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.
The civilized way
In July, I accompanied Haetzni-Cohen to a conference on public diplomacy and the media organized by the Yesha Council, the umbrella governing body of the settlements. The venue was a Jerusalem hotel. Haetzni-Cohen had been invited to moderate a panel on “possible political-diplomatic blueprints for coping with the conflict.” The opening speaker was Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat, followed by a veritable who’s who of the right wing: Education Minister Bennett, Social Equality Minister Gila Gamliel (Likud), Yesha Council chairman Avi Roeh, and journalist Ben-Dror Yemini, who as usual blasted human rights groups “for spearheading a dialogue of hatred against Israel” .
One of the panelists, Eliaz Cohen, a poet and editor who lives in the settlement of Kfar Etzion, south of Jerusalem, spoke passionately against a partition of the country but from a radically different point of view from most other participants. Cohen is one of the leading figures in the “Two States, One Homeland” initiative, which also has left-wing members and was formulated in a dialogue with Palestinian activists. The idea is to create a confederation that recognizes the historic and cultural ties of both peoples to the area between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean, thus making it possible to maintain two political entities with open borders. The approach articulated by Cohen, who comes from the heart of the settlement project, infuriated conference participants. “That is not right-wing in the least,” a member of the audience shouted, continuing to heckle Cohen until moderator Haetzni-Cohen told him, “This is not some populist TV program, let’s be civilized about it.”
Haetzni-Cohen did not make do with this encounter with Cohen: In mid-August, in her ninth month of pregnancy, she went to Beit Jala, a Palestinian town south of Jerusalem. There she met with Cohen and two other architects of the plan from the Israeli side, journalist Meron Rapaport and the political geographer Prof. Oren Yiftachel, in a dialogue-encounter with their Palestinian colleagues. She emerged with mixed feelings. “They are charming, captivating people,” she said, “but I don’t see it happening, and furthermore I am not willing for another state to be established west of the Jordan.”
Closer to her heart is a blueprint proposed by Education Minister Bennett, whom she also interviewed. Bennett, who presented his political vision during the last election campaign in a vivid, animated clip, reiterated the main points for her. His plan entails annexing Area C and granting Israeli citizenship to the Palestinians there, introducing an autonomous government with no sovereign continuity in other territories in the West Bank, and massive investment in joint Palestinian-Israeli infrastructure projects in a Marshall Plan-type endeavor.
But while Bennett’s proposal is supposed to constitute an orderly plan of action, in practice it overlaps with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s fudging and delaying strategy (of “managing the conflict”), urging, as Bennett told Haetzni-Cohen that we “take a step back from the obsessive preoccupation with the conflict … The key is to stand strong for 50 years, 500 years … not to forgo a slice of land, and to build a flourishing state that will be a ‘light unto the nations.’ When that happens, the issue will diminish in scale.”
For her part, Haetzni-Cohen can relate to this approach: “I don’t understand what underlies the demand for ‘peace now.’ I find that childish, like when my son wants a candy now and nothing else interests him.”
Substantively, she finds Bennett’s plan “the most orderly and the most connected [to reality] so far, even if I don’t agree with all of it. Many of the other blueprints respond to it or converse with it. Bennett also breaks ground in the sense that he was the first to notice the [policy] vacuum and to say that if we don’t fill it, others will. People used to talk in grand ideological terms: settlement, patrimony. Today everyone’s talking about annexation. After the murder of the three teens [in June 2014], there was talk of annexing the Etzion Bloc; today there’s talk of annexing [the urban West Bank settlement of] Ma’aleh Adumim. This is largely thanks to Bennett, who put the issue on the table.”
This is not the first time Haetzni-Cohen has displayed near-symbiotic ideological identification with Bennett. Last March, TheMarker reported that My Israel, the organization she heads, was registered as a not-for-profit association called Friends of My Israel and published a charter that bears almost the identical wording to the platform of Habayit Hayehudi, Bennett’s party.
Haetzni-Cohen: “The principles of My Israel were drawn up when the movement was established, in 2010, by Naftali Bennett and Ayelet Shaked. That might account for the similarity to the platform of Habayit Hayehudi, which we are not familiar with. Bennett and Shaked severed their ties with the movement when they entered politics.”
Indeed, the organization changed considerably after the two left. At the time of its founding, My Israel was aided by the services of the strategic consultant Moshe Klughaft, who specializes in conducting virulent negative publicity campaigns. In one case, for example, My Israel conducted a public campaign to change the character of Army Radio, alleging that it was controlled by leftists. Its slogan was, “Army Radio – stabbing the soldiers in the back.” My Israel has been heard from less in recent years, though it has more than 150,000 Facebook followers.
Haetzni-Cohen defends the past campaigns (“I would have done exactly the same thing, even if with slightly different terminology”).
One reason for the organization’s lower public profile is reduced funding by the Yesha Council. “I have never seen an extremist in My Israel and I don’t think we have changed our line,” she notes. “But one thing we won’t do is provocation for its own sake. Our voice is a responsible one. We will be biting, we will not compromise but we will not descend into dreck. You won’t see us publishing posts about [Joint Arab List MK] Haneen Zoabi, despite the traffic that could generate, because I know the surfers’ responses will be to curse her mother and wish for her to be raped in a dark alley. That is not interesting or productive and it leads nowhere.”
Dress code
Like Ayelet Shaked, whom she succeeded as head of My Israel, Haetzni-Cohen is something of a rare breed – someone organizers of panel discussions are happy to invite: right-wing, secular, analytical, very presentable. At times she even seems to have adopted Shaked’s intonation: monotonic, not to say robotic, clipped speech with a fixed expression that betrays no emotion.
But unlike Shaked, who was raised in a Tel Aviv home where a shifting political atmosphere prevailed and who over the years went rightward, Haetzni-Cohen was exposed to right-wing ideology from Day 1. Her father, Boaz, a former garage owner, is currently employed by the Samaria Regional Council, and her mother, Kadmiella, is an educator.
Sara, the eldest of three siblings, sums up her childhood in Kiryat Arba in one word, “complex,” and explains: “It’s not easy for a secular child to grow up in a religious locale.” Her mother interrupts with an example: “In school, she dressed like a secular girl, but with limits that I set. I didn’t allow her to wear a miniskirt, because every place has its appropriate form of attire, even though you would not suspect me of being religious.”
Haetzni-Cohen prefers a less provocative example. “When I wanted to join a youth movement, before [Likud-affiliated] Beitar opened a branch here, the only option was Bnei Akiva [a national-religious movement], which was not really relevant, largely because they held most of their activities on Shabbat, when we went to the beach, visited relatives and so on.”
Touring Kiryat Arba with Haetzni-Cohen is a jolting experience. Her parents’ home is located in the lower slope of the neighborhood of Ramat Mamre – the name is from Genesis, and it’s also known as Givat Harsina (after an army colonel) – which is the highest point in the West Bank, overlooking an almost pastoral landscape. The homes are large, detached dwellings, with brilliantly colored bougainvillea spilling out and a Porsche parked out in front of one of them. But further in are tenements, their squalor unconcealed even with a Jerusalem-stone facade; they are populated in part by the Bnei Menashe community from northeastern India, who were originally housed there in the 1990s.
“Kiryat Arba is absolutely a ‘development town,’” Haetzni-Cohen says, using the term for the outlying, hardscrabble towns built in Israel in the 1950s to house new immigrants. “The people here are not cut of the same fabric; some are very depressed socioeconomically. Contrary to the impression people try to create, this is absolutely not the ‘great demon’ drinking up the budgets of the underprivileged neighborhoods and outlying areas [within Israel].”
But in Kiryat Arba the neglect is drenched in blood. Here, for example, is “Security Alley,” a narrow passage on the way to Hebron – also called “Death Alley,” in the wake of an attack during the second intifada in which 12 Israelis were shot to death. And here is the home of Hallel Ariel, the 13-year-girl who was murdered in her bed by a terrorist two months ago. This reality is not foreign to Haetzni-Cohen. “We’ve been on the receiving end of stones and Molotov cocktails for as long as I can remember,” she relates.
At the southern end of Kiryat Arba is Meir Kahane Park, in the center of which is the grave of Baruch Goldstein, who massacred 29 Muslim worshippers in the Tomb of the Patriarchs in 1994. According to Haetzni-Cohen, the gravesite is not a bustling pilgrimage venue: “In practice what you’ll see there is teenagers drinking alcohol, people doing drugs – the whole backyard of Kiryat Arba moved there. On Purim, the extremists have a party there, and that’s it. Breaking the Silence visits there on their regular tour, an activist from the Jewish settlement in Hebron performs antics for the camera [during those tours], and each side gets its show.”
She attended a state-secular elementary school in Kiryat Arba, then the elitist Boyer boarding school in Jerusalem. Her youthful rebellion, if it can be called that, was a momentary attraction to religion, which receded. She served as a noncom service conditions officer in the Israel Defense Forces, then became a full-fledged officer. She went on to obtain an undergraduate degree in media studies and business management, and a master’s in public policy, both from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
At school, she had frequent run-ins with lecturers “because most of them were left-wing, whether I liked it or not, and I am not a person who shuts up,” she says. “There were some unpleasant clashes. They tried to dissuade me from writing a certain seminar paper, or influence me with all kinds of ideological biases. I remember one class in which [legal expert, now law professor] Moshe Negbi spoke in a hall of 300 students about ‘Elyakim Haetzni, the extremist right-winger.’ Fine, so a left-wing extremist says my grandfather is a right-wing extremist. I said nothing. Sometimes you have to choose your battles.”
She met her husband, Elkana Cohen, a religiously observant teacher (see box), when they were both working at a summer camp in the United States sponsored by the Jewish Agency. Their firstborn son, a boy, now 4, was followed by a daughter, who is 2, and last week she gave birth to another daughter. They recently bought an apartment in Jerusalem’s largely lower-class Kiryat Menahem neighborhood. A “variety of considerations” militated against the Kiryat Arba option, Haetzni-Cohen says, “among others because I can’t live in an excessively religious place. In Kiryat Arba, for example, there is a municipal pool, but even though 40 percent of the people who live there are secular, no times are set aside for coed swimming. Why? Because it doesn’t suit the religious folk. So it doesn’t suit me, either.”
In fact, there’s a more substantive reason for the decision not to live in the West Bank: namely, many settlements require prospective members to be vetted by an admissions panel, a custom that Haetzni-Cohen terms “one of the evils of the settlement enterprise.”
Who would refuse the granddaughter of Elyakim Haetzni?
“As a secular woman, I would still not be accepted in a settlement with a religious nature, such as Har Bracha. I can somehow understand the rationale in smaller settlements, which want to preserve a distinctive community cohesiveness. But why is it needed in a settlement like Tekoa, where there are 900 families? Admissions panels also exist in most of the Etzion Bloc settlements [south of Jerusalem]. They choose the easy way out. I believe it’s an ethical mistake but also a strategic one. Look at the growth of settlements that don’t have admissions panels, such as Ma’aleh Adumim, Givat Ze’ev or Ariel. They are genuine cities.”
The tour of Kiryat Arba concludes at the home of Grandpa Elyakim – but we only get to look from the outside, as he refuses to have anything to do with the article. I should not take it personally, Haetzni-Cohen tells me, adding, “When I came to interview him for the [Makor Rishon] project, the fact that I am his granddaughter maybe gave me a small advantage, but no more. He’s not someone whose emotions you can play on.”
I ask her about her sharpest memory of her grandfather. She says, with some amusement, that he spent most of her wedding outside the banquet hall, reading a book, “because it was too noisy.” That anecdote illustrates the fact that “he wasn’t a regular grandpa of the type who hands out candies or takes the grandchildren to play during summer vacation. He was first of all Elyakim Haetzni, afterward Grandpa, and that’s fine with me. I rather admire him, though less in the family context and more as an example of a public figure who behaves responsibly and with an intellectual depth you don’t find today – one who interweaves solid ideology with great humanism.
“The Israeli public doesn’t know him well enough, which is a pity – they are missing out,” she continues. “He is not bitter … but he is very concerned about the direction in which the country is heading. My grandfather is a pessimist.” She, in contrast, terms herself an optimist by nature (“Life here is wonderful”), though not to the point of harboring fantasies about peace. Her analysis: “There is a deep ethnic conflict here between two peoples, which did not begin in 1967, and therefore will also not end with what the left calls the ‘end of the occupation.’”
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