Nadia Matar

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Nadia Matar (Pikovitch) born on 16 February 1966 in Antwerp, Belgium) is a very known activist in Israel. She is, together with her mother-in-law, co-chairman of the Women in Green. Nadia's stated goal is to give a voice to the women living in Israel.

[edit] Early life

Matar 's great grandfather Rabbinovitch was a very famous hazzan and her grandfather and father are in the diamond trade. Nadia spent her youth in Antwerp and attended the Tachkemoni School, where she learned secular and Hebrew. In her free time she was a member in the youth organisation Bnei Akiva and later even became a counselor and therein developed leadership skills..

After high school she spent a year at Machon Gold to perfect her studies in the Jewish faith and later as a student in economics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

She married an American doctor in pediatrics she met at the university and today they live in Efrat with their six children.

[edit] Political activity

Nadia believes in a “Large Israel” and shouts that the civil servants in charge of dismantling apply the policy of the Judenrat. She wears neither long skirt, nor sandals. She does not quote the Bible at any end, but rather the last articles of her preferred journalists. One would imagine her elegant silhouette walking on the beautiful avenues of Tel-Aviv rather than at the top of' an isolated outpost. Nadia Matar, passion aria of the anti-withdrawal, lives in a very beautiful villa south of Jerusalem, in Efrat, “the 16th of the colonies”. “When the movement of the Women in Green was created in 1993, the idea was to break the stereotype of the bearded colonist in his military dress with the machine-gun on his shoulder, tells Nadia. We wanted to show that in Judaea-Samaria (the West Bank) and in Gaza ,the women were similar to the women of Paris or Antwerp.

`I saw myself as a peaceful housewife, I did not have great ambitions, Peres and Rabin changed all this`.

After the oslo accords in 1993, Nadia sees red. She decides then, with her mother-in-law Ruth, her inseparable accomplice, to gather women hostile to the principle “Peace against territories”. The movement aims at collecting attention from the media by multiplying more or less controlled happenings and provocations. Nadia is not afraid to knock with the police, get bruised and spend days in jail all with a courage and determination that even her adversaries admire and always in company of the mother-in-law

The claims of the Women in Green : 1. All-out war against terrorism 2. Not to give back an inch of territory 3. To expel the Palestinians implied in armed actions 4. To allow the others to live within the large Israel, but without the right to vote. “Familiar with the television interviews, Nadia like to use shock formulas : “My hero became one zero (Sharon)”, “Our buses are the gas chambers of the Palestinians” or “Bassi applies the policy of Judenrat”. This comparison between the Nazis and the Israeli senior official in charge of dismantling caused the fury of the Israeli left. Nadia caused the controversy when she compared the government's intention to remove Israeli settlers from Gaza to the involvement of the Judenrat ("Jewish Council") in Berlin in 1942, which under orders from the German government organized the expulsion of the Jewish community from that city.Matar drew this comparison in a letter she sent to Yonatan Bassi, the head of the department overseeing the civilian aspects of the withdrawal. She attached a copy of a 1942 letter from the Judenrat, which she claimed mirrored the letter Bassi sent to Gaza settlers explaining the procedures for the evacuation. Matar stated:

Yonatan Bassi is a much worse version of the 'Judenrat' in the Holocaust, for then in the Holocaust, this was forced upon those Jewish leaders by the Nazis, and it is very difficult for us to judge them today. But today no one stands with a pistol to Bassi's head and forces him to cooperate with the deportation of the Jews of Gush Katif and northern Samaria. I n times of frontal fight with the government, Nadia Matar causes more than ever the admiration of her admirers. Three weeks before the disengagement out of Gaza she exchanged her house against a small caravan on the beach of Gush Katif, where she spend her time there with her six children. From there, she organized resistance against the dismantling of the settlements. With Baruch Marzel and Itamar Ben-Gvir, barricaded in a hotel near her caravan, she developed a true battle plan. `The goal is to attract as many Israelis as possible who will oppose to the soldiers.You do not imagine the number of soldiers who will not obey the orders, promises Nadia. This plan will not be carried out. If not, it would be the beginning of the end for Israel”.