Major Raz Esther Koons, age 34, holds many identities that can seem to conflict: a soldier who believes in peace, a left-wing activist from a religious household, an Arabic-speaking grandchild of Holocaust survivors, a Zionist who believes in the right of Palestinians to self-determination. In conversation with Koons, though, all these complexities seem to add up to something powerful and potentially transformative.
“I am here because after the Holocaust my grandparents needed a place to go. I’m very connected to this land. I can’t say that I’ll live somewhere else. The Zionist thing to do is to see how you can live here together with the Palestinians,” Koons, who lives in the Jerusalem neighborhood of Ein Kerem, told Davar. “This is the meaning of caring for the future. It is an illusion to think that the Palestinian issue can disappear through war.”
Koons grew up in a religious home in Meitar, a small village in the Negev that borders the southern West Bank. Her parents were very left wing, which was unusual in her social environment growing up, where many classmates’ families were settlers who demonstrated against the 2005 disengagement from Gaza.
“I was educated in a religious school for girls, and I remember not talking about it at school,” she said. “It was almost shameful to tell my friends that my family was pro-peace.”
Like many Israelis, Koons’ first real encounter with Palestinians was during her army service. “When I became an officer in the Intelligence Corps we learned about the history of the conflict,” she said.
The turning point in her understanding of the conflict was a meeting with Rabbi Menachem Froman, a peace activist settler from the West Bank who promoted reconciliation with Palestinians.
After Froman passed away in 2013, Koons remained in close contact with his family. A few years later, Froman’s widow, Hadassah, invited her to a meeting with a 17-year-old resident of one of the settlements, who had a dream to bring settlers and Palestinians together. Thus, Koons found herself a founding member of the coexistence grassroots organization Roots, which aims to foster “understanding, nonviolence, and transformation among Israelis and Palestinians.”
“Suddenly I found myself engaged for six years in establishing and managing a youth group of Palestinians and Jews living through the conflict,” Koons said. “The group grew and more groups were opened under the Roots organization. It is an organization that does not sit well for anyone, neither the right nor the left. I had an Israeli participant whose teacher was killed in a stabbing attack, and a Palestinian boy who was arrested for rioting. These teenagers became my great teachers and shaped my life differently.”
That work taught her to value the importance of holding multiple narratives. “The spaces that hold me are ones that manage to deal with complexity,” she said. “Spaces that hold both narratives are the ones I feel the most comfortable.”
While involved in Roots, Koons enrolled in Middle Eastern, Arabic, and Islamic studies. She called learning Arabic “one of the greatest gifts I could give myself.”
Following her Arabic studies and her work at Roots, Koons was offered to serve in the reserves as a population officer in the Civil Administration. "I told myself that when there is a war, I want to be in this position,” she said. “And at the same time, no one prepared me for October 7.”
The Civil Administration is Israel’s governing body in the West Bank, overseeing bureaucratic functions in territories occupied by Israel after 1967. It is subordinate to the Israeli military’s Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories, which also deals with Gaza, and soldiers can complete their mandatory and reserve service in the Administration.
On October 7, Koons received a call up to the reserves and arrived at Sde Teiman base, where she was attached to one of the divisions. In the weeks leading up to a full-scale ground invasion of Gaza, Koons had plenty of time to talk to the soldiers about what to expect in terms of Gaza’s civilian population and how to avoid harming them in the difficult circumstances of urban warfare. These conversations weren’t always easy.
“When I talked to commanders about the civilian side of Gaza, most of them were unwilling to take it to heart, and I understood them,” Koons said. “It’s hard to hear about it. And yet I spent hours there talking with them.”
Ultimately, Koons believes that her work can make a difference. “A war zone is chaotic. The army does not want to harm the civilian population, but in the field, the commanders make the decisions. A commander in war operates under a lot of stress, and it is possible to increase his vision of the value of people’s lives,” she said.
She recounted a conversation with a commander who returned from Gaza during which he said that their preparation sessions helped him decide how to deal with a stressful situation in which Hamas militants forced a group of civilians to shield them inside a shelter.
“I believe that thanks to this conversation he was able to contain the complexity of being a fighter within a civilian population,” Koons said. “This is what helped me believe that there was a point to the many conversations I had, even if I didn’t always see the results.”
Besides the conversations with the commanders, Koons described cases in which she was able to ensure the safety of civilians in the midst of intelligence about potential militants hiding in a shelter. “An alert was received about a hostile presence, but it was not possible to locate them because they were inside a shelter and there were no eyes on them,” she said. “Just before the place was attacked, we insisted on further investigation, and it turned out that there were no terrorists there at all. It was a shelter for a very large civilian population, and we prevented a disaster due to misidentification.”
In another case, they received a call from an elderly Gazan couple who needed medical attention and could not leave their home.
“In the past, we heard about scams like this, which could be a situation of luring in soldiers in order to attack,” she said. “In the end, we confirmed their condition and they were sent for treatment.”
Koons’ other role was participating in a joint military operation for the IDF and the humanitarian organizations to oversee the humanitarian aid that entered the Gaza Strip.
“I was supposed to be there for a month and a half, and I stayed another month and a half because it felt important to me,” she said.
Koons sees her empathy for the Palestinians and the need to resolve the Palestinian issue as part of her Zionism, not something that contradicts the existence of the State of Israel and the need for its defense.
“The complexity of my military role is that I also protect soldiers and cannot endanger them, which is no less important than protecting the Palestinians. I cannot fight for the rights of my people without fighting for the rights of the people sitting next to me,” she said. “This is Zionism and this is Judaism. Saying that Zionism and Judaism is synonymous with reducing the rights of Palestinians, is a moral distortion.”
Now, after a second round of reserves, she is trying to think about what could create a different future for Israelis and Palestinians.
“I hold the complexity,” she said. “My ambition is that we end the occupation and that there be equal rights for all the inhabitants of this land. But I understand that now is not the time for that, and the interim period will be managed by what we know. With one hand I try to act within the existing reality, and with the other hand I try to create a different reality.”
“If you don't create an environment that thinks about what should be and how it can be built, you don’t solve the problem. We haven’t found the formula. When we don’t find the cure for cancer, we don’t close laboratories, but open more,” she said.
Those efforts to find the cure include Koons’ work managing the Shalom Hartman Institute’s premilitary training school, which educates youth from Israel and North America. Koons was also a partner in The Forum for Regional Thinking, an organization which aims to reshape how the Israeli public views the country’s position in the Middle East.
“I told my students from Roots that we need a special muscle, a muscle of holding complexity, which if you don’t practice it, won’t get stronger,” Koons said. “I reached decision-making junctions after practicing it for years, in peace activities, in women's activities. We live in a reality which forces false dichotomies of good and bad, left and religious. Today it is a radical act to strengthen this muscle. We need a supportive community for times when we forget that.”
This article was translated from Hebrew by Nancye Kochen.
