A new women’s party?

Journalist Judy Nir-Mozes Shalom is considering forming a women’s rights party to run in the next general election.

By GIL STERN STERN HOFFMAN
Female Knesset Members 311 (photo credit: Marc Israel Sellem)
Female Knesset Members 311
(photo credit: Marc Israel Sellem)
Journalist Judy Nir-Mozes Shalom tweeted on Tuesday that she is considering forming a women’s rights party that will run for Knesset in the next general election.
Nir-Mozes Shalom, who is the wife of Vice Premier Silvan Shalom, said the recent spate of incidents involving alleged discrimination against women persuaded her that she had to take immediate action.
She said that although she is disgusted by politics, she felt she had to take a leading role, because female politicians like Kadima leader Tzipi Livni and Labor chairwoman Shelly Yacimovich were not doing enough.
“I woke up with an itch to form a women’s party,” she tweeted.
Shalom told Army Radio that if she did form a party it would demand that all funding be cut off to institutions that discriminate against women. When asked what she would do about the woman who caused a stir by insisting on remaining in the front row of a bus from Ashdod to Jerusalem, she said she would have immediately canceled the bus route.
“Many women are coming to me and saying they are sick of all this,” she said. “I really don’t want to be prime minister.
But I think maybe the time has come for a ticket just on this issue. I have to check it out in a serious way.”
Nir-Mozes said she was working on slogans, demonstrations, conferences and legislation.
She said her nascent political aspirations had nothing to do with the ongoing political dispute between her husband and Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu.
“I am doing this only as Judy who doesn’t want to turn Israel into Iran-El,” she said.
The Labor Party’s young guard will hold demonstrations for women’s rights across the country on Wednesday evening. Participants in the rallies will hold torches and quote a well-known Hanukka song “Banu Hoshech Legaresh” (we’ve come to dispel the darkness).