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A Message For 2024 from Zulat President

The new year began with rocket fire from Gaza and two precedent-setting Supreme Court rulings overturning the abolishment of the reasonableness standard and postponing the application of the Impeachment Law to the next Knesset.

It is a reminder that 2024 is a continuation of 2023 by other means. 2023, with its scars, its dead, its hostages, and its challenges, is still with us. It’s hard to even remember what our life before the October 7th massacre looked like, when an entire nation rose to its feet to fight the regime revolution plotted by a corrupt leader and his throng of Kahanist lackeys. The Supreme Court rulings prove that our state institutions refuse to wither, disappear, or surrender.

Our challenge as a society will be to learn to look beyond the immediate horizon and set a new civil agenda – an essential condition for the promotion of equality and human rights in a civilized democracy – in order to start breathing again. However, such a civil agenda cannot be set unless Netanyahu and his government, who have left our country in ruins, go home.

Years ago we identified a huge void of tools, knowledge, and expertise among Israel’s senior political players, a dangerous vacuum that was filled by such organizations as Kohelet Forum. That is why we produce tools and offer expertise to politicians and policy-makers through two types of activity: one tries to influence decisionmakers and present them with well-argued policy papers and sound legislative initiatives, while the other tries to impact the public discourse with the help of a professional task force made up of former government ministers and Knesset members and a half-a-million strong mailing list to whom we forward our materials.

The year 2023 began with an effort to promote a regime revolution, harm the free media, and reduce the power of the Supreme Court, and ended with the greatest calamity in Israeli history and warfare on two battlefronts. The fighting in Gaza has so far claimed the lives of some 500 Israeli soldiers and over 21,000 Gazans, including noncombatants and people in need of humanitarian aid.

The numbers are mind-boggling, new records of blood in a conflict that has already seen a lot of it. This is not the time to curl into ourselves and bow our heads. On the contrary, if we have learned anything, that is that a strong civil society is built of committed citizens who can move mountains. We’ve come a long way, we have scored quite a few successes, and we surely have quite a few mountains to move in 2024.

Zehava Galon
President of Zulat

>> Click here to read Zehava Galon’s Message regarding the deal for hostages release. 23/11/2023 

>> Click here to read Zehava Galon’s Message regarding the 07/10 massacre, 15/10/2023
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Dr. Maha Sabbah Karkabi

 

Senior Lecturer in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. She holds a Ph.D. in Sociology from Tel Aviv University (2015), a postdoctoral fellowship at the Center for Gender Studies, SOAS, University of London (2015-2016), a postdoctoral fellowship in the Department of Sociology at Tel Aviv University (2016-2017), and a postdoctoral fellowship Ph.D. at the Humphrey Institute for Social Research, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (2018-2020).
Dr. Maha Karbahi’s areas of interest focus on the connection between social change, family behavior, and gender inequality in societies in the process of change and specifically in Palestinian Arab society in Israel. Her research draws attention to the study of family life and employment, using a combined “ethnic lens” and “gender lens” and paying attention to the perspective of Palestinian Arab women, a group characterized by intersections between multiple marginal locations, which over the years has remained hidden from the research eye. Dr. Karkabi-Sabah’s research is published in professional journals and chapters in scientific books that are considered pioneers in family research, work, and gender equality.

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Prof. Frances Raday

Professor Emeritus in the Lieberman Chair in Labor Law, in the Faculty of Law at the Hebrew University and serves as a full professor in the College of Management’s academic track, where she also serves as chair of the graduate program and as honorary president of the Concord Center for International Law Absorption. Radai was a member of a working group of the UN Human Rights Council on discrimination against women. In addition, she is a prominent and feminist human rights activist.

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Dr. Rawia Aburabia 

Faculty member of Sapir Academic College’s School of Law, received her PhD from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Her research deals with the interface between law, gender, minorities, and human rights. Has published in leading journals on the subject of the matrimonial laws pertaining to Muslim women in Israel. Her book Under the Law, Outside Justice: Polygamy, Gendered Citizenship, and Colonialism in Israeli Law is expected to be published as part of the Gender Series of Kibbutz Meuhad Publishing House.

Dr. Aburabia has extensive experience in international human rights and public law. She has worked as a jurist for the Association for Civil Right and has been invited as a specialist to address such international forums as the United Nations and the European Parliament on the subject of indigenous communities and minority rights. She has interned with Human Rights Watch in Washington DC, and has been a member of the executive board of Amnesty International. In 2018, she was selected by the magazine Globes as one of the 40 most promising young persons in Israel under the age of 40.

 

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Ron Kessler

With over two decades of experience in the field of digital content, Ron has participated in numerous political and social campaigns. He helped run the digital activity of senior public officials, and worked in various NGOs. Ron is a fundamentally optimistic man, who believes that Israel can be changed and so can people. Lives in Tel Aviv.