Ismail has wide popular support and plans to run in the parliamentary elections scheduled for April 2000. Hussnia Jebara Israel elected an unprecedented 14 women to its 120-member parliament, the Knesset, last May. Also unprecedented was the election of Hussnia Jebara, the first Arab woman to hold a seat. Jebara, a psychologist, ran as a member of the mostly Jewish Meretz party, the only party to establish a quota for female candidates. She intends to press for equal rights for women and Arabs.
Israeli feminists are largely supportive.
Janet Reno Having hired a slew of special prosecutors and suffered a barrage of criticism from both left and right, Attorney General Janet Reno was once again under fire in late summer when members of Congress called for her resignation. The brouhaha stemmed from her admission that she'd made mistakes during the 1993 FBI siege in Waco, Texas. Despite relentless controversy, Reno, the nation's first female attorney general, has held the position for almost seven years, longer than anyone else in this century. In May, as chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, Louise Arbour indicted the world's most wanted man, Slobodan Milosevic, and four other Yugoslavian leaders. The Canada native garnered global respect and cooperation for the war-crimes tribunals, which had previously been seen by many countries as inefficient and incapable of taking a strong stand on war crimes.