Hotovely is the youngest Member of the Israeli Knesset, an attorney with a Bachelor’s and Master’s degree (with honors) from Bar-Ilan University, a doctoral candidate in Law at Tel Aviv University Law School, an observant orthodox woman who heads the Knesset’s Committee on the Status of Women (she wants the 120-member Knesset to have more than the 23 women it currently has), and one of the rising stars in the Likud, having been recruited for the party by Benjamin Netanyahu.
Her parents immigrated to Israel from the former Soviet Union, and she was born and raised in the southern Israeli town of Rehovot. During her National Service she served as an Emissary of the Jewish Agency in Atlanta, Georgia; her English is exceptional.
Here’s an excerpt from her talk entitled “The Challenges of an Unapologetic Zionist,” given on January 16, 2011 at an event sponsored by American Friends of Likud and Children of Jewish Holocaust Survivors, in which she connects Israel’s problems to a "compulsion to apologize for having won in 1967," and presenting its claims based on arguments around security rather than on moral rights:
Photo Sharing – Video Sharing – Photo Printing
Call her the Good Tzipi, or perhaps The Third Jew. She does not believe in excessive apology, and believes the political battle in Israel today is not so much between right and left as between Zionists and post-Zionists, with post-Zionists occupying an inordinate part of the Israeli academic and media world. She thinks the future of Israel rests as much on its ability to articulate the moral basis of a Jewish state as it does on its physical security.
Tzipi Hotovely, January 17, 2011 (Photo Credit: Jewish Current Issues)