightsdiscourse right up to the end of the year (December 17,2002), when the Budget Law and Arrangements Law passedtheir second and third readings. From October, as they be-came increasingly attuned to the devastating ramificationsof the imminent economic cuts, they supplemented therights discourse with a new form of speech, one declaringan emergency situation that required all possible action:

The budget presented by the government is fatal to the status ofwomen in Israel. I am directly addressing the representatives oftheMinistry of Finance and other government officials. The beliefthat the unemployed are parasites takes us back at least one de-cade…Weare greatly concernedwith the budget in general andwith the direct and indirect harm inflicted on working women,particularly single mothers…we will do all we can to winthis battle (Anat Maor, Chair of the Subcommittee for the Ad-vancement of Women in the Work Force and in the Econo-my, the Committee for the Status of Women, October 7,2002).

The emergency definition of the situation is clearly voicedin the call to recognize the fallacy of the parasite stereotype.This emerges in the emphasis on the working woman'sright to provide for her children despite her low salary:

The majority of single mothers are employed. They receive par-tial income assurance because their salaries are below the min-imum. Is thatwhy you [the FinanceMinister] say that they don't

work? They go to work and that's the truth. For all intents andpurposes, you are cutting your support of employed women(Tamar Gozansky, first reading of the 2002 Budget Law andArrangements Law, October 29, 2002).

Continuing the same tack of emphasizing the singlemother's right to an allowance, representatives of the NationalInsurance Institute (NII) also voiced clear resistance, explainingthat the reform was bound to hurt two thirds of those sup-ported by the allowance. Moreover, the NII reps tried to under-mine the Finance Ministry's justifications of over-dependency:

As a matter of fact, the increase in individuals receiving allow-ances is clearly the result of prolonged structural unemploy-ment: people cannot find jobs! And that was the originalpurpose of this allowance. Their need has nothing to do withthem not wanting to work; it just reflects the market situation(Yochanan Shtasman, Head of the NII, Finance Committeemeeting, November 11, 2002).

Close to the 2002 vote, on October 29, a protest March wasorganized against the expected neo-liberal reform. Accordingtomedia reports, 5000women fromall over the country partic-ipated. The March was publicized through articles in localnewspapers and advertisements in national papers. The slo-gans used attempted to load the budget with a gender mean-ing: “a protest against the budget that will destroy womenfirst” (Yediot Ahronot: “Women against the budget,” October20, 2002; “Say no to the budget,” October 30, 2002). Clearly,extra-parliamentary activity persistently demanded that theright to a dignified existence be preserved and that the upcom-ing reform not destroy the 1992 achievement.

On November 5, a few weeks before the vote on the secondand third readings, the Committee on the Status of Womencontinued this message, inviting Barbara Swirsky, an experton feminist budget analysis, to explain the devastating implica-tions of the neo-liberal reform for women's social and econom-ic rights. After her rights-based talk at the committee meeting,participants' awareness of the upcoming disentitlement be-came even clearer. This consolidated awareness of the feministMPs was voiced at the second and third readings in forms thatcorrespond with the rights discourse:

It is difficult, indeed impossible, to legitimize a reality in whichsoup kitchens across the country replace the commitment ofthe state to the welfare of its citizens (Colette Avital, Decem-ber 17, 2002, second and third readings of the 2002 BudgetLaw and Arrangements Law).

After such a mild echoing of the rights discourse in theLabor MP's talk, a leftist MP reinforced that discourse bybroadening the list of demanded rights:

Members of the Knesset: who is willing to defend the public'sright to life? and its right to peace? and its right for a futureof growth? and for the right of a future of employment andsocial welfare?… The government betrays the interests ofthe public and leads it to the verge of catastrophe. All thosewho do not vote against it and against this budget todayare equally responsible (Tamar Gozansky, December 17,2002, second and third readings).



Gozansky's statement epitomizes the rights discourse,connecting social rights of citizenship to human dignity.

Another MP illustrates what perhaps was the feministpoliticians' assessment of a need for more convincing discur-sive resources than the rights discourse, as the latter could beinterpreted as utopian by the relatively conservative audi-ence. Interestingly, she returns to the misery discourse, fo-cusing on women's poverty and exposure to violence:

I want to knowhow theMinister of Labor andWelfare can votefor the budget today, knowing that the decrease in welfarebenefits directly augments violence against women (YaelDayan, December 17, 2002, second and third readings).

The convincing power of the presented speech is con-structed through the concurrent usage of the misery discourseemphasizing poverty and the rights discourse, applied in an at-tempt to remind theMPs of their commitment to anti-violencepolicies and to women's entitlement to state protection.

Other MPs who objected to the economic reform relied, asexpected, on the misery discourse:

Thousands of families, time after time, are bitten, humiliated,thousands of families searching for food in the markets' gar-bage bins (Issam Makhoul, December 17, 2002, secondand third readings).

Who is going to be held accountable for the children of thesesingle-parent families, who will be so badly situated thatthey will have nothing to subsist on? (Amir Peretz, Decem-ber 17, 2002, second and third readings).

Note that the last quoted MP was the very same one whohad led the nationalist discourse in 1993. Throughout thesecond and third readings, one MP after another protestedwithin the misery discourse.

Thus, the Knesset's criticism of the economic cuts consistedof an encounter between twoways of speech: the feministMPsspoke the language of (excessive) rights, occasionally relyingon discursive resources derived from the misery discourse,and other MPs remained loyal to themisery discourse. This en-counter left no room for a third discourse that could recruitright-wing allies. We can clearly see a complete demise of thenationalist discourse that was so crucial for the 1992 achieve-ment. The lack of such discursive leverage allowed no roomfor cooperation from right-wing MPs, who were likely to besusceptible to Zionist argumentation.

Discussion

This paper has analyzed feminist parliamentary activityleading up to the 1992 legislation that provided support forsingle mothers, and during the time between that achieve-ment and the neo-liberal reform in 2002. Tracing the prevail-ing ways of speech used in these activities, we were able topinpoint an important difference between the comparedperiods.

The process in 1992 was characterized by feminist politicsthat targeted agreement and a “foot in the door” tactic, aimedprimarily at establishing the category of the single-parent

family. It was strategic politics that operated in favor ofsingle-parent legislation. Avoiding the hegemonic misery dis-course and intentionally marginalizing the rights discourse, athird nationalist discourse emerged: one that identifiedsingle-parent families as immigrants and Zionists. Parliamen-tary feminists embraced this third discourse, even though therights discourse was already gaining dominance among theactivists of the time. The lawwas able to pass in 1992 becauseutilization of this discursive leverage enabled the recruitmentof atypical allies, particularly among right-wing MPs.

Of the three participating discourses in the debates of thetime – the rights discourse, the misery discourse and thenationalist-Zionist discourse – it was the third one that wasmost effective. It operated through the commitment ofright-wing MPs to the Zionist project of allowing Jewish im-migrants an existential rescue in Israel. The combination ofsuch discursive leverage and the left-right cooperation it gen-erated was clearly demonstrated in the 1994 amendment ofthe law that broadened the number of entitled women.

Confirming Ajzenstadt and Gal's (2001) argument that Is-raeli welfare policies supportive of women served national-demographic interests rather than gender equality, we foundthat the 1992 legislation could be approved because it was per-ceived as a component of the national-demographic orienta-tion of local politics, aimed at enhancing the Jewish majority.Conceptualized in this manner, as Helman (2011) explains,support for single mothers became a matter of national identi-ty, one which right-wing MPs could not negate.

In contrast, up to and during 2002, parliamentary feministpolitics was characterized by an increasingly elaborate rightsdiscourse held within feminist circles, particularly the discus-sions of the parliament Committee on the Status of Women.Throughout this period, feminist MPs worked hard to expandsingle-parent's entitlements by proposing one amendmentafter another. Indeed, left-right cooperation continued duringthese years – as exemplified in shared bills submitted byNaomi Chazan (left) and Marina Solodkin (right) – but thediscursive leverage binding single mothers with Zionist im-migrants gradually faded. No alternative discursive leveragewas introduced and no third discourse was used.

In other words, in the period leading up to the 2002 vote,little was done to develop ways of speech that would enablerecruitment of allies in the Knesset. Of the two measures thatoperated in favor of single-parent legislation in 1992 – name-ly, the third nationalist discourse and left–right cooperation –

only the latter was left. Analyzing the second and third read-ing protocols, we found no attempt to challenge the budgetby citing responsibility to immigrants. Instead, we foundthat non-feminist MPs who wanted to criticize the proposedreform, as well as one feminist MP, used the misery dis-course. We interpret the utilization of this poverty discourseby those interested in defeating the reform to indicate that noalternative discourse was developed, and hence no discursiveleverage was created.

By indicating the extent to which parliamentary feministactivism neglected the discursive aspect of local politics, weargue for a feminist broadening of the notion of “political op-portunity structure.” We see this as a means of reconcilingtwo opposing findings of O'Connor et al. (1999). On the onehand, they conclude that it is a specific institutional contextand women's political mobilization which enable positive



policy responses to feminist legislation demands, such as theIsraeli 1992 legislation; on the other hand, in the four coun-tries they studied (Australia, Canada, Great Britain and theUS), they report that the logic of fiscal responsibility stipulat-ing government expense cuts halted the positive responseand confined the expansion of programs (1999: 220), aswas the case of the Israeli 2002 reform. These seemingly con-flicting findings can be reconciled by distinguishing betweentwo components that generate a political opportunity structurefor parliamentary political influence: left–right cooperation,which was effectively used throughout the two examined pe-riods, and discursive leverage that is crucial if recruitment isto be developed. Both these components must be present toenable positive policy responses to feminist activity. In otherwords, unless some kind of in-between discourse is generatedto allow a wider range of political views to connect to feministaims, left–right cooperation is confined and cannot developinto a political opportunity structure.

Previous analysis (O'Connor, 1998; O'Connor et al., 1999)of how Tarrow's (1983, 1994) notion of “political opportunitystructure” has been conducive to understanding feminist pol-itics and positive responses to feminist demands focused onfive conditions: feminist mobilization, anti-feminist mobili-zation, party configurations, social forces understood as polit-ical allies to the women's movement (traditionally, unions)and the institutional context (1999: 202–203). The analysiswe have presented of the two components that facilitatedthe 1992 pro-single mothers' legislation – left–right coopera-tion and the emergence of discursive leverage – is not wellcovered by these dimensions, particularly if we take into ac-count that four of the above five dimensions remained simi-lar between 1992 and 2002 (the institutional context beingthe exception). Even Meyer and Minkoff's (2004) critical re-view of the diverse dimensions offered by authors interestedin policy achievements of social movements disregards theissue that emerged so powerfully in our study: discursive le-verage. Instead, they argue for a more nuanced understand-ing of the possibly contradictory influences of the diversedimensions.

Answering the call for more nuanced applications of theconcept, we focused here on how parliamentary feministsacted to generate political structures of opportunity. Lookingat the Israeli scene, we found that feminist MPs worked inmore sophisticated ways when promoting new legislationthan they did when it came to protecting past achievements.When their aim was to introduce the category of singlemothers and get a “foot in the door,” they were cautiousenough to seek and adopt accepted ways of talking thatserved to reinforce their rationale positioning in parliamenta-ry debates. However, when it came to protecting gains forsingle mothers in the context of neo-liberal reforms, they be-came less cautious, tenaciously sticking to the rights dis-course. They developed no discursive measures to justifythe call to protect single mothers, even though they wereaware of the threat and defined the situation as an emergen-cy. Indeed, in the November 2002 meeting of the Committeefor the Status of Women, one month before the vote, theramifications of the upcoming economic reform were clari-fied. Nevertheless, feminist parliamentary activists were un-able to translate the grassroots demand for protection intopowerful discursive leverage.

We propose that our findings in the Israeli context maywell be conducive to political influence elsewhere, particular-ly when aiming to protect past achievements. As more neo-liberal reforms can be expected, it is particularly importantfor feminist politics to generate “in-between” discoursesthat fall between the rights discourse and local hegemonicdiscourses. This third discourse can become significant lever-age for recruiting political allies.

End Notes

1 Na'amat, (Council of Working Women), organized as an autonomousmovement with affiliation to the Histadrut (The General Federation of La-bor). Na'amat is a socio-political, multi-party women's movement. Na'amatderives its ideology from the labor party in Israel.2 WIZO (Women's International Zionist's Organization) was founded, as awomen Zionist apolitical movement of volunteer women.3 The Israeli women's network was established in 1984 as an apolitical inde-pendent organization acting for the promotion of women's status throughlegislation, Parliament lobbying, education and research.4 Recently, several MPs, aware of the destructive outcomes of this routine,have initiated better scrutiny of the Finance Minister's suggestions includedin the Arrangements Law (Meydani, 2008).5 Emunah — National Religious Women's Organization affiliated with theMafdal which is the National Religious party. Today, its original loyalty to so-cialist values as part of the religious workers' movement is translated to acommitment to various welfare services.6 MP Ora Namir was the chairwoman of the prime minister committeewhich published its conclusions on 1978. One particularly influential chap-ter of the conclusions was devoted to Single-Parent Families.7 MPs Nava Arad and Shoshana Arbeli-Almozlino from the Labor party (leftwing) and MP Shulamit Aloni from Meretz (civil rights) party (left wing)were involved in the legislation of the 1992 Single-Parent Families Law.

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It was a Zionist act: Feminist politics of single-mother policy votes in Israel

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