After a geopolitical tour of Israel’s northern border, we met at Alma, a research and education center, to focus on security challenges in this area. Alma was named after founder, Sarit Zehavi’s daughter. Family means everything to Sarit. I got the amazing opportunity of interviewing her, learning a lot about the details of her daily life and what she has to deal with in her line of work. When we talked about the difficulties of being a woman in a position of power in the workplace, Sarit explained that since she’s the boss the only challenging aspect of her career was her fluctuating work-family schedule. This was a problem similar to her time spent rising in the military where she felt a continuous threat of competition by her male peers. She was criticized for going home earlier to take care of her children so she had to adapt to her environment. According to Sarit, you can get anywhere you want in the army as a woman as long as you play by the rules made by the men.
In 2006, Sarit was 9 months pregnant during the same time as Israel was at war with Lebanon. There was a building of Lebanese civilians that was bombed by Israel and the media portrayed Israel as the antagonist using pictures of the dead children. Sarit realized that nobody cared about the context- Hezbollah prevented the civilians from leaving the building- and can say that this moment changed the trajectory of her ideals to make her focus on Alma. Her goal is to stick to the facts and to present information to the public so they can see the truth without jumping to conclusions.
Despite receiving hate from other organizations (a Lebanese newspaper posted that Alma’s core mission was to threaten and create direct call out of Hezbollah which isn’t true), Sarit feels that she won’t know when she’s accomplished her mission, so in the meantime she works hard to communicate with an international community.
My main takeaways from the interview were to be more concrete with my passions by asking questions and learning the facts. It is very inspiring for me to have an accomplished woman to look up to and I’m so thankful for the opportunity of interviewing her.