High Court backs secular settlers’ legal battle for co-ed swim time
In the latest development in an intense legal battle for secular rights in the southern West Bank settlement of Kiryat Arba, the High Court on Wednesday again ordered the local council to permit co-ed family swim time at the town pool.
The ruling came after residents in the settlement petitioned the court against the local council for breaching a 2018 ruling to allow mix-gendered swimming at certain times in the day.
The local council told the court that forcing the pool to provide mixed swimming had caused religious residents to cancel their membership to the recreational center, leading to a loss in income for the town. As a result, it admitted, the pool had reverted back to solely separate-gender swimming times.
Justices in the top legal body, however, panned the local council for neglecting roughly 30 percent of its population.
“Kiryat Arba is no longer cut from one cloth and has a significant minority of residents who want mixed family swimming or are willing to recognize the right of others to do so,” wrote Justice Yitzhak Amit in his ruling.
“Shared swimming reflects the basic principle of Israeli law, according to which services to the public should be provided on the basis of gender equality,” Justice Ofer Grosskopf concluded.
Kiryat Arba had for years refused requests to allow any mixed-gendered swimming, saying it was obliged to respect the sensitivities of religious residents, many of whom are ultra-Orthodox.
Secular parents, on the other hand, lamented the inability to bring all of their children to the pool at once because of the strict modesty rules, which divided the site’s hours between those open to men and those open to women.
In 2017, after what the secular residents described as years of inaction on the part of their local representatives, a group of them submitted a High Court petition, demanding several hours of co-ed swim time be carved out of the pool’s schedule each week. The court ruled in their favor a year later.
The residents behind the latest petition released a statement Wednesday welcoming the decision, which they said “put an end to discrimination against an entire community.”
“We hope that the council will act to implement the verdict as soon as possible,” the residents said.