Husnia Jebara won a seat in the Knesset representing the Meretz party during the elections in May, 1999. Ms. Jebara, who before taking her place in Israel's parliament served as director of the Middle East Department at the International Institute of the Histadrut (Israel's General Federation of Labor), has made history by becoming the first-ever Arab woman to win a place in the Knesset.
During the past two years Ms. Jebara was responsible for implementing MASHAV funded courses in Arabic at the International Institute in a wide range of topics, including community and leadership development. Hundreds of professionals, mainly from the Palestinian Authority and Jordan, have participated in these courses, as well as a number of people from North African countries.
"I'm very sad to be leaving my job with MASHAV," she told Shalom Magazine. "But I have no regrets. People have to move on and in the Knesset I am faced by a fresh and exciting challenge."
Ms. Jebara, 41, has been ambitious from a very young age. "When I was a small girl I told people that I wanted to be a Knesset member when I grew up," she recalls. "In a traditional Arab town where a woman's place is in the home nobody took me very seriously."
Ms. Jebara pays tribute to her late father, Haj Abdullah Abu Amsha, for being able to realize her dream. "We were thirteen children," she explains. "Seven sisters and six brothers. But our father treated us equally. This was very rare in Arab society. When he died he divided his land equally between all of us - girls and boys."
"He was one of the town elders," she adds. "He used to settle disputes between neighbors. I used to go around with him and I thought that when I grew up, I too would like to be like him, seek just solutions and put the world to right."
Her only regret is that on the day she took her Knesset seat in June, her father, who died in 1983, was not in the gallery to see his "little girl" take her place.
Jebara was born and raised in the town of Taibe northeast of Tel Aviv. She studied at Tel Aviv University's School of Business Administration. She served as chairman of the Taibe office of Na'amat, the women's division of the Histadrut, before becoming director of the Youth and Women's Department of the Arab-Jewish Institute at Beit Berl. In 1997 she set up the Middle East Department when MASHAV wanted to enhance regional coexistence and development by intensifying its activities in Arabic.
During her two years at the International Institute she devised and implemented innovative curricula on such topics as "The Development of Young Leadership," "The Development of Women's Leadership," "The Management of Voluntary Organizations," "The Organization of Community Medicine," "The Development of Informal Education," and "Education for Democracy."
For 11 years now Jebara has also been politically active in the Meretz party.
"I chose Meretz because it best reflects what I believe in," she explains. "The rights of disadvantaged groups and equality for women, as well as coexistence and equality between Jews and Arabs in Israel, and peace based on territorial compromise between Israel and its neighbors."
When it was announced that there would be Knesset elections in 1999, Jebara took the plunge and contested the internal elections for Meretz representatives to stand for Knesset. Popular among the grass-roots members of the party she won 10th slot on the Meretz list.
The 120-seat Knesset is elected by proportional representation. All Israelis over the age of 18 are entitled to vote and each party receives the percentage of seats according to the percentage of votes cast for it. Meretz received more than 8% of votes and, therefore, was allocated 10 seats. For Jebara, the hours following the election were mixed with emotional ups and downs.
"The polls broadcast by the television stations when the ballot stations closed gave Meretz 10 to 11 seats," she recounts. "I was excited but I wasn't celebrating. Polls often get it wrong. And by the morning with most of the votes counted Meretz only had 9 seats. I was disappointed. It was looking as though I wasn't going to make it into the Knesset. Then the last votes counted raised Meretz representation to 10 and I was in. But I didn't celebrate until the results were officially announced the following day."
There then followed what Ms. Jebara describes as seven days and seven nights of celebrations and fireworks in Taibe. "We received hundreds of phone calls and visitors to congratulate us."
The first-ever Arab woman to sit in the Knesset, she is one of a record 14 women and 13 Arabs in the current parliament. Always one to insist on fairness, she would like to see a 20% Arab representation in the Knesset (24 seats) to reflect the size of Israel's Arab minority and a 50% female representation. "But I'd settle for 40%," she adds with a compromising smile.
Married with three children - a daughter aged 19 and two sons aged 16 and 12 - Ms. Jebara is not a woman who has struggled to raise a family and pursue a career. She pays tribute to her husband, Fatheh, for his sympathy and support and says that the secret to having both a family and career is "making time" and "being organized."
Put in other words Jebara has realized her ambitions through determination, motivation and most of all hard work. In recent years she has followed a routine of waking up at five in the morning to cook and clean the house so that she has three or four hours available before starting the "career" side of her life. Since being elected to the Knesset she has worked longer hours, often holding meetings until after midnight. And although Israel has a proportional representation rather than a constituency election system, she sees the residents of Taibe and the surrounding villages as her constituents and devotes her weekend (Friday and Saturday in Israel, the Muslim and Jewish Sabbath respectively) to meeting local petitioners with problems that seek solutions.
In the Knesset itself Ms. Jebara has already made an impression with her prolific work rate. She sits on four committees: Education; Labor and Social Welfare; Interior; Status of Women, and chairs a sub-committee on the Advancement of Arab Women. She has initiated legislation compelling Israel's national airline to employ Arab stewards and intends introducing a law to make the learning of the Arab language compulsory in Israeli schools.
"I aim to champion all the disadvantaged," she insists. "That includes Israel's Arab community as well as the Jews living in development towns. Everybody regardless of race, religion and gender must be given equal opportunities. That means an end to economic, social and political discrimination."
Ms. Jebara also feels that she has a role to play in the peace process. "Israel's Arabs form a natural bridge between the country and its neighbors," she says. "I am cautiously optimistic that the present government can achieve peace between Israel and all its neighbors - the Palestinians, Jordanians, Egyptians, Syrians and Lebanese."
If at MASHAV she helped build the people-to-people contacts between Israelis and Arabs, which will cement the peace process, she now intends to help design the peace process at governmental level. Ms. Jebara plans to be re-elected to the next Knesset and states boldly that her ambition is to become Israel's first Arab cabinet minister.
"I'd like to be Minister of Labor and Social Welfare," she says with the same earnest smile that no doubt she had as a young girl when she declared that she would grow up to be a Knesset member.