At the Jerusalem Post Women Leaders Summit 2026, World WIZO President Anat Vidor offered a definition of Zionism rooted less in slogans than in agency, responsibility, and the refusal to remain passive in history.
Speaking with Inbal Ann Bouskila, Vidor described growing up in Israel in a home where Zionism was so embedded in life that it was almost invisible. “I didn’t have to go and check my roots,” she said. “The story was here” in streets and institutions bearing her family’s name, and in the history she studied at school.
It also shaped the way she saw WIZO. As a child, she said, WIZO felt almost like part of the state itself, omnipresent, woven into Israeli life, not something she thought about ideologically. Only later did she grasp the gap between how WIZO is perceived and what it actually is.
Australia, she said, changed her. In Israel, Vidor had never needed to explain her narrative because she lived inside it. In the diaspora, she suddenly understood what it means to exist as a minority, always having to define, justify, and explain yourself. That, she argued, creates a subtle but constant psychology of defensiveness: either you begin to soften your identity, or you internalize the idea that you must always present it apologetically. That is why, she said, she calls herself “an unapologetic Zionist.” Explanation may still be necessary, but never from a place of apology.
Founded in London in 1920 by women and later moved to Israel, WIZO, she argued, is not simply “an organization dealing with women’s issues.” It is one of Israel’s largest civil society systems, employing around 6,000 people, roughly 5,100 of them women, and operating about 300 institutions and projects.
Its global federations, she stressed, are not merely donors but part of the movement’s governing structure, approving budgets and work plans. In WIZO, women are not looking for a seat at the table. They created the table, and they still run it. There is almost no precedent in Israel for an organization of this scale, one of the country’s largest civil society systems, to be built and led this way by women. And as Golda Meir once suggested, women are not better than men, but they are certainly no worse.
That female leadership reveals itself not in symbolism but in the ability to hold multiple realities at once. October 7 did not confront WIZO as a charity fund, but as a vast civilian service system that had to keep functioning under fire. Foster homes, youth villages, emergency centers, shelters for battered women, and essential care frameworks could not simply close because the country was at war.
The first task, she suggested, was to hold that system together: care for staff, sustain operations, and keep essential services open. But leadership also meant seeing the quieter emergencies early, opening daycare centers inside hospitals so medical teams could continue working, launching programs for reservists’ wives, reopening protected daycare centers in Sderot, and building resilience responses in both the south and the north. “Routine is part of resilience,” she said, framing continuity itself as a frontline response.
Her closing message was unmistakable. Being a Zionist is first of all a state of consciousness. It means understanding that everyone is responsible for our destiny. We are the architects of that destiny, and it begins with the understanding that Israel is the state of every Jew, for better and for worse. That ownership carries responsibility. Not one action can solve antisemitism, and not one action can strengthen the country. It is one deed added to another. That was the success of the Zionist movement: different people, under the same ideology and the same responsibility, managed to build one of the ten superpowers in the world. Conviction, responsibility, ownership, and unity in action. With the deeds, the miracles happen.
Written in collaboration with World WIZO