Mehadrin bus lines

The so-called "mehadrin" bus lines were created in the late 1990s for the Haredi public. It began with two lines in Jerusalem and Bnei Brak in 1997. In fall 2001, Dan and Egged bus companies, in order to compete with private buses run by Haredim, had come to an agreement with the ultra-Orthodox Mehadrin Council. In 2007, there were an estimated thirty "mehadrin" buses operated by public transportation companies, in early 2010 the number had risen to more than fifty.

In July 2004, American-Israeli novelist Naomi Ragen unintentionally boarded a "mehadrin" bus toward her home in Ramot and was physically threatened for refusing to give up her seat and move to the back of the bus. In 2006, "mehadrin" buses were heavily criticized in the media worldwide after an American Jewish woman, Miriam Shear, reported being attacked and beaten by a group of ultra-Orthodox men after refusing to move to the back of the bus on a non-segregated line. Shear and another male passenger accused the bus driver of "doing nothing" during the attack, while the bus driver claimed to have stopped the bus to inform the men surrounding Shear that his line was not sex-segregated. Critics likened the "mehadrin" lines to racial segregation in the United States, with Shear compared to African American icon Rosa Parks.

According to a survey conducted by the Smith Research Institute in Summer 2010 for the organization Hiddush, 70% of Jewish Israelis, male and female, support abolishing or reducing the gender-segregated public bus lines. 40% support complete abolition, 30% are in favor of reducing their number and 22% support continuing the arrangement as it was at the time of the survey. Only 8% supports further expanding gender-separated transportation services. Among those supporting the abolition or reduction of gender-segregated public bus lines are 75% of Likud voters, 76% of Yisrael Beytenu voters, and 88% of Kadima voters. A Jerusalem Post online poll found that 76% of those who responded did not approve of segregated buses, 6% approved and 18% said that segregation should only exist in lines that operate in Haredi neighborhoods.

Petition and court ruling

In 2007, the Israel Religious Action Center (IRAC), an organization close to Israel's Reform movement, together with several women who were harassed while traveling on gender-segregated buses (including Shear and Ragen), submitted a petition demanding the introduction of alternative lines without gender segregation and requiring the authorities to ensure the safety of female passengers. The Ministry of Transportation replied that the gender segregation is a "voluntary arrangement" and that the ministry did not intend to intervene.

In January 2008, the Supreme Court recommended that the Ministry of Transportation appoint a committee to examine the matter. In its report published in October 2009, the committee came to the conclusion that gender segregation in public buses is illegal and that arrangements in public transportation that include segregation, inherently entail a dimension of coercion. The committee's main recommendation was to introduce a temporary arrangement on the bus lines that had imposed gender segregation, in which both the door in front and in the back would be opened at the bus stops, instead of just the door in front, as customary in Israel, giving women the possibility to use the back door and sit in the back, but that each passenger, male or female, could choose where to sit with no defined segregation, and no specific seating arrangement would be enforced. Transportation Minister Yisrael Katz, in an affidavit to the High Court, said in February 2010, that the state would not tolerate the use of threats and violence to enforce the separation. However, he suggested, that bus operators should be permitted to hang "behavior-directing" signs asking passengers to sit separately, but indicating that this is not mandatory. According to the state, who was required to monitor these buses, there were no problems, but data collected by IRAC showed numerous cases of abuse, harassment, and even women being denied entrance to the bus.

In its ruling on January 6, 2011, the High Court of Israel did not allow the creation of additional segregated lines and ruled that gender segregation was illegal and ordered that signs designating buses as segregated were to be removed and new signs to be put up informing passengers that they had the right to sit wherever they wanted, and stressed that neither passengers nor the driver could pressure anyone into complying with a segregated seating arrangement. In his ruling, Supreme Court Justice Elyakim Rubinstein wrote: "A public transportation company (like any other person) cannot say, ask or order women where to sit on a bus simply because they are women, nor what they should wear, and they are entitled to sit anywhere they wish. Of course, this also applies to the men, but for reasons that are obvious, the complaints have to do with the harmful behavior toward women." And he added: "As I now read over these lines emphasizing this I am astounded that there was even a need to write them in the year 2010. Have the days of Rosa Parks, the African American woman who collapsed the racist segregation on an Alabama bus in 1955 returned?"

In a one-year experiment to see whether a voluntary segregation system could function, about 50 bus lines, serving both inter and inner city, are registered under the High Court of Justice as lines in which voluntary segregation is followed. They reportedly operate in and between ultra-Orthodox neighborhoods with a Hasidic majority.

The Egged bus company was also ordered to publish ads about the cancellation of the "mehadrin" gender-separation arrangement in three daily publications, including at least one haredi newspaper. In February 2011, the Jerusalem Post reported that all haredi newspapers had refused to publish the ads. One of them even presented the High Court's decision "as a victory, enshrining the arrangement".