ABSTRACT
How have the expansion and institutionalization of non-governmental organizations (NGOs), known as the NGOization of the civil society (Lang 1997), affected the women’s movement? Since the 1990s this has been a recurrent question among feminist writers. To what extent and in what way have the strengthening of neoliberal trends, privatization, and the retreat of the welfare state that results in NGOization of the feminist movement affected women’s political organizations and messages? In Israel, as in the rest of the world, the neoliberal structuring of civil society is perceived in public and academic discourse as a process of rupture and depoliticization of social movements, including feminism (Ben Eliezer 2003; Yishai 2008); hence the claim that the women’s movement is being weakened as a sociopolitical force. The present article seeks to examine whether this argument is consistent with the situation in the Israeli women’s movement of the early twenty-first century.
