Survey shows that the vast majority of Palestinian judges are sexist

A new survey by the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics indicates that most of the current Palestinian judges are sexist.

66% of the regular judges in the West Bank said that there are enough female judges. According to the UN, in 2018 only 18% of the judges in Palestinian courts were female. If you assume that all of the women in the survey did not think that 18% is enough, that means that 82% of the male judges are sexist.

Similarly, 58% of sharia judges felt there were enough female sharia judges. As of 2019, there were three female sharia judges out of 245 total.

To be sure, the Palestinian Authority is ahead of most Arab countries in this regard - most do not have any female sharia judges and a smaller percentage of regular female judges. However, there is a bigger story here.

There is almost certainly a higher percentage of NGO workers in the West Bank than anywhere else in the world. Leftist Westerners love to work there - they can party in Tel Aviv and commute to their jobs in Ramallah where they can write extensive papers on how awful Israel is. 

These NGOs and the ecosystem that they are in show very little interest in researching or publishing anything that is not anti-Israel. 

When a Palestinian woman does become a sharia judge, she is rightly celebrated - a documentary about the first such judge gathers lots of awards. The tagline makes it sound as if the problem of sexism in the Palestinian territories is solved.

When Israel appointed a female sharia judge, however, media wrote, "Opinions vary on whether Israel’s first female sharia court judge marks social change or is mere symbolism."

Palestinians appointing such a judge is a victory for feminism. Israel doing the same is considered a cynical PR ploy.

There is a chicken and egg problem here - does the anti-Israel posture of the NGOs come because they are funded by people who only want to bash Israel, or is the latent antisemitism of the Left the driver and the funding only reflects that?

There is no doubt that the mostly European funders of these NGOs only want their grantees to bash Israel. The NGOs concentrate on anti-Israel issues in order to keep themselves funded. They hire people who are anti-Israel to work for them. But they are founded with an anti-Israel agenda to begin with before the first dollar goes into their coffers.

This survey wasn't even done by an NGO, but by the PA government itself. With the millions of dollars being poured into Palestinian NGOs, practically none of those dollars go towards improving Palestinian society, or even to make it more aligned with Western and liberal values.

In short, these NGOs don't give a damn about Palestinians and improving their lives. They buy into the antisemitic, zero-sum pretense that if something hurts Israel, it somehow helps Palestinians. 

Practically all the money that pours into Palestinian NGOs is not meant to help Palestinians but to attack Israel. The thousandth report on how terrible Jewish settlers are does not help ordinary Palestinian Arabs in the least. 

If such survey results would have been found in Israel showing how sexist the judiciary is, it would have been headline news. In this case, though, the article that mentions these statistics in Ma'an didn't even note the sexism of the judges; that statistic was practically a footnote in the main article on how Palestinians look at their judiciary.

The phrase "the soft bigotry of low expectations" was first used by President George W. Bush in 2000. The Western, liberal funders of Palestinian NGOs have no expectations that Palestinian society can fight sexism or homophobia or the people's massive support for terrorist attacks. 

The  Leftist funders of Palestinian NGOs pretend to be so anti-racist - but they assume at the outset that Palestinians are irredeemably bigoted, sexist and antisemitic and are quite happy with that status quo.

They are the bigots. 

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