New Hope politician Dani Dayan wants to foster unity, both within a fractured Israel and with the Jewish world.
After making Aliyah from Argentina at age 15, Dani Dayan created a hi-tech company and then sold it, ditching the business world for politics with the then-singular mission of saving the settlement movement and preserving the Land of Israel.
Elected to head the Yesha Council in 2007, Dayan inherited a movement that had sunk to one of its lowest points in the aftermath of the 2005 withdrawal from Gaza and the destruction of the settlements there.
Soft-spoken, with fluency in Spanish, Hebrew and English, Dayan was successful in building bridges between the council and mainstream Israel, as well as with the international community. As a result, a special envoy post was created for him on the council, even after he left his leadership role in 2013.
Still, when Prime Minister Netanyahu appointed Dayan to New York to be Israel’s consul-general in 2016, he raised many eyebrows. Sending a top settler advocate to represent Israel before left-wing Jewish communities, politicians and media in the Big Apple did not make sense to many people.
But, by all accounts, Dayan served Israel well, winning many friends for his respect for political and religious pluralism during a sensitive time in American politics and amid a rise in antisemitism that peaked with the worst antisemitic attack in American history at the Tree of Life Congregation in Pittsburgh.
Dayan, now 65, has returned to the Israel political map, joining Sa’ar’s New Hope party. After representing Israel to US Jews, he is now ready to be the face of world Jewry in the Knesset and, he hopes, with the party that will lead the next government.
He is determined to use the post to advocate in Israel for American Jews and for world Jewry in general. “I entered the political sphere almost as a one-issue person, the issue of the Land of Israel, but immediately in New York I was taken over by the Jewish people. I will be involved in those issues in the Knesset. It will be high on my agenda. Yes, I would support a bill requiring consulting the Diaspora on key issues.” he says.
