yytz: “or as an independent”
Unfortunately (or, in the broader scheme of things, perhaps fortunately), there aren’t really independents in Israel. You need a list of 120 candidates and must win at least 4/120 seats in the Knesset.
So all that’s left is to join a party, which isn’t really so shayach, because a charedi party will never let women join and there will isn’t necessarily a reason for any other party to put up a charedi woman in a position high enough on the list that she’d actually end up in the Knesset. That said, why should she want to join another party? For the purposes of this discussion, I’m going to assume that a charedi woman would want to join a charedi party because she believes in their side of things… there are non-charedi religious women in other parties, after all.
DY: Absolutely. I’m not saying that it can’t be valid, just please provide me with the line that divides between not being able to be seen in public in Knesset and more extremist views. People have made the point of serara being an issue but it doesn’t seem to make sense to me. My point is merely that people seem to be going by visceral reactions- “there’s no way this could possibly be acceptable, after all no charedi woman’s ever done it, so it must be a tznius issue” without pointing out why it’s halachically worse than going to the grocery without a burqa. Or, if you don’t like taking things to the extreme, then even why it’s worse than a woman going out to work, which is a fait accompli these days in much of the charedi world. Nobody has pointed out a CLEAR DISTINCTION between the two that makes one valid and the other not.