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CNN’s Women’s Rights Narrative on Israel Collapses Under Misleading Data
Israel’s women’s basketball team in action against Ireland. Photo: Screenshot
Israeli women are living in a dystopian reality where, year by year, they are being stripped of their most basic rights. At least, that’s what one would think from reading CNN’s, “Women’s rights are on a sharp decline in Israel. Advocates blame Netanyahu’s far-right government.”
But CNN’s article is a far stretch from the truth.
The piece frames Israel through a distorted lens of reality. Women wearing red gowns and white hats lead the cover image of the article, presenting Israel as a nightmarish reality, where women are living in a version of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale.
But read the fine print, and you see that this image, taken nearly three years ago, concerned demonstrations against Israeli legal reforms, not the decline of women’s rights.
Screenshot from CNN.
From there, the framing of the article is set. The distortion of women’s rights is not accidental but structural, rooted in how CNN selects imagery, language, and ultimately the data it relies on to construct its narrative.
Relying on a Faulty Index
CNN’s article is based on data from the Women Peace and Security Index (WPS Index) by the Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace and Security. The index scores and ranks 181 countries on women’s wellbeing based on 13 indicators, including employment, education, and access to justice, cellphone use, son bias, and proximity to conflict. Taken together, these indicators are not uniquely gender-specific. Many reflect broader societal conditions that affect the entire population.
The findings declared that Israel ranked in 84th place, noting that in 2023, Israel ranked 27th.
Remarkably, Israel is behind several countries that have extremely poor women’s rights.
Oman is ranked 58th, despite openly discriminating against women in terms of divorce and legal guardianship. Saudi Arabia is ranked 63rd, though women require a male guardian, and Qatar ranked in 70th place, despite women requiring a guardian’s permission to leave the country, marry, or pursue higher education on a scholarship.
There are several other countries with long-demonstrated records of laws that restrict women in several aspects of life. Israel is not one of them.
CNN originally published the article without mentioning that three years ago, Israel was not in the midst of a multi-front war after terrorist organizations attacked its sovereign borders. It since issued a correction and a one-line update, but it is remarkable that the article was published without this crucial information in the first place, as this directly impacts the findings of the WPS Index, which encompasses many categories related to safety, terrorism, and conflict more broadly.
Thus, even if there is a lack of change in other categories, the change in the security situation directly impacts the index.
In the WPS Index, Israel is compared to other developed countries such as the United Kingdom, Germany, and the US, further skewing the presentation of the results. Those countries are not contending with sustained warfare on multiple fronts. By contrast, “Palestine” — ranked 167 and unmentioned in the CNN article — is grouped with fragile states, including Yemen, Qatar, and Afghanistan. This asymmetrical framing by the WPS Index, which CNN adopts without scrutiny, creates a misleading comparison that exaggerates Israel’s decline.
Nonetheless, a graph created by CNN compares Israel to the US and Afghanistan, which ranked 181. This visual representation further distorts the reality, as Afghanistan is not in the same group as either Israel or the US, and the US is not in the middle of a war in proximity to its own territory.
Screenshot from CNN.
Skewing the Reality
CNN additionally suggests that because there are currently fewer women in Israel’s parliament, this correlates to a lack of women’s rights. Of course, it would be nice to have more women’s representation, but the lack of representation does not imply malicious intent or systemic rollback.
Women’s political representation fluctuates over time and varies across electoral cycles in every democracy. Many democratic countries face similar gaps. The US, for example, is only four percentage points ahead of Israel in this regard. Improving women’s representation is a challenge shared globally, not evidence of a uniquely Israeli failure.
Israel is unique, however, in that it is the world’s only Jewish state. That means it is the only state that also incorporates aspects of Jewish law, which inherently differ from Western secular norms. As such, rabbinical courts run by men have more power over Jewish family law than secular courts in Western states. While CNN presents this as an issue that sprouted during the past three years during this current government, there has been a consistent and ongoing debate in Israeli society about the extent to which religion can and should influence the law.
If CNN truly wanted to present this issue in a non-partisan manner, it would have interviewed and represented both sides, as well as judges from the courts. However, a heartbreaking story of one woman’s challenges with the court is presented as representative of the system as a whole – an approach that privileges emotional impact over balanced analysis.
CNN further jumps the gun on the conclusion that there is a link between the increase in gun ownership and femicide. Yet there is no data to suggest this connection exists. In reality, Israelis rushed to buy guns in the aftermath of October 7 as a measure to protect themselves, and with encouragement from the government. And, unlike the US, for example, stringent gun laws and licensing ensure that gun ownership remains limited to qualified individuals.
No, Israel is not a perfect country, and, like all democracies, it has areas that require ongoing debate and improvement. What makes Israel unique is that it navigates the challenge of being both a Jewish and democratic state, allowing its citizens to practice their rights within a legal framework shaped by centuries of tradition and modern law.
While CNN attempts to present a dystopian reality of what it means to be a woman living in Israel today, this is not reflected in Israeli society. Rather, Israeli women exercise their rights in an environment that strives to balance religious principles with democratic freedoms, even in the midst of a war.
The author is a contributor to HonestReporting, a Jerusalem-based media watchdog with a focus on antisemitism and anti-Israel bias — where a version of this article first appeared.
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University of Michigan will have a leader who defended pro-Palestinian protesters in court
A civil rights attorney who defended pro-Palestinian protesters in court and made social media posts viewed as pro-Hezbollah and antisemitic, has won his bid for the University of Michigan Board of Regents.
Michigan is one of a few states in which voters play a direct role in choosing university overseers. As a regent, Amir Makled (D) will help oversee expenditures at the university where his clients, the student protesters, were arrested. The position is unpaid and carries an eight-year term. Democrat Paul Brown won the other seat up for election, maintaining the board’s 6-2 Democratic majority.
Makled beat out Republican challenger Lena Epstein, who is Jewish and previously identified as a “Jewish Messianic believer of Christ,” but recanted the statement and later said she was “100% Jewish.” Mainstream Judaism does not accept Messianic Jews because they believe in the divinity of Christ and try to convert Jews to Jesus.
Epstein told the Forward in an April interview that the Democrats had handed her an opportunity to win the seat by endorsing Makled, who was facing intense scrutiny. In one of his controversial posts, Makled called Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah a “martyr” after he was killed by Israeli strikes in 2024. He lost an endorsement from Service Employees International Union for the posts and later deleted them.
In the regents race, voters picked up to two of six candidates, with the top two winning. Makled received 25.6% of the vote while Brown received 27.2%. Epstein received 22.2% while her fellow Republican Michael Schostak received 22.6%.
Makled’s election comes as part of a wave of Democratic Party wins, including in Michigan, which elected as Senator Abdul El-Sayed (D), who also faced severe backlash for statements related to Israel and Gaza and for appearing alongside streamer Hasan Piker, who has been accused of antisemitic rhetoric.
Israel played a major role in the rhetoric surrounding Michigan’s midterms. But voters, including 60% of Jewish voters that voted for El-Sayed according to early exit polls, favored sharp critics of the Jewish state to candidates in support of it.
The post University of Michigan will have a leader who defended pro-Palestinian protesters in court appeared first on The Forward.
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This grandson of Holocaust survivors is headed to Congress. The ADL has concerns about his antisemitism record.
The election of Daniel Biss, a Jewish critic of Israel, to an Illinois congressional seat Tuesday has sparked a public feud between the Anti-Defamation League and the liberal Zionist group J Street over whether the ADL remains a credible voice in the fight against antisemitism.
After Biss, the former Jewish mayor of Evanston, Ill., won his seat Tuesday night, the ADL Midwest took to social media to express “serious concerns” about Biss’ “approach to antisemitism.”
J Street, which had endorsed Biss, hit back, noting that Biss is the grandson of Holocaust survivors and calling the ADL’s statement “a shanda,” the Yiddish word for disgrace.
“It is hard to read this statement without wondering how far the ADL has drifted from the organization it once was – a gold standard in our community for standing up against bigotry, hatred and discrimination,” J street wrote on X.
Biss, who speaks Hebrew and spent childhood summers in Israel, was elected with 75% of the vote in a district where 11% of the electorate is Jewish.
“It saddens me to watch the ADL, once a preeminent civil rights organization, devolve into an entity that traffics in fear, intimidation and extremism,” Biss wrote in a statement to the Forward. “This kind of rhetoric does nothing to keep the Jewish people safe—in fact, it undermines that very cause.”
The ADL has long faced scrutiny from critics who view the watchdog group as labeling too broad a swath of Israel criticism as antisemitic, while less forcefully condemning antisemitism when it comes from the political right.
“Our statement speaks for itself,” an ADL spokesperson wrote in an email to the Forward.
In its statement, the ADL pointed to a specific set of concerns involving Biss’ record as mayor of Evanston, Illinois, the college town home to Northwestern University.
Biss did not provide Evanston police support that Northwestern requested after reported “antisemitic conduct” at the Gaza war encampment on campus in April 2024, the ADL said, “raising serious questions about whether the safety, dignity, and equal access of Jewish students were treated with the urgency they required.”
Biss has defended his decision not to dispatch police to the encampment, writing in response to a congressional inquiry that forcibly clearing the protest would have gone against police department advice and suppressed “constitutionally protected speech.”
The ADL also said that Biss “dismissed scrutiny of his response as a politically motivated attack fueled by AIPAC, rather than substantively addressing the concerns raised by Jewish students and community members.”
Biss made opposition to AIPAC a central theme of his primary campaign for Congress after the hardline pro-Israel lobbying group spent millions opposing him and supporting another candidate, state Sen. Laura Fine.
In an interview with the Forward in March, Biss said it was “absurd” that AIPAC opposes imposing any conditions on U.S. military aid to Israel. “And then try to enforce it with millions of dollars of dark money, is certainly bad for democracy and bad for our politics here in America,” Biss added.
At the same time, Biss faced pressure to his left on Israel in the primary, defeating Kat Abughazaleh, a Palestinian-American who has characterized Israel’s conduct in Gaza as a genocide. Biss, who has described himself as a progressive Zionist, declined to use the word genocide, despite repeated calls from Abughazaleh to do so.
In a March op-ed in The Nation, Biss wrote that he believed he was one of AIPAC’s top targets partly because “I’m the grandson of Holocaust survivors. My mother is Israeli. My extended family lives in Israel. AIPAC knew that they couldn’t dismiss me as anti-Israel or antisemitic.”
The ADL also criticized Biss for supporting the repeal of an anti-BDS law, which bars Illinois from investing public pension funds in companies that boycott Israel. That position, the ADL said, “raises additional concerns about his willingness to stand against efforts to isolate and delegitimize the Jewish state.”
In an April Substack post explaining his position, Biss said that he personally opposes the global movement to boycott Israel, but he does not believe the government should “stop people from using their economic agency to advocate for their values.”
Biss will succeed Rep. Jan Schakowsky, a Jewish lawmaker who represented the district for nearly three decades and was also an outspoken critic of AIPAC.
The post This grandson of Holocaust survivors is headed to Congress. The ADL has concerns about his antisemitism record. appeared first on The Forward.
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At the Vatican, two elderly men — one Jewish, one Catholic — exchange gifts and mutual admiration
On Wednesday, two senior citizens, Robert Zimmerman, 85, a Jew originally from Minnesota, and Robert Prevost, 71, a Catholic of Chicago, had a brief meeting at the younger man’s office in central Italy.
Sources on the scene report that Zimmerman was in town for business and Prevost, who goes professionally by Leo, had recently cited Zimmerman’s work in the preface to a book about nuclear disarmament.
Both men dressed in uniform, looking a bit Spy Vs. Spy, with Zimmerman in a black hoodie and Prevost in white with a small white skull cap. The confab was brief, a bulletin from Prevost’s workplace reported, consisting of “greetings and a few lighthearted exchanges.”
Prevost gifted Zimmerman with prayer beads, and Zimmerman presented Prevost with a copy of his memoir, published under his pen name, Bob Dylan.
While Zimmerman was raised in a Jewish home, he had, for a time in the late 1970s to early 1980s, converted to born-again Christianity, confounding many.
The post At the Vatican, two elderly men — one Jewish, one Catholic — exchange gifts and mutual admiration appeared first on The Forward.
