Nitzan Horowitz

Horowitz was born on 24 February 1965 and grew up in Rishon LeZion; a biographical account also reported that he had lived in Tel Aviv for more than thirty years by the time it was published.[1][5] He enlisted in 1983 and served at the Israel Defense Forces radio station Galei Tzahal, first as a military correspondent and later as a foreign-news editor.[1]

He studied law at Tel Aviv University’s Faculty of Law and qualified as a lawyer in 1992.[1] Journalism, rather than legal practice, became his profession before he entered politics.[5][3]

Horowitz worked as a journalist at Hadashot and Haaretz, served as Haaretz’s correspondent in Paris and Washington, and headed the foreign-news desk at Channel 10 News.[3][4] He also made documentaries for Channel 10, including a 2005 film about the Indian Ocean tsunami and another about the unsuccessful hunt for Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan.[3] His reporting and public activity included a focus on environmental issues; he received the 2007 Pratt Prize for environmental journalism, completed the Heschel Center’s environmental leadership fellows program, and was active in the Association for Civil Rights in Israel and the LGBT community.[3]

Horowitz entered the Knesset as a Meretz member in 2009 and served until 2015.[5][4] He chaired the Committee on Foreign Workers and served on committees dealing with foreign affairs and defense, internal affairs and the environment, and science and technology.[4] His parliamentary work focused largely on social issues, including challenges Israel faced amid an influx of foreign asylum seekers.[5]

In 2013, Horowitz ran for mayor of Tel Aviv–Yafo against incumbent Ron Huldai. He received about 40 percent of the vote but lost to Huldai, who received more than half.[1]

Horowitz returned to electoral politics in 2019, saying he believed he could have more influence from within parliament.[4] In June, he defeated incumbent Tamar Zandberg in the Meretz leadership election. Ynet reported that he received 54 percent of the vote, while Globes reported 56 percent to Zandberg’s 43 percent and turnout of 81 percent.[1][9] His election made him the first openly gay leader of an Israeli political party.[5]

After becoming Meretz leader, Horowitz said he wanted to strengthen the party’s social-democratic identity and campaign for separation of religion and state.[1] In his victory speech, he emphasized equality, personal freedom, dignity, and opposition to religious coercion.[9]

For the September 2019 election, Horowitz headed the Democratic Union joint list formed by Meretz, Ehud Barak’s Israel Democratic party, the Green Movement, and Stav Shaffir, who had left Labor to join the slate. It won five Knesset seats.[1][5] Horowitz said the alliance would seek social change, protect democracy and the free press, support human-rights organizations, promote equality, and pursue a political agreement with the Palestinians.[10]

For the March 2020 election, Meretz joined Labor and Gesher on a shared list. Labor leader Amir Peretz headed the slate, Gesher’s Orli Levi-Abekasis took second place, and Horowitz was third; the parties together won seven seats.[11][1] In the 2021 election, Meretz ran independently under his leadership and won six seats.[1]

Horowitz announced in July 2022 that he would not seek another term as Meretz chair, though he planned to compete for a place on the party’s Knesset list. He said he had led the party through three election campaigns and helped bring it into the Change Government.[12][13] He served as health minister through the end of Israel’s thirty-sixth government on 28 December 2022.[2]

When Israel’s thirty-sixth government took office in June 2021, Horowitz became health minister, making him the first openly gay person to head the ministry.[2][6] Meretz joined the coalition and returned to government after a twenty-year absence.[1] In his first address as minister, Horowitz stressed that health policy involved more than the coronavirus and highlighted preventative medicine.[14]

The COVID-19 pandemic remained a major part of his work. In a June 2021 interview, he discussed vaccination for people over 12, airport screening and enforcement, and restrictions on travel to designated high-risk countries. He said the government aimed to keep restrictions to a minimum while responding to rising cases, and gave the previous government’s pandemic management a “failing grade.”[6] During the Delta-variant wave, he urged people aged 40 and older to receive a third vaccine dose. An August 2021 report said more than 1.2 million Israelis had already received a Pfizer booster.[15]

Horowitz announced that blood-donation rules for men who have sex with men would change from 1 October 2021. The former questionnaire barred donation if a man had had sex with another man during the previous twelve months. Under the replacement approach, the same rule applied regardless of gender or sexual orientation: donors were asked to wait three months after high-risk sex with a new or multiple partners.[7] The Health Ministry said the change followed advice from its transfusion-medicine advisory committee and was consistent with policy changes elsewhere. The report also discussed the HIV-risk considerations behind the earlier restriction.[7] Horowitz described the change as ending discrimination.[7]

At the end of his term, Horowitz highlighted work involving women and LGBT people, including restrictions on conversion therapy, surrogacy access for same-sex couples and single men, changes to transgender care, and abortion reform.[12] He also said the Health Ministry budget had increased by NIS 2 billion and credited that funding with advancing mental-health services and other priorities.[13] Another report, published in September 2021, gave a markedly different figure of “some NIS 2 million” for a health-system budget increase. The reports do not establish whether their scopes are comparable or explain the discrepancy.[14][13]

A Foundation for Defense of Democracies brief published in February 2023 described Horowitz as health minister in the previous government and said he was the only other cabinet minister, besides Foreign Minister Eli Cohen, to have visited Kyiv since Russia’s 2022 invasion.[16]

Horowitz’s political career combined party leadership, parliamentary service, and a term directing the Health Ministry. His 2019 election as Meretz leader was a milestone in Israeli party politics: he became the first openly gay leader of an Israeli political party and, in 2021, the first openly gay health minister.[5][6] His ministerial agenda included pandemic vaccination, preventative medicine, and a change to blood-donation eligibility rules that replaced a restriction specifically targeting men who have sex with men with a risk-based waiting period applicable to all donors.[7]

His public career also included extensive journalism, international reporting, environmental journalism, and documentary work before his return to elected politics.[3][4] In political leadership, he headed Meretz through several election campaigns and helped bring it into the 2021 coalition government.[1][13]

Horowitz advocated direct negotiations with the Palestinians toward a two-state solution rather than unilateral decisions. In a January 2020 interview about the Trump administration’s “Deal of the Century,” he called it the “Spin of the century,” arguing that Palestinians had been excluded from determining the plan and that some of its elements were ones they would never accept.[17] He opposed implementing it while Israel had an interim government and a prime minister who had been indicted. He also said, “I don't see how an agreement or some kind of peace will come out of this.”[17][18]

In March 2021, Horowitz said there had been grounds for the International Criminal Court’s decision to open an investigation and favored cooperating with the court rather than attacking it. He also stated that he opposed bringing Israeli soldiers before the court and said Israel should examine what it could do to prevent such proceedings.[6]

A separate political dispute followed Horowitz’s March 2022 instruction to hospitals concerning hametz during Passover. After reports that Hadassah Hospital continued to ban hametz despite a 2020 Supreme Court ruling allowing patients to bring it into hospitals, Horowitz wrote to hospitals on 29 March asking them to respect the ruling.[8] Health Committee chair Idit Silman criticized him at a committee meeting on 3 April and resigned from the coalition on 6 April, saying she could no longer tolerate harm to the values she represented.[8]

In July 2022, Horowitz presented his ministry’s record as including two coronavirus cycles without lockdowns and a larger budget for health services. These were achievements he cited in announcing that he would not seek another term as party leader, rather than independently assessed measures of his tenure.[13] At the January 2023 handover, he urged his successor, Aryeh Deri, to keep politics and discrimination out of medical care, describing equality in health as a fundamental value.[19]