In the summer, there was a lot of talk condemning violence against women.  One Example:

https://www.timesofisrael.com/pm-violence-against-women-is-stain-on-the-country-that-cannot-continue/

But it continues, and we women don’t know how to defend against it.  Women are not only killed by their jealous ex-spouses and honor-preserving brothers but, being more vulnerable, by people who can’t get to their husbands or fathers or brothers.  I don’t know if it’s connected to the virus or what, but it scares me.

And I wish I lived in a society that protects endangered women.  When I first moved into an apartment in Israel, in 1972, my mother-in-law then assured me that I could not survive without a cleaner, and my Iraqi neighbor found me a Tunisian woman who had lived near her before.  She was, my neighbor affirmed, known to have killed her husband by spraying his food with DDT for a long time.  She told me she had been married at 14 and had her first of five children before she was 15.  And she never had a good day (or night) with her husband.  Why was she never convicted of murder?  Because the neighbors who knew about it didn’t think the law could understand the situation and wasn’t fit to judge.  This was the case in the play “trifles” and the story “jury of her peers” that I wrote about in a few articles a few years later.  The fact that women cannot be given protection under the law when their situation cannot be understood.

Here, now, women are provided with shelters that don’t offer them normal lives or are ignored when their husbands break injunctions preventing them from coming close to their exes… It’s as if there should be a separate legal system protecting women. 

She worked for me for at least 4 years, maybe 6, and we spoke of many things, but not this.  

And yes, this entry was triggered by the murders of a woman and her daughter to punish the husband who was out of the country.  Here’s one take on the story