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Nadia Matar (Pikovitch) born on 16 February 1966 in Antwerp, Belgium) is a well-known activist in Israel. She is, together with her mother-in-law, co-chairman of the Women in Green.

Early life

Matar's great-grandfather Bentzion Rabinovitch was a very famous cantor, while her grandfather and father were in the diamond trade. Nadia spent her youth in Antwerp and attended the Tachkemoni School, where she learned secular and Hebrew studies. In her free time she was a member of the youth organisation Bnei Akiva, soon becoming a counselor, therein developing leadership skills.

After high school she spent a year at Machon Gold, in Jerusalem, to perfect her Jewish studies, and after a brief return to Belgium to study psychology in Brussels, returned to Jerusalem to study history at the Hebrew University.

She married David Matar, an American-born pediatrician she met at the university, in October 1987, and today they live in Efrat with their six children.

Political activity

Nadia believes that the Land of Israel including the West Bank and Gaza was promised and belongs to the Jewish People, according to the Torah. She fights for the right of all Jews to live and flourish throughout Judea and Samaria (West Bank), the heart of the Jewish Homeland and the cradle of Jewish history for thousands of years. “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", says 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 "saw red". She decided then, with her mother-in-law Ruth, her inseparable partner, to organize women opposed to the principle of “Land for Peace”. The movement aims at attracting attention from the media by generating more or less controlled happenings and provocations. Nadia is not afraid to clash with the police, get bruised and spend days in jail, always together with her mother-in-law.

The principles of the Women in Green:

• 1. All-out war against terrorism
• 2. Not to give back an inch of territory
• 3. To expel Palestinians involved in armed actions
• 4. To allow the other Palestinians to live within the larger Israel, but without the right to vote.

Familiar with television interviews, Nadia likes 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 senior Israeli official in charge of dismantling Jewish Gaza provoked 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."

Three weeks before the disengagement out of Gaza she moved to a small caravan (house trailer) on the beach of Gush Katif, where she lived 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 battle plan. "The goal is to attract as many Israelis as possible who will oppose 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”.

External links

• Website of the Women in Green
• "J'accuse: The background of the accusations against me (1)" by Nadia Matar, israelinsider, September 29, 2004

• Misplaced Pages articles needing copy edit from May 2008
• Living people
• Israeli activists
• Israeli women