Israel: Voices and Visions: Orly Gold Haklay
4. Orli Gold Haklay: Getting the hostages out is the top priority
Orli Gold Haklay attends demonstrations in her hometown of Beer Sheva every Saturday night to push for the return of the hostages and for new elections. She is a longtime member of Women Wage Peace, a grassroots peace movement in Israel whose purpose is to promote a political agreement, involving women in the process. “We believe that women have a unique ability to be more flexible to reach agreements and to be more determined than men,” she says. “Women sit down at the table and always see before them the children whose lives will end just because we’re too stubborn or too inflexible to reach agreements with our neighbors.” Women Wage Peace, she says, works very closely with Women of the Sun, “a group of very ambitious and brave Palestinian women from the West Bank and also from Gaza, whose lives could be in danger if people knew what they’re doing with us.” Before October 7, Women Wage Peace would go to the Gaza border with their phones and communicate with women on the other side of the fence. “Palestinian women stood there with their cell phones, telling us that they do believe in peace and not to give in and to stay in it for both sides, and that you always have extremists on both sides.” On October 4, some 1,500 Israeli and Palestinian members of Women Wage Peace and Women of the Sun rallied for peace in Jerusalem and on the shores of the Dead Sea. Three days later, three members of Women Wage Peace, including cofounder Vivian Silver, were killed by Hamas terrorists.
Since October 7, Haklay has refocused her energy on the hostages, giving out yellow ribbons at every opportunity and talking about them as if they are her own family members. “The next step is that we have to get all of them out,” she says. “They’re being tortured. They’re dying. We feel like the government isn’t doing enough. The prime minister’s definitely not doing enough. That’s number one. Number two is to reach some kind of political agreement, because we can’t do it by force; Hamas is not a terrorist group that can be beaten. I don’t think anyone would not like to see Hamas disappear, but it’s not going to happen.”
Haklay moved to Beer Sheva from Texas with her parents 40 years ago. Shortly afterward, she remembers standing with her father watching a cavalcade of cars coming down the street. “The neighbors said, ‘Don’t look up, don’t look up,’ and my dad asked why and they said, ‘Because the Egyptians are going to bomb us from above.’ Our neighbors couldn’t believe that the Egyptians wanted peace. And here we are all these years later and not one soldier has been killed on the Egyptian border. So peace is possible and it’s something I think Israelis need to believe—or be convinced of.”
