Forming a feminist future under fire: Funders, activists discuss Israeli gender issues amid war

An incoming missile alert sounded just as Kalela Lancaster, Israel director of the National Council of Jewish Women, was presenting about the future of gender equity in Israel during a webinar last week. A few minutes later, the video meant to present the initiative’s vision cut out entirely — the signal, apparently, couldn’t hold under the disturbance. Lancaster returned, and the webinar continued.

The event, originally billed as “A Seat at the Table: Advancing a Future of Equity in Israel,” had been planned as an in-person conference in Tel Aviv on March 5, hosted by NCJW, Jewish Funders Network’s Gender Giving Forum and the Hadassah Foundation. And it was meant to coincide with a major Hadassah mission and International Women’s Day on March 8. The organizations behind NCJW’s Connecting for Impact — a field-building initiative involving more than 30 Israeli nonprofit leaders and philanthropists — were going to have representatives there in person, their top executives available to speak directly with funders, their materials spread across tables, and their plans ready to present. As the drum beats of war grew louder — but before Israel and the U.S. launched their airstrike campaign against Iran — Hadassah cancelled its mission, and the in-person event was off.

Within days, the organizers shifted the event online. It is, Lancaster noted, a skill Israelis have been forced to develop. “War teaches you to move quickly,” she told eJewishPhilanthropy.

The March 11 webinar, now retitled as “Women’s Leadership in Israel Through the War and Beyond,” drew more than 230 participants. What they came to hear was something unusual in Israel’s current landscape: not just an account of how the war is hitting women, but a concrete, fully-developed plan for what comes next.

“We cannot wait for the emergency to end to build the future,” Lancaster said.

The plan is the work of NCJW Israel’s cohort-based leadership program, Connecting for Impact (CFI), which brings together CEOs and activists from feminist organizations across the spectrum of Israeli civil society. In the summer of 2023, as hundreds of thousands of Israelis filled the streets to protest the government’s proposed judicial overhaul, CFI convened a gathering of field leaders who had been through its program.

They concluded that the government’s plans to weaken the judiciary were not a distinct issue but were directly tied to what they saw as an erosion of women’s rights. Based on research and experience from around the world, they determined that the rollback of gender equity is a reliable early warning sign of democratic collapse, and Israel, they felt, was moving in that direction. A field-wide strategy was necessary.

Then, on Oct. 7 of that year, thousands of terrorists from Gaza breached the border with Israel, carrying out the most devastating terror attack the country had ever seen. In the aftermath, Lancaster and her colleagues observed that philanthropy was flooding into emergency response but it was largely bypassing the women’s organizations that were also functioning as first responders. If the field didn’t organize, didn’t make itself legible to donors, didn’t arrive with something concrete and fundable, it would be invisible precisely when it needed to be seen, she said.

“Philanthropy is a barometer,” Lancaster said. What the field was expressing, she said, was a lack of recognition of the gender dimensions of war, and a failure to see the crucial role women’s organizations were playing.

By the spring of 2024, CFI launched a structured collaborative planning process involving 36 field leaders and 100 stakeholders. Six months later, it arrived at a shared theory of change and organized into three impact clusters, each targeting a different sphere of influence.

The first cluster, the Policy Forum for Gender Equity, is led by Tal Hochman, CEO of the Israel Women’s Network.  It brings together senior leadership from 15 advocacy organizations — among them Naamat, the Association of Rape Crisis Centers, the Rackman Center and the 5050 Initiative — to coordinate strategy across the legal, political and public spheres. In an election year in which no major party is chaired by a woman and female representation in government has hit historic lows, the forum has a four-pronged plan: a shared communications strategy, dialogue with leaders of the liberal camp, a campaign targeting first-time voters and an effort to mainstream gender considerations into the state budget before the next government is formed.

“The decisions being made today will shape what Israel looks like for the next 50 to 100 years,” Hochman told the webinar. “And we are not around the table where those decisions are being made.”

The numbers bear her out. Out of 29 director-generals of government ministries, none are women. Women hold fewer than 15% of Knesset seats, and no party running in the upcoming election that is currently polling above the minimum threshold is led by a woman.

Yael Yechieli, founder of the 5050 Initiative, one of the Forum’s member organizations, believes that their work is already bearing fruit. When the government announced — at 10 p.m. — that the economy would return to work the following morning but schools would not, commentators on one of the local network news channels immediately began asking how many women had been in the room when that decision was made — and who thought a late-night announcement was a good idea. “The issue of women in decision-making is being discussed in this war like it never has been before,” Yechieli told eJP.

Yechieli and the Policy Forum contend that if gender equity is going to appear on the postelection agenda — in coalition agreements, in budget allocations, in the priorities of whoever forms the next government — the work of putting it there has to begin now, while the campaign is still being fought.

The second initiative, called In Her Shoes, addresses how public systems so often fail the women they are meant to serve. Research conducted by the cluster found that 71% of professionals who interact daily with women and girls in situations of risk — survivors of trauma, prostitution and domestic violence — say they lack sufficient knowledge and training to serve this population effectively. In Her Shoes will be a mobile training center, using immersive technology to put welfare workers, police officers, court officials and medical staff inside the experience of the women they encounter. Participants will receive a professional tool kit drawing on the expertise of the four partner organizations — Eden Association, Lo Omdot MeNegged, Women’s Spirit and Itach Ma’aki — each of which has spent years developing specialized intervention models for women at the margins. In 2026 the partners will complete product development, renovate a mobile training unit and conduct an initial pilot rollout.

Ronit Shoval, CEO of Eden Association and a specialist in complex post-trauma, described the problem the initiative is trying to solve: Women and girls at risk who encounter judgment and lack of compassion when they turn to professionals for help are often unable to access the services they need — and are frequently retraumatized in the attempt. “First, their wings are clipped,” Shoval said, borrowing a quote from feminist writer Simone de Beauvoir, “and then they are blamed for not knowing how to fly.”

The third initiative, the Scalerator for Gender Equity, takes aim at a structural problem that has kept feminist organizations small and fragile for decades: chronic underfunding, high burnout and the impossibility of thinking strategically when you are constantly fighting for your next grant. Modeled on an impact accelerator, it will work with midsized gender equity organizations to help them grow — through technology, cross-sector partnerships and sharper public messaging — without losing their mission in the process. It is led by Yael Boim Fein, founder of the Institute for Gender Equity in Education, together with Equal Work and Women & Their Bodies. A pilot cohort will launch this year.

Taken together, the three initiatives are asking for $1 million — a figure that Lancaster acknowledges sounds significant until you consider what it covers: three major strategic initiatives, 30 organizations, political advocacy in an election year and a country in the middle of a war. “The bang for the buck,” she said, “is considerable.”

The March 11 webinar also marked the launch of the latest Gender Lens Philanthropy Guide, researched and written by Yael Hasson and Ronit Amit for Jewish Funders Network. It documents in granular detail the effects that a prolonged state of emergency has had on women — from the democracy crisis, to COVID, to the wars of the past two-plus years — and prescribes how a gender lens on philanthropy can reduce gaps, promote equality and strengthen Israeli democracy.

According to the guide, despite a growing “gender awakening” among Israeli philanthropists — women now lead 66% of foundations listed in the Forum of Foundations in Israel — only 2.2% of all philanthropic donations to nonprofits reach organizations promoting women and girls.

According to Hasson, who also serves as CEO of the Adva Center, the war is disproportionately harming women. Women, she noted, make up the majority of workers in the essential public services that are now the most overstretched — education, welfare, mental health — often in demanding jobs with low pay. The often invisible labor of keeping households and families functioning during wartime has also expanded enormously and falls disproportionately on women, particularly as tens of thousands of fathers and husbands have been called up to the reserves.

“Gender is not a niche issue,” Hasson said. “It is a strategic one. If we want resilient communities, a strong economy and a healthy democracy, gender must be integrated into long-term planning, policy design and philanthropic investment.”

All of the participants in CFI insisted that gender equity is not a cause that should be addressed once the emergency is over, but a prerequisite for getting through the emergency in the first place.

“Civil society is very used to helping people in an emergency — organizing transportation, food,” Yechieli said. “But you also need to give a view toward a better future. That is part of our role.” She sees signs of change already: a growing demand in Israeli society for more women in political life.

Lancaster has been making the same argument for three years, through the anti-judicial overhaul protests, through the aftermath of the Oct. 7 attacks and now through the second war with Iran. “We’ve been in this state for two or three years,” Lancaster said. “There are brief moments of respite — essentially, this is a constant state. And we have to build the future inside it. Because if we wait, we never will.”