In a quiet conference room conversation that moved effortlessly between legal petitions, battlefield statistics, and deeply personal stories of transformation, Hagit Pe’er refused to soften the language of struggle.
“If they did a blood test on me, it would come back Na’amat-positive, for sure,” she said, half-joking, when asked to describe her identity as chairwoman of Na’amat and president of World Na’amat, capturing both the intimacy and intensity of her worldview.
For Pe’er, feminism is not a banner to wave or a label to wear, but rather something closer to instinct, a lens through which she understands institutions, power, and the future.
As she prepares to lead Israel’s largest women’s organization to the upcoming Jerusalem Post New York Conference, Pe’er speaks about the moment less as an arrival than as another point along an unfinished journey, one she repeatedly describes as a daily struggle over the character of Israeli society.
The struggle, she makes clear, has never been linear.
“We often take one step forward, and two steps back; we succeed in courtrooms more than we succeed in reality,” she said, noting how much the distinction matters to her. Legal victories, she argued, frequently outpace social change, as rights may exist on paper long before they take root in institutions.
“If in 2026 we still need to shine a spotlight on every woman who succeeds,” she said, “if every achievement still needs to be framed as exceptional, then something is deeply broken.”
That gap between legislation and lived experience runs through much of her analysis. Israel’s requirements for fair representation in public appointments have existed for years, she noted, yet the outcomes remain strikingly uneven.
“Today, there is one female Director-General across all government ministries,” she said.
The woman appointed to the role, Pe’er was careful to stress, earned her place on merit. “She is highly qualified,” she said. “She is not there for decoration.”
The broader picture, however, remains difficult to ignore. “When decisions are being made for 51% of the population,” she said, “their absence from the room stops being incidental, and it becomes structural.”
The same pattern appears elsewhere. Pe’er recalled a meeting with the CEO of one of Israel’s largest employers, who proudly told her that women made up 73% of the workforce.
“I said, wonderful, and how many women are in management?” she recalled. The answer followed shortly: “‘That’s your problem, not mine.’”
She laughed when retelling the story, though only briefly, as for Pe’er, the exchange is the perfect illustration of how responsibility for inequality is endlessly deferred, with organizations celebrating representation at the lower levels while leadership remains stubbornly unchanged.
NA’AMAT’S RESPONSE, she explained, has been to build pipelines rather than campaigns.
The organization has funded scholarships for women in science since the 1980s and supports research in both science and gender equality. In recent years, however, leadership development has become increasingly central: mentorship programs, professional networks, training initiatives, and targeted efforts to move women from middle management into decision-making roles.
“When people tell me there aren’t enough women,” she said, “I tell them: send me the CVs. I’ll make sure they get interviews.”
Yet even that, she insisted, begins too late: “Everything starts with education.”
Gender equality, she explained, is woven into Na’amat’s educational framework from the earliest stages – daycare centers, schools, and youth villages. “We work from every direction,” she said. “You create opportunity, but you also create expectation.”
Pe’er described one woman who arrived at a Na’amat leadership program deeply uncertain of herself: “‘I don’t know if this is my time. I don’t know if I’m capable,’ she told me.”
That is when Pe’er decided not to give up on her. The woman completed undergraduate and graduate studies, moved to a new city, advanced professionally, and eventually secured a senior position in local government.
Years later, during a field visit in northern Israel, Pe’er encountered her unexpectedly. “She called out to me, shouted my name,” she said. The memory still moves her. “And I thought: saving one person is an entire world.”
These moments, she suggested, are what sustain the work. When the term “Sisyphean” is brought up, she rejects it immediately. “Absolutely not,” she said. “That entails that our progress is meaningless, but there are so many successes. It is as meaningful as it gets.”
She began listing them almost instinctively: children returning to school after months away, families stabilized through educational intervention, toddlers whose developmental difficulties are identified early enough to change the course of their lives.
She described educators in Na’amat daycare centers recognizing problems before medical professionals do, allowing children to receive treatment at a critical stage.
“A child goes on to live a completely different life because someone noticed,” she said. “That is enormous.”
The same emotional weight extends even to scholarship programs. Women researchers receiving Na’amat grants, she said, often tell her that the money itself is secondary. “They always go back to the same feeling, of being seen, being recognized as a researcher.”
Recognition, she suggested, can be transformative in itself.
STILL, MUCH of Pe’er’s attention remains fixed on the arenas where power is concentrated. The military is one of them, with women now serving across intelligence units, combat formations, and elite positions. Roughly one-fifth of combat personnel are women.
“You would think the debate would already be behind us,” she said. Instead, it continues to return. Court rulings have already established that all military roles should be open to women.
Yet implementation remains uneven, and public arguments over women’s service continue to resurface. “If we still need to return to court over issues that have already been decided,” she said, “then the obstacle is no longer legal.”
She spoke carefully when discussing outside pressures, referring to gatherings of religious leaders who attempt to influence military policy.
“They sit and whisper in the ear of the chief of staff,” she said. “On one hand, there are people who do not want women to serve. On the other, they do not want women in combat roles either. So who exactly is supposed to serve?”
Government, in her view, reflects a similar tension. The mechanisms and laws exist, representation requirements exist, and yet, appointments continue to tell another story.
“We have rules that exist on paper,” she said, “and somehow disappear in practice.” For all the frustrations she described, despair never quite entered the room.
Pe’er kept returning to the idea of accumulation, to the belief that change is built through repetition rather than dramatic breakthroughs. At one point, she paused and revised her own language. The familiar image of “one step forward, two steps back,” she decided, no longer feels right.
“It’s more like inch by inch, one woman at a time,” she said. The phrase feels, in many ways, like the quiet thesis beneath everything else: the petitions and programs, the scholarships and court battles, the educational work and leadership training.
It is this perspective Pe’er will carry with her to New York as Na’amat prepares to take part in the Jerusalem Post Conference – an international platform, certainly, but in her eyes only another chapter in a much longer story.
“We are not done,” she said quietly. “Not even close.”
This article was written in cooperation with Na’amat.