Women Should Be Allowed to Serve in All Army Units, Israel’s High Court Says
Three judges in Israel’s High Court of Justice criticized the IDF on Tuesday for limiting their pilot program of integrating women into elite combat units to only two – the special air force rescue team, unit 669, and the Yahalom special ops unit of the Combat Engineering Corps.
The court session follows three petitions filed against the military in 2020 which demanded that women be permitted to join any IDF unit, including the elite Sayeret Matkal and Duvdevan units if they meet the necessary requirements. Petitioners Mika Kleiger, Mor Lidani, Gali Nashri, and Amar Sariya requested the court to rule that closing elite units to women is “wrong, against the law and contradicts the principle of equality of opportunity.”
Court President Esther Hayut and Justices Anat Baron and Ruth Ronnen, asked the state’s representatives during the hearing on Tuesday why the pilot program fails to include the other IDF special operations units.
After the state’s representative Omri Epstein presented the IDF’s pilot program to the court, President Hayut argued that “The law establishes a principle according to which a man and a woman have an equal right to serve in any position, unless it’s inappropriate by its essence and nature and contains a discrepancy that justifies an infringement on the right to the equality of women, and then coming to say: ‘We opened Yahalom – applause,’ is not the point.”
“If there’s already an experiment to make such a decision, then why not allow every woman to try to be accepted to additional units?” Hayut added.
Justice Ronnen also commented on Epstein’s claims, saying that “It’s possible to recruit women to the army’s volunteer units in which tests are being conducted.” However, she said, the limited format of the current pilot reduces their chances of being fully integrated. “The smaller your two-unit pilot, the smaller the chances of integrating women. The more units you open, the more chances it will have,” she told the state officials.
Justice Baron also wondered why the pilot is limited to two units alone, suggesting that “It’s because [the state] wants to postpone the decision indefinitely,” she said.
Hayut and Ronnen considered if it would be possible to learn from the pilot that the IDF is conducting in the two units, about the possibility of integrating women into other elite units that are fundamentally different from them.
