Hatnuah
| Hatnuah הַתְּנוּעָה | |
|---|---|
| |
| Leader | Leia Clemens |
| Deputy Leader | Samuel Goyers |
| Secretary | Shelly Montefiore |
| Founded | |
| Headquarters | Keybir-Aviv |
| Political ideology | Haifan Nationalism Secularism |
| Political position | Center-left |
| Colours | Purple, white, and yellow |
| Parliamentary seats | 14 / 422 |
Hatnuah (Haifan: הַתְּנוּעָה) was the Haifan nationalist party in the Caputian state of Haifa. It stood on the center left, with a platform of Haifan nationalism, secularism, and environmentalism. Through the two referendums of the Caputian period, it led the campaign for Haifan independence against the unionist party Yesh Atid. Leia Clemens led it from 1658 AN, with Samuel Goyers as her deputy and Shelly Montefiore as secretary. Its headquarters were at Keybir-Aviv. The party ended with the Kingdom of the Union of Caputia in 1668 AN.
Origins and leadership
Hatnuah was the organized form of a Haifan nationalist current older than Caputia itself. That current reached back through the Free State of Haifa (the independent republic dissolved in 1620 AN) and the autonomous Hammish territory of Haifa that followed it. Under Caputian rule it took political rather than military shape, in a party its members traced back to the Haifan Nationalist Army, the force that had gathered among displaced Haifans at Keybir-Aviv late in the Hammish Civil War and was destroyed by the Alexandrian Flu before it could fight. Hatnuah sat in the Caputian Parliament from its first, appointed session, where it held ten of 250 seats. Leia Clemens took its leadership in 1658 AN.
In the same year the party helped bring about the Edict of Pallisican Expulsion and Repudiation, which Queen Elizabeth I issued on 25.II.1658 AN on the petition of the National Salvation Front and of Hatnuah. The edict expelled the nationals of the Haifo-Pallisican Imperial Trade Union and the practitioners of the Stripping Path from Caputia and confiscated their assets.
Platform
Hatnuah's declared object was a new Holy Haifan Empire, and its registered platform, resting on Haifan nationalism and environmentalism, called for relations with the Bassarids of the Haifo-Pallisican Imperial Trade Union to be severed altogether. Its secularism spoke to the Israati-descended Haifans of the shore of Lake Morovia, many of whom had kept the name of their forebears while leaving the Judahite rite behind. Writers within the rite read the party's secularism as the political afterlife of that diaspora, a reading recorded in the Festival of the Crossing but adopted by no source outside the rite. The party drew support beyond the state as well as within it: its national vote of 1,767,637 in 1660 AN ran several hundred thousand ahead of the nationalist share of the Haifan poll, the balance coming from the Haifan diaspora elsewhere in the kingdom.
Independence campaign and dissolution
At the general election of 1660 AN Hatnuah returned fifteen members, and Clemens answered the unionist majority with the slogan that carried the nationalist campaign for the next five years, "Hands Off Haifa Now!" The same campaign saw three of Haifa's independent deputies found Yesh Atid, a unionist party under Noam Reiner that contested the state alone and became Hatnuah's principal rival. Hatnuah stood behind the Free Haifa campaign at the first independence referendum in 1663 AN, which returned a narrow majority for independence on a turnout of 47 percent. The state's unionist government, under Governor Rachel Dresner, held the result inconclusive. Confrontations between the police and independence supporters on the night of certification left seventy dead in Abeis, Keybir-Aviv, and Diamandis. When the government put the question again on wider terms, Hatnuah supplied the whole of the minority that opposed the Second Haifa Referendum Act, 1664 AN, which the Parliament passed by 359 votes to 15.
The second referendum was held alongside the general election of 1665 AN. Clemens brought 850,000 people into Abeis by the count of the Caputian Broadcasting Corporation, but the separatist camp divided over its aim: Clemens wanted independence under a shared Crown, while her deputy, Samuel Goyers, wanted a unilateral declaration and a Republic of Haifa. The poll produced a plurality for remaining a Caputian state, and Hatnuah returned fourteen of the 422 members at the election held with it, while Yesh Atid took ten. Clemens resigned the leadership on the night of the result and declared the referendum illegitimate. Masked protesters camped before Luxor Palace in Abeis and set the center of the city alight. More than four hundred were arrested, more than eighty were injured, and one demonstrator died. Iram Buchler took the party provisionally, and from that point Hatnuah abstained on every recorded division of the Third Parliament, including the proclamation of Gerhardt Eugen Seydlitz as Prime Minister. The party ended with the kingdom in 1668 AN, after which Haifans scattered into the Keltian Green and abroad, and later generations of the diaspora reached Ransenar and Nouvelle Alexandrie.
