In a telling editorial choice, Haaretz, Israel’s oldest daily newspaper, devoted its lead editorial — published in both its English and Hebrew editions one day last week — to warning that Israel’s new law permitting voluntary religious arbitration will harm women and undermine the legal system. At a moment when Israelis are running to shelters under missile fire, this is what Haaretz chose to elevate.
That might be defensible if the argument was serious. It isn’t.
Haaretz, long aligned with Israel’s secular liberal intelligentsia, has made a habit of treating religious institutions — and the voters who support them — as suspect. Here, it goes further, effectively arguing that consent cannot be trusted when the forum is religious. Women, in particular, are treated as presumptive victims of pressure rather than as actors capable of choice.
That is not legal analysis. It is condescension.
What Haaretz never explains is what actually changed with the new law. Israelis have long been free to resolve disputes through arbitration, including before religious forums like a beit din. But those proceedings operated as private arbitration, typically requiring civil court involvement to enforce results. The new law does not create religious arbitration. It expands it — allowing state-recognized religious courts to hear a broader range of disputes and, in some cases, to issue decisions with more direct legal effect. In other words, it changes how these proceedings are structured and enforced — not whether people can choose them.
Arbitration itself is a standard feature of modern legal systems. Parties choose it every day — for speed, cost, expertise or privacy. The governing principle is consent. If consent is defective — because of duress, fraud or coercion — courts already have the authority to invalidate the agreement.
Haaretz’s argument presumes coercion. The editorial points to the possibility of social or economic pressure within the religious community and treats that possibility as enough to render consent inherently suspect. But that is not how the law works. Coercion is assessed case by case, not assumed across entire categories of people or forums.
If the Haaretz standard were applied consistently, much of modern arbitration would be in doubt. Unequal bargaining power exists in employment, consumer agreements and landlord-tenant relationships. Yet Haaretz treats religious arbitration as uniquely problematic — either because it assumes these forums cannot fairly assess consent, or because it believes something about religious law itself undermines voluntary choice. Neither claim is argued. Both are simply asserted.
The editorial’s concern about the so-called “summons mechanism” — where one party initiates arbitration and the other receives a formal notice asking whether they will agree to resolve the dispute before that forum — is weaker still. That is how arbitration often works outside pre-existing contracts: one side proposes, the other accepts or declines. There is nothing coercive about receiving such an invitation. The recipient can say no.
The truth is that this is less about protecting women than about Haaretz’s enduring discomfort with religion in public life, religious courts and a Knesset majority that reflects voters outside its cultural orbit.
Israel has no shortage of urgent problems. By inflating a structural legal change into a crisis of religious coercion, Haaretz reveals more about its own assumptions and bias than about the law it condemns
