Sara Netanyahu’s Niece, Prof. Ruth Ben-Artzi, Breaks Her Silence: ‘My Relatives Are Promoting Fascism’
Ruth Ben-Artzi. “In the end, the family ties are not important when it comes to the essence.”Credit: Brian Ulrich
A key question that arose during my conversations with Ruth Ben-Artzi, a political scientist who is the niece of the prime minister’s wife, Sara Netanyahu, was why she decided to break her silence precisely now. For years, she kept her political opinions to herself and made no attempt to publicize the family connection. In fact, she says that very few of her friends even knew about her being a relative of the Netanyahus.
Ben-Artzi replied to the question in detail, but a few days later decided to hone her response and sent another message on the subject. “So, why now? The answer is that I am ashamed, sad and angry. Ashamed that my relatives have no shame. That they are in a position of power that promotes and encourages violence, racism, nationalism and fascism. These are not the Jewish values I absorbed and to which I feel connected. Israel could remain a country in which Jews find a safe and free haven of equality and partnership with all the population groups within the state’s borders.
“I have to believe that this is possible,” she continued, “because the alternative – a nondemocratic, halakhic, despotic state based on Jewish supremacy will bring about so much suffering and destruction, such as we got a taste of in Hawara. A policy that is based on religion and revenge will lead to dark places. As long as friends, colleagues and people I know and respect live in Israel and are fighting for a democratic, egalitarian future, I will do my best to support [them].”
In our oral conversations, she explained that friends pressured her to speak out and that she read texts and speeches from many other people who have chosen to stop being silent in the face of the state of emergency, and this heightened her own sense of commitment. But she added a demurrer: “If my analysis of the situation can enhance the protest, I am duty-bound to do this, but I do it with hesitation and the knowledge that I am absolutely not the story.”
Ruth Ben-Artzi, 51, is an associate professor of political science at Providence College, a private institution in Providence, Rhode Island. Her fields of research include the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, as well as relations between developed and developing countries and how international organizations influence those relations. She obtained her doctorate in political science from Columbia University and her B.A. from the University of Haifa.
Ben-Artzi is the daughter of the eldest sibling of the Ben-Artzi family, Matania, a professor of mathematics, and his wife Ofra, a teacher of Hebrew and Hebrew literature. Matania has two brothers – Hagi (more about him later) and Amatzia, a former helicopter pilot who today lives in the United States and works in high-tech. After the three brothers, a daughter was born to the family: Sara Netanyahu, who is today 64.
The parents of the four siblings were the writer and educator Shmuel Ben-Artzi and his wife, Hava (formerly Paritzky), who grew up in an ultra-Orthodox family in Jerusalem. Politically, Shmuel and Hava supported Mapai, the forerunner of Labor, with an emphasis on Bible studies (a “biblical-secular home,” as Matania once put it). The three sons, and afterward also the grandson Avner Netanyahu (son of Sara and Benjamin), all either won or came in second in the annual Bible Quiz for youth. They lived on Kibbutz Mahanayim in the north of the country, then moved to Kfar Hittim, a moshav near Lake Kinneret, and then to Kiryat Amal, a town in the Haifa area, which later merged with Tivon. Late in life, the parents moved to Jerusalem. (Shmuel died in 2011, and Hava in 2003.)
Ruth Ben-Artzi, who grew up in Tivon, remembers a close-knit family in which everyone gathered on Friday evenings and on holidays at the grandparents’ home. “The family my father came from was very modest, and my grandfather and grandmother took pride in living modestly,” she relates. “They had a small house and there was always a warm family atmosphere. Over the years we gradually grew apart, as all the uncles scattered, some going abroad and others moving elsewhere in Israel. Everyone went in their own direction. I suppose that the significant differences in worldviews and values also contributed to the mutual distancing.”
Of her Aunt Sara, she retains one vivid memory. “At the end of the 1970s, when I was 6, my father received a Fulbright scholarship [for study in the United States] and we went on a two-year sabbatical. My parents invited Sara, who had just completed her military service, to spend two months with them, and together they traveled across the United States and Canada. It was her first trip abroad. She was like my mother’s little sister and like a big sister to me. We were very close once.”
Matania, Ruth’s father, was recognized as a genius from an early age. He completed high school at 16 and moved to Jerusalem to study mathematics and physics at the Hebrew University. He was drafted into the pilots course, transferred to the Golani infantry brigade, and eventually made his way to Rafael, the defense technology company, where he served in the career army for 12 years. After Ruth, two sons were born to the family – Ahikam and Yonatan (Yoni) – both of whom are mathematicians.
Yonatan was a conscientious objector, and served two years in prison for his refusal to serve in the Israel Defense Forces. In August 2002, he read out the following statement to the military court that sentenced him: “I, Yonatan Ben Artzi, refuse to be drafted into the army on grounds of pacifism. My deep belief in nonviolence began when I was a little boy and developed over the years into a comprehensive political and philosophical conception. Because of my belief, my country is about to send me to prison, contrary to all international law and a basic law of morality. I will go to prison with head held high, as I know that this is the little I can do to improve the country.”
The family my father came from was very modest, and my grandfather and grandmother took pride in living modestly. They had a small house and there was always a warm family atmosphere. Over the years we gradually grew apart.
Ruth Ben-Artzi
Ofra, Yonatan’s mother, told Haaretz at the time, “We support him very much and we think he did the right thing at the right time. It is not an act of anarchism. Yoni now personifies the only thing that can be done, and the right thing: civil revolt.” Ofra herself would become a prominent activist against the occupation and one of the leading voices on behalf of the Palestinian residents of the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood in East Jerusalem.
In the same article in Haaretz, Matania noted that he too had refused to do reserve service in the territories in 1980, and had been tried in a military court. He made the decision “when [he] saw the humiliations and the oppression and the curfew” that Palestinians were subjected to, he explained.
Ruth and her brother Ahikam both did full military service, she in the air force, he in the navy. Subsequently she became active in the dovish Meretz party and in the Peace Now movement. Indeed, in the 1996 election campaign, she worked hard to try to prevent her aunt and her husband from moving (for what would be the first time) into the Prime Minister’s residence – but to no avail. She now lives in Boston, some 80 kilometers northeast of Providence, and is married to a Jewish-American man whom she met during her doctoral studies. They are raising three children, who are today 16, 14 and 8. I interviewed Ruth Ben-Artzi from Tel Aviv by video chat from Providence.
I’m curious about relations in the family. When your brother was in prison for two years, there must have been a family furor, as he is Sara’s nephew.
“I will speak only for myself. When very deep differences exist in values, it’s certainly difficult to maintain a relationship. It is very difficult for me personally that the line there has been crossed in a direction of nationalism and fascism. The fact that someone is a family member does not constitute a sufficiently cogent reason to justify or normalize such extreme and dangerous views. That’s what’s most important to me. What I see happening in Israel is worrisome, some of my friends feel they are in danger, that their children’s future is uncertain.
“It’s important for me to maintain a distance from those who are fanning the violence and are expressing racist opinions that cause incitement. You mentioned my brother, who is indeed a pacifist and a seeker of peace. The attacks from the right on the opponents of the regime coup and their portrayal as anarchists, inciters or terrorists are puzzling and dangerous, because nonviolent protest is an integral element of democracy.”
Back then, it seems, her brother’s refusal to serve in the army did not tear the family apart. At the end of the interview that Ofra and Matania Ben-Artzi had with Haaretz in 2002, they shared a minor family anecdote. “A few months ago we had a big celebration for my mother’s 80th birthday,” Matania related. “Sara [Netanyahu] organized a meal at the King David Hotel. The whole family was there and we talked about refusal to serve [in the military]. Bibi, who has an American orientation, said he was familiar with the phenomenon from America during the period of the Vietnam War. ‘Civil revolt is all right,’ he said, ‘and it is also all right that the army puts the refuseniks in jail.’”
Nakba education
Did you have a specific moment of disillusionment, or have these thoughts accompanied you since childhood?
“There was always a political discourse around me. I grew up in a home in which we were acquainted with many communities in Israeli society. One uncle is a settler, we have Haredi cousins, my mother’s brother was killed in the War of Attrition [between Israel and Egypt, 1967-1970]. My maternal grandfather is a Holocaust survivor, and my other grandfather came to Mandatory Palestine in 1933 and his family perished in the Holocaust. My two grandmothers were born in Jerusalem and I am 10th generation in Israel on both sides.
“I did my military service during the first intifada [1987-1993], and I saw the occupation from close-up. My generation did not have the tools to understand the history of the Palestinians, or the possibility to talk about the occupation openly. No one taught us about the Nakba or told us, ‘The Palestinians lived here before us, before our families came here.’ So during my army service I taught myself all I could about the history of the place.”
The settler-uncle whom Ben-Artzi mentioned is Hagi Ben Artzi, the second-born brother, who became religiously observant during his adolescence and is now an educator and lecturer in the fields of Bible, Talmud and Jewish philosophy. In the 1970s, he moved to the Beit El settlement in the West Bank, and over the years he has also frequently leveled criticism at his brother-in-law, Benjamin Netanyahu, albeit from the right side of the political map, such as in connection with the 2011 deal to release the soldier Gilad Shalit, who was being held by Hamas. (In return for Shalit’s freedom, Israel released more than 1,000 Palestinian prisoners.)
Talking to Haaretz in 2002, Ruth Ben-Artzi’s father told the following story about a visit by bus to his brother in Beit El: “On the way from Jerusalem, stones were thrown at the bus and one of the windows was shattered. There was a little hysteria on the bus but nothing serious happened. I came to Hagi and asked him, ‘Why don’t you travel in armored buses?’ He replied, ‘Out of principle, we travel the same way people do in Tel Aviv, but we react differently.’
“And before my eyes a group of them organized and went openly to the neighboring villages to take revenge. The next day I read in the paper that settlers smashed solar heaters, shot up cars belonging to Palestinians and perpetrated a pogrom, and the police were investigating. I told Hagi, ‘I will not visit you again, I don’t want to be an accomplice to all that.’ Since then I have stopped going there.”
With the images of the recent violence perpetrated by settlers in the town of Hawara still fresh, that event from two decades seems even more chilling. Not only has nothing improved – now the pogromists are also being backed by the government. Ruth’s view is similar to her father’s.
As an activist during the 1996 election campaign, Ruth Ben-Artzi worked hard to try to prevent her aunt and her husband from moving (for what would be the first time) into the Prime Minister’s residence – but to no avail.
“I came into contact with settler ideology first-hand,” she says. “My uncle also wants democracy – but only for Jews. So actually what my uncle wants is not democracy, it’s theocracy. The ideology that says Jews and non-Jews should have a different status? That’s not democracy. We have reached the present pass not only because Netanyahu has [indictments] that are being deliberated in court, but because this is a decades-long process toward which a certain population in Israel was oriented and for which it longed.
“In the year after the massacre perpetrated by [Baruch] Goldstein [against Muslim worshippers in the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron, in February 1994], Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated. Various leaders described those who carried out these violent actions as ‘wild weeds,’ but that was a misnomer. They weren’t wild weeds; they were part of a significant public whose ideology advocates violence as a means to achieve religious-political goals.”
She adds: “The situation we’ve arrived at doesn’t surprise me. We were on the way there for a long time. Two processes brought us to where we are. The first is the state’s definition as Jewish and democratic; the second is the occupation that began in 1967. There is a particular reason why democracies generally separate between religion and state. When religion is connected to politics, it will in the end unavoidably infringe on certain freedoms that are the anchor of democracy.
“In Israel, Judaism overrode the democratic ethos, which consists of equal rights for all the citizens within a state’s recognized borders. The regime in Israel is operating in part on the basis of religious motivations, and accordingly the overhaul will turn us into an undemocratic theocracy, [although] not necessarily into a dictatorship. I will give you an example. There are currently two religiously observant parties in the government that won’t allow women to be members. The coup proponents claim there is a problem with diversity in the Supreme Court, but what about the Knesset? In a democracy, parties that don’t allow women to be part of their lineup, are not allowed to take part in the political game. And this is even before we’ve spoken about legislation that is intended to serve interests of Jewish religious population groups at the expense of all the other citizens of the country.”
How does the second process, the occupation, fit in?
“Israel always strove for democracy, and until 1967, that also looked feasible. Until then the country’s borders were defined, and therefore we met the dictionary and political definition of a state: a geographical region with political borders in which the population of citizens are all subject to the same laws. After 1967, a situation was created in which half a million citizens of the country live [in the West Bank] outside the borders of the state from the standpoint of international law. That is a paradox of identity, which has now reached a boiling point. There were a few possible ‘exit points’ in the past, which we failed to internalize. For example, after the massacre in the Tomb of the Patriarchs in 1994. At the time, there was an opportunity to remove the Jewish settlement in Hebron. Rabin was prime minister, and it would have been possible to cope with that and to understand that the activist, messianic core of the settlers was effectively operating as a terrorist organization.”
“Terrorist organization” is a harsh term.
“First of all, I am not saying anything new. [The religiously observant philosopher] Yeshayahu Leibowitz warned us grimly against the occupation and the settlement project. A terrorist organization is defined according to its mode of operation and the object against which it operates – the desire to wield violence against civilians in order to achieve a supreme goal, which it views as holy, even above human life. By these criteria, the settlers who are perpetrating violence meet that definition. Their motivations are religious and nationalistic – another characteristic of most of the world’s terrorist organizations. They can be called all kinds of names, but according to the professional literature, they function as a terrorist organization.”
Ben-Artzi notes that, “No Palestinian infant is born hating Jews, or as a terrorist, or wanting to wield violence. But every Palestinian infant that is born in the territories, is born into a reality of occupation. That is always on my mind when it comes to the Jewish values on which I was raised. And it didn’t start with the present government, of course. In May 2022, while the previous government was in power, the Supreme Court ruled contrary to international law, and allowed the expulsion of about a thousand Palestinians from Masafer Yatta in the South Hebron Hills. These are people who have been living there for generations and who are the victims of brutal violence on the part of the settlers, who behave like the lords of the land, because they know they will not pay any price for their behavior. Democracy in Israel wasn’t perfect prior to that, nor did it cease to exist in November 2022 [after the last election]. It’s a long process. Starting in 1967, Israel has only been an aspiring democracy.”
Yair’s genes
While you’re speaking, I can’t stop thinking about how surprising it is that you share common genes with Yair Netanyahu.
Ben-Artzi doesn’t laugh, the subject is obviously too painful to joke about. “I am raising three children, so I know that the influence [parents have] on children is limited. They [siblings] are influenced partly by how they are raised, but also by their differences from one another. The values I was raised in are those of dialogue, nonviolent behavior and love of humanity. It’s hard for me to say what influenced the views of my relatives. Differences of views and ideology are legitimate and important in a pluralistic society. Not everyone needs to think alike. But there are basic human values that we must all hold in common.”
You are showing respect for them and speaking about them politely, but they don’t talk like that about others. They probably won’t talk about you like that after reading this interview.
“I regret that. Maybe that is one of the reasons I agreed to be interviewed, in order to place a certain barrier between myself and what I read in the media that they are saying – violent talk that is not consistent with my values and the way I was raised.”
So you are actually trying to salvage the family honor?
“Politically, Bibi was elected and he is responsible for his government’s policy. He is an experienced politician with a multi-year record of political maneuvering under his belt. In the end, the family ties are not important when it comes to the essence.”
In Israel, Judaism overrode the democratic ethos, which consists of equal rights for all the citizens. The regime in Israel is operating in part on the basis of religious motivations, and the overhaul will turn us into an undemocratic theocracy.
Ruth Ben-Artzi
But in the case of the Netanyahu family, they pushed themselves into the spotlight and also into the rooms where the decisions are made. As such, it’s legitimate to criticize them too, and not only the premier.
“If he let them [his wife and son] in, that was his decision. The responsibility is his.”
And also theirs. Yair and Sara Netanyahu have placed themselves in the center of the public arena.
“True. Anyone who places himself in the political discourse, in the public arena, whether they were elected or not – it’s legitimate to critique them. But in respect to policy, responsibility devolves on the decision maker. The prime minister is subject to many diverse forms of influence, from people around him and within the family. But at the end of the day, the responsibility is completely and exclusively his. Tweets and interviews of family members, including me, should not influence policy.”
That’s not the case when it comes to this family. The positions espoused by family members become policy and also enter the national budget, which we pay for.
“I don’t know how Netanyahu makes his decisions, but I insist that the exclusive responsibility for the government’s decisions is that of the prime minister and his government alone.”
Have you ever visited the prime minister’s residence during an event or a ceremony?
“No.”
You have lived in the United States for many years and are raising your family there. You won’t be affected by the changes in Israel.
“I was born and raised in Israel, my parents live in Jerusalem. I will never cease to be an Israeli, no matter how many years I live abroad. The strong bond with Israel is also the motivation for continuing to act for the country and for being willing to be interviewed. In addition, the direction that Israel follows will have implications for me and for Diaspora Jewry. I have, we have, a legitimate interest, in addition to our moral responsibility. If over the course of 75 years, all of Israel’s governments relied on the support of Diaspora Jewry and the United States, the present government of Israel and its supporters have no right to demand that we sit on the side.”
On the right they’ll say that people who don’t live here have no right to intervene.
“The citizens of democratic countries not only have a right, but also a responsibility to be involved in the foreign policy of their countries. After all, these are relations that are maintained thanks to their tax funds, especially U.S.-Israel relations, which include the annual transfer of $4 billion from the United States to Israel. It follows that every American taxpaying citizen is entitled to learn about the essence of the connection, to express their opinion and to bring influence to bear on the U.S. administration in regard to its foreign policy. That is not an anti-Israeli proposal, still less an antisemitic one. On the contrary, it is the only way to preserve close ties with Israel.”
This article is published in its entirety.