Want to see people lose their boat? Enter Twitter and type in the search box the words “Kern Ples”. Yesterday Fells appeared at Hangar 11, and in the encore she went on stage with the famous outfit from “The Handmaid’s Tale” that became one of the icons of the resistance to the coup d’état. For those who have been breathing the protest for 13 consecutive weeks, it certainly doesn’t seem like a particularly radical act, but in the psychotic sounding board of the Bibiist poison machine, it is perceived as a personal blow with the insulting side of the kapa, even among people who have never considered going to her concert.
It was amazing to see the intensity of the reactions to the level on social media, higher on the hate index even more than “Shlomo Artzi refuses to accept the Israel Award” or “Prime Minister with six mandates”, thousands of responses that combine varying degrees of hatred overflowing on the basis of religion, sect and status, and of course , much of the same misogyny against which Peles sought to protest. This silent act of wrapping in a red cloak and a piece of white Bristol on the head presses on some point in the souls of the supporters of the coup more than any inflammatory speech in the square, and drains from it quite a bit of pus. The effectiveness of the “The Handmaid’s Tale” protest reveals the contamination.
Right at the same time as the beastly attack on Peles, Akiva Novik sent a column to the “time” system full of lamentations, rants, and gaslighting against the slave girl protest, in an infantile night of indolence and eye-rolling the likes of which we have not seen since the days after Rabin’s murder (Hey, “time”, remember that you don’t have to publish Everything that is sent to you, yes?); In Toru, Novick accuses the protest initiatives of “presenting the entire religious camp as motivated by dark and extreme ambitions”, which is of course “unfair defamation”, and that the women’s protest is in general a “campaign”, and as is the way of hysterical women, it is also “demagogic, exaggerated and twisted”. That’s how women are, demagogues even when they are silent in silent protest.
Reading Novik’s aggressive column is a mind-expanding glimpse into an elaborate and convoluted denial mechanism: the coalition agreement contains no laws against women, Novik waves enthusiastically as if it were an exciting liberal achievement, and Avi Maoz also resigned, so basically everything is fine, you have nothing to fear at all, and why You don’t smile. This is happening in the week when women in Tel Aviv are being attacked by Itamar Ben Gabir’s shabiha phalanxes because they are leftists, because they hold the pride flag, because they are women. Novick claims that this is part of an ongoing campaign against “religion” in terms of shouting “wolf, wolf”, and he is spectacularly doing this while the wolf is literally physically rubbing the hems of the protestors’ robes.
And that’s exactly the point: the smart protest of the “Building an Alternative” organization succeeds in driving the supporters of the coup crazy because it touches on distilled truth. Even in the United States of 2016, after the election of Trump, women walked the streets dressed like in the popular series, and there were all kinds of noobs who told them that they were exaggerating and hysterical, and there really was nothing to worry about and abortion is already a criminal offense in half of the US states and women’s rights Govan has moved back decades. “The Handmaid’s Tale”, Margaret Atwood’s futuristic novel, warns of a possible future. The handmaids’ protest also warns of a possible future. And here, this future has a temporary majority in the Knesset and he is not afraid to use it right now to force the His ideology is about the minority.
The “religious camp”, as Novick calls it, is offended by the handmaids’ protest because he interprets it as if this is how the participants see the religious in Israel, a childish and stupid argument that ignores the fact that the whole essence of this protest is a warning against the future. Those who look at the women in red and see the reflection of their own camp probably know something about the crazy extremism of religious Zionism, the gender segregation in the Bnei Akiva, the exclusion of women and the prohibition of women’s singing even for 12-year-old girls, not to mention more than a quarter of the coalition that in general disbelieves in the right of women to be elected, a government that does not It has female CEOs and the number of members of the Knesset is lower than the number of criminal charges against members of the government. It is really very strange that the women of the protest suspect that this is the direction in which things are going.
Religious people whose feelings were hurt by the “Story of a Handmaid’s Tale” protest, the people of the Avi-Nalabi camp, can perhaps begin to understand how offended we were when the most extreme and darkest people in Israel were placed and elected at the head of the “religious camp”. Actually, our feelings were hurt a lot. We were deeply offended. This protest is not an attempt at intimidation and is not a criticism against the religious way of life. It is a protest that marks with sheer terror the place where the religious lifestyle is marching and being marched by its politicians.