Nadia Matar

She imagines that the whole land of Israel, in which she includes the West Bank, lies under an imperative struggle on the ground, throughout every inch of territory, where ‘(e)nemies from within and without want to take it from us and we must not continue with our life’s routine. The words routine (shigra) and expulsion (geirush) have the same root.’ When anchorman Liam Bartlett noted that settlement building is illegal, she replied, ‘where should we go? Where should we go? Back to Auschwitz?’ In the wake both of the murder of 3 Israeli teenagers and on the discovery that the revenge murder of a Palestinian boy was perpetrated by Israeli youths, she said the response to the former was to build new outposts and settlements in revenge, one of which is named after them, Givat Oz Ve’Gaon.

She is a leading figure in an apparent attempt to create a settlement, called Shdema, at Ush al-Ghrab (“Crow’s Nest”) in Beit Sahour, on a local Palestinian park that was, until 2006, an Israeli military base, and where her activism has managed to get the IDF to restore a presence there in the form of a watchtower and prevent ‘illegal Arab building’.

Nadia Matar (Pikovitch) was born on February 16, 1966 in Antwerp, Belgium) into a non-religious Jewish family and is a Zionist activist in Israel. A Yavneh Olami youth leader, she performed aliyah (immigrated) alone at the age of 18 in 1984, while still in her teens, and married an American doctor, David, a pediatrician at Hadassah Hospital, with whom she has had six children, and settled in Efrat, though she moved her family to Shirat HaYam in Gush Katif in 2004 when Ariel Sharon decided to dismantle Jewish settlements in the Gaza Strip. She has been called by some admirers ‘the settlers’ Joan of Arc’. She is, together with Yehudit Katsover, the co-chairman of the Nationalist organization Women in Green. She hosts a settler radio show.