The trains from Tel Aviv were packed one evening last month when Inbal Boxerman, a 40-year-old mother of two, was blocked by a wall of men as she tried to board. One of them told her that women were not allowed on — the car was for men only.

Boxerman was stunned. It was a public train operated by Israel Railways, and segregated seating is illegal in the country. The men stopping her appeared to be protesters going home from a rally supporting the governing coalition, which includes extremist religious and far-Right parties pushing for more sex segregation and a return to more traditional gender roles.

“I said, ‘For real?’” said Boxerman, who works in marketing. “And my friend came up and she also said, ‘Are you for real?’ But they just laughed and said, ‘Wait for the next train — you can sit in the way back.’ And then the doors slammed shut.”

Public transportation is the latest front of a culture war in Israel over the status of women in a society that is sharply divided between a secular majority and a politically powerful minority of ultra-Orthodox Jews, who frown on the mixing of women and men in public.

Although the Supreme Court has ruled that it is against the law to force women to sit in separate sections on buses and trains, ultra-Orthodox women customarily board buses in their neighbourhoods through the rear door and sit in the back. Now, the practice seems to be spreading to other parts of Israel.

Incidents like the one described by Boxerman have received widespread media attention since Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu included extremist Right-wing and ultra-Orthodox parties in his governing coalition late last year.

As part of an agreement with ultra-Orthodox allies that underpinned the formation of the coalition, Netanyahu made several concessions that have unsettled secular Israelis. Among them are proposals to segregate audiences by sex at some public events, to create new religious residential communities, to allow businesses to refuse to provide services based on religious beliefs, and to expand the powers of all-male rabbinical courts.

Supporters of expanding the rabbinical courts’ jurisdiction — such as Matan Kahana, a former religious affairs minister who remains in Parliament but is not in the governing coalition — argue that as a pluralistic society, Israel should tolerate sex segregation in some arenas to accommodate the ultra-Orthodox, for whom it is a way of life.

“I’m all for the rabbinical courts — they are a symbol of Israeli sovereignty in our own land and our eternal connection to Hebrew law,” he said on Twitter earlier this year.

Although some women within the Likud-led coalition are loyal to carrying out its agenda, much of the push to strengthen the rabbinical courts is by the two ultra-Orthodox parties, which don’t allow women to run for office.

Israel’s laws have not been amended to reflect the concessions, but some fear that the changes are already coming, at the expense of women. The Israeli news media has been full of reports in recent months about incidents seen as discriminatory.

Bus drivers in central Tel Aviv and southern Eilat have refused to pick up young women, because they were wearing crop tops or workout clothes. Last month, ultra-Orthodox men in the religious town of Bnei Brak stopped a public bus and blocked the road because a woman was driving.

And Israel’s national emergency medical and disaster service is for the first time segregating men and women during the academic part of paramedic training undertaken to fulfill a national service requirement, the Israeli news media reported last week. A spokesperson, Nadav Matzner, said that many of the students were religious, and emphasised that all of the clinical training will be in mixed-sex settings and that paramedics must provide care for everyone.

Over the past decade, sex segregation has seeped into many areas. Small public colleges that enroll ultra-Orthodox students seeking undergraduate degrees segregate classes by sex. Some drivers’ education and government job training courses have run sex-segregated sessions, and some public libraries post separate hours for girls and boys.

Now, the demands of the coalition’s ultra-Orthodox and far-Right parties could radically transform the face of a country where equal rights for women are guaranteed in the 1948 declaration of independence and reinforced in several key Supreme Court decisions.

“What is going on here is not an issue of Left and Right — they are changing the rules of the game, and it will have a dramatic effect on women,” said Moran Zer Katzenstein, who heads Bonot Alternativa, a pro-democracy group, as well as a nonpartisan umbrella group of women’s organisations. “Our rights will be harmed first.”

Members of Bonot Alternativa show up at weekly anti-government protests dressed in scarlet robes and white wimples that mimic those of the disenfranchised women forced to bear children in the dystopian television show based on Margaret Atwood’s novel The Handmaid’s Tale.

In a global gender gap report issued by the World Economic Forum in June that ranks 146 countries, Israel dropped to the 83rd place, from 60th place last year. Although the report ranked Israel first in terms of women’s education, the country’s ranking for women’s political empowerment slipped to 96th, just below Pakistan, from 61st last year.

New York Times News Service