Israeli and American Jewish Women Strategize for U.N. Conference in Fall

As the fourth U.N. sponsored World Conference on Women approaches this fall, members of the Israeli delegation say they are less apprehensive than in the past.

“We are finding that we are more accepted. People want to learn from our experience,” said Nava Arad, the Israeli prime minister’s adviser on the status of women.

“Before, we were outcasts, but now we are very popular,” Arad said, referring to the anti-Israeli atmosphere that permeated previous conferences in Mexico City, Copenhagen and Nairobi, Kenya.

Arad made her remarks in an interview after a gathering here of Israeli and American Jewish women last week. It was the second meeting held to strategize for the upcoming conference, which will be held in Beijing in September.

The first meeting between the two delegations was held in Jerusalem in November. At that meeting, the delegates passed the Jerusalem Declaration, which welcomed the continuation of the peace process, the peace with Jordan and the signing of the Declaration of Principles between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization.

But with that groundwork already laid, there is still much work to be done, according to leaders of both delegations.

“We must stress the importance of peace to advance the status of women,” Arad said.

And, she stressed, there are still battles to be waged on the domestic front. “Not everything is rosy,” she said, citing the fact that there are more than 2,000 reported cases of battered women in Israel.

Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin recently announced a bill, which will be submitted to the Knesset, guaranteeing the establishment of a statutory authority for the advancement of women. The authority will be independent, with its own budget.

Preparing for Beijing will be one of the new authority’s top priorities. “We need solidarity, and to safeguard and progress the status of women on a a national and international level,” Arad said.

Leaders of American Jewish women’s organizations pledged their support for the Israeli delegation, along with voicing other concerns.

Shirley Joseph, co-chairwoman of the National Jewish Community Relations Advisory Council’s Ad Hoc Committee for the Fourth World Conference on Women, also addressed the gathering.

“We must be a presence at Beijing, and show that Jewish women are concerned about women’s issues, not only about Jewish issues,” Joseph said.

“And we must be prepared to respond to any problems in an appropriate way,” she said.

Members of the American Jewish delegation will take part in conflict-resolution training, in the even that any confrontations should occur.

Confrontations over Israel have dominated past women’s conferences. The equation of Zionism and racism, which later became a major point of contention in the United Nations, originated at the Mexico City women’s conference in 1975.

The Israeli delegation then was often met with shouts of “Death to Zionists.”

In Copenhagen in 1980, Zionism was officially listed as an obstacle to peace, and therefore to the advancement of women. It was only due to the determined efforts of the United States that Zionism was removed from this list at the 1985 conference in Nairobi. But even in Nairobi, the Israeli delegation was often heckled, or not permitted to speak.

Currently, Arad is spearheading an effort for the U.N. Commission on the Status of Women to pass a positive resolution regarding Israel and the Middle East.

“Women must be a part of all levels of the peace process,” she said. “And we want special assistance to Palestinian women, so the effects of peace will be felt by the Palestinian people.”

`Arad cited the United Nations’ former hostility towards Israel, and said it is very important that a positive resolution regarding Israel is passed.

In March 1994, the Commission on the Status of Women passed a resolution supporting the Middle East peace with Jordan and of economic resolutions passed at the conference in Casablanca, Morocco, last fall.