Seeking to inject positive content into right-wing ideology that rejects the two-state idea, Sara Haetzni-Cohen, whose family belongs to settler aristocracy, has been out seeking alternative strategies. Haetzni-Cohen talks about life as a secular woman married to a religious man, and explains why she won’t live in Kiryat Arba.
Forty years ago, attorney Elyakim Haetzni, a leader of the West Bank settlement movement, who would later serve in the Knesset in the ultranationalist Tehiya movement, established an organization that he called “The People against a Hostile Media.” Its logo was a snake wrapped around a microphone. Haetzni had long been frustrated by what he termed the “leftist media,” which in his perception dominated public opinion. The organization’s bumper stickers soon appeared on cars across the country.
Haetzni’s granddaughter, 33-year-old Sara Haetzni-Cohen, imbibed the slogan from an early age. “Do you know what it’s like to grow up with the feeling that you don’t have a voice?” she asked-asserted when I met with her last month in her parents’ home – a single-family house with a grapevine in the yard – in Kiryat Arba, home to some 8,000 settlers and adjacent to Hebron. “You had Channel 1 [state TV], which was afterward joined by [the commercial] Channel 2, two [tabloid-style] newspapers, Army Radio, Israel Radio’s current events station, and that was it. The same dialogue, the same opinions. It was a situation of total silencing. I could have shouted at the TV until tomorrow, but it wouldn’t have helped.”
Haetzni-Cohen’s experience of dissonance didn’t end there. “I grew up as a secular person in a very religious community,” she recalls. “As a right-wing adolescent I attended Boyer High School [in Jerusalem], considered a left-wing bastion. It continued in university, when lecturers allowed themselves to make comments about my ‘fascist’ grandfather. The only place where I could voice my views was among my circle of acquaintances. It was infuriating and frustrating. I’m happy to say that things are a little different today.”
Haetzni-Cohen’s qualification – “a little” – reflects her sense of the current situation. The media, she maintains, still does not represent the public’s feelings properly. More precisely, she adds, the major outlets have not kept pace with the consistent shift in public opinion, meaning that what was once considered hard right is now mainstream.
This may be why Haetzni-Cohen refuses to refer to the organization she now heads – My Israel, a Web-based national-Zionist organization established in 2010 by Naftali Bennett and Ayelet Shaked, the education and justice ministers, respectively, in the present government – as a right-wing body per se. “We do not declare ourselves right-wing, because we are not. We are simply the majority of the nation. I am not a vocal minority, I am the consensus,” she said in a recent media appearance.
Precisely because of her ostensibly consensus-based self-confidence, and also because her political camp has led the country for many years, she felt a certain embarrassment when a politically left-center Tel Aviv friend asked her some months ago about the vision the right wing has to offer as an alternative to the concept of two states for two people as a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
“I, who am rooted in the heart of the settlement movement and in the heart of the right-wing camp, started to hem and haw,” she relates. “I told him I needed to think about it. I asked questions, spoke to people and discovered that it’s not just me – others, too, are slightly confused. I understood that a conceptual vacuum exists and that if the right wants to be relevant and to influence the country’s future, it has to fill that vacuum. One can stay in power by rejecting the policy of the other side, but only for a limited time, because being in power is not an end but a means.”
That perception spawned a “conceptual journey through the realms of the right wing.” It took the form of a series of interviews conducted by Haetzni-Cohen with right-leaning people in a variety of fields. They were published over the summer in the weekly Makor Rishon, which generally serves a national-religious readership.
Haetzni-Cohen’s own point of departure is a rejection of the ethos of a “New Middle East,” which people like Shimon Peres were heralding the arrival of in the 1990s.
“I am not here to sell anyone illusions,” she says. “Maybe there will be quiet, or lulls, but not peace. I set out to look for a path, a way to cope, a blueprint, but I don’t think there is a solution to the conflict.” She asked her interlocutors for concrete responses to a series of questions – relating to demography, security, geography, international relations, etc. – and to address certain human- and civil-rights issues affecting the Palestinian population, including freedom of movement, the right to vote and so forth. She started with Prof. Yisrael (Robert) Aumann, from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, co-winner of the 2005 Nobel Prize in Economics for his work on conflict and cooperation through game-theory analysis (see box).
Let’s put aside for the moment a discussion of the applicability of the ideas put forward in the interviews, the international community’s likely response to them or – a minor matter – the aspirations of the Palestinian people. Even so, it’s quite apparent that the first few interviews of Haetzni-Cohen’s “journey” already revealed extensive differences. Some participants proposed a demilitarized Palestinian state, others rejected the very idea of Palestinian sovereignty.
I put it to her that the right wing is confused and doesn’t know what it wants. “This journey was planned so that there would be differences between the plans proposed,” she replied. “I made no pretense of locking everyone in a room until they reach agreement on a single plan. On the contrary, the idea was to get people to open up. For 40 years, they were sold the two-state idea, and now people are eulogizing that concept and talking about a single state. I am trying to undo that dichotomy, to show that there is still a lot of gray in the middle.
“You talk about confusion on the right, but the truth is that the left is just as confused. The friend who set me going on this quest understands that there will be no new Middle East here and that the notion of dividing the country according to the 1967 lines is a messianic idea.
“Beyond that, and without being too blunt about it, the left is of no interest to me,” she continued. “For years they proposed a program that was ruinous in terms of identity and in terms of security. We as the right wing need to take responsibility and decide what it is we want. Will it be perfect? Probably not, but never mind. I’m not yet in the country’s leadership, so I have the privilege to search, to ask questions.”
Toppling the PA
The Haetzni family doesn’t agree on all the issues, as one learns from Sara’s description of a cross-generational meeting with her father, Boaz, her uncle Nadav and her grandfather Elyakim, who recently turned 90. The latter believes, for example, that Israel should annex all the territories in the West Bank and gradually allocate broad powers to the local Palestinian administration in Areas A and B (as delineated in the Oslo accords).
However, attorney Nadav Haetzni thinks his father’s approach is flawed by inequality vis-a-vis the Palestinians, and is also legally impossible. He suggests first annexing Area C (about a quarter of the West Bank, which is currently under full Israeli civilian and security control) and placing its Palestinian population under a military regime with the aim of creating a “flourishing autonomous administration.” In this plan, the discussion on sovereignty would be postponed “for an interim period of 100 years, until the status of the territory is clarified.”
All the Haetznis agree on one issue: Toppling the Palestinian Authority, which is viewed as “absolute evil,” is the first, necessary condition for any political move.“ The annulment [of the PA] needs to be creative; it has to be crushed in a whole range of ways,” Nadav Haetzni said. “First and foremost, we have to renew our connection with the local population. In Oslo, we handed over the population to the violent and corrupt PA, and it’s there that reform must start.”
The Haetzni family is not alone in espousing the militant idea of bringing about the PA’s collapse. In fact, nearly everyone Haetzni-Cohen interviewed spoke of the need to replace the PA with a new entity. For example, Yigal Cohen-Orgad, a former Likud finance minister and now chancellor of Ariel University Center of Samaria, suggested joint Israeli and Jordanian-Palestinian sovereignty in Judea and Samaria.
Even Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman declared last month that he intends to create a “Muqata bypass” – referring to the PA’s headquarters in Ramallah – and converse directly with Palestinian academics, businessmen and intellectuals. According to Lieberman, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas is an “obstacle” to any agreement. And last February, Jerusalem Affairs Minister Zeev Elkin predicted that upon conclusion of Abbas’ term in office, the Oslo-based arrangements between Israel and the Palestinians will collapse. “The question is not whether the PA will collapse, but when it will happen,” Elkin stated, adding that when this indeed occurs Israel might have to take full charge again of the entire West Bank.
If the scenario of the PA’s crumbling is suggested only sporadically by government spokesmen, for the gallery of individuals interviewed by Haetzni-Cohen, it is an essential development, and one that Israel should initiate. Perhaps, then, like ideas that have their origin below, and then trickle into the mainstream, the idea of the PA’s necessary collapse will acquire a solid foothold within the political right’s establishment. This approach is fiercely opposed by the army and the intelligence community, which consider the PA to be a moderating influence and emphasize its cooperation with Israel in thwarting terrorist attacks. However, that in itself will not likely stop the trend from gaining traction, as the high command is in any event tagged as leftist.
However, Israel’s bringing about the collapse of the PA – which Haetzni-Cohen’s interviewees see as a way for the Jewish state to take its fate into its own hands – might reflect a totally opposite process: a flight from responsibility. This is because, when the PA implodes, Israelis will be able to argue that it was the Palestinians who elected Hamas and not a moderate government, and therefore we are to blame for their predicament.
“On the contrary,” Haetzni-Cohen retorts, “the moment you have brought the PA down, you become responsible for all the civil and security consequences of that act. After all, on the day the ‘wet dream’ of the left is realized in the form of a Palestinian state that will introduce super-democratic elections, Hamas will be able to come to power. And what will we do then, with a Hamas state half a kilometer from the Trans-Israel Highway? What is that if not relinquishing responsibility?
“In a cold calculation, the PA’s existence does more harm than good,” she adds. “And because it’s a corrupt, inflammatory body, which encourages terrorism and abuses its citizens – its collapse is preferable. If you want to talk purely about human rights and you really do care about the Arab in Hebron, it’s not certain that the PA is best for him. Ask the Palestinians who work with my father in his garages.”
to be continued in PART II tomorrow
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