Zehava Galon

Zehava Galon was born in 1956 in Vilnius, Lithuania — then part of the Soviet Union — under the birth name Zlata Shnipetsky.[1] Her family immigrated to Israel when she was four years old, settling first in a transit camp before establishing themselves in Petah Tikva.[1]

She served in the Israel Defense Forces as a clerk in the Paratroopers Brigade and was discharged with the rank of sergeant.[1] It was in Petah Tikva that Galon first entered public life, becoming one of the leaders of campaigns for freedom of religion, conscience, and culture.[2] Among her early causes was a campaign to open the Heichal cinema on Friday nights, a symbolic fight in the broader struggle over religious coercion in Israeli public life.[2]

In 1989, Galon became one of the founders of B'Tselem, the Israeli human-rights organization, and served as its first executive director.[2] She later worked as a media columnist before entering electoral politics.[3]

She was first elected to the Knesset on the Meretz list in 1999.[2] Meretz is a left-wing social-democratic party.[4] Galon did not win a seat in the 2009 election, when Meretz won only three seats and she was placed fourth on its list, but she returned to the Knesset in March 2011 after MK Haim Oron resigned.[2]

In a 2015 INSS conference, she appeared as one of several party leaders — alongside Yair Lapid of Yesh Atid, Gilad Erdan of Likud, Naftali Bennett of Habayit Hayehudi, and Isaac Herzog of the Zionist Camp — on a panel discussing priorities for the first hundred days of the next government.[5]

Galon's most consequential legislative work concerned human trafficking. In June 2000, at her initiative, the Knesset plenary decided to establish a parliamentary inquiry into trafficking in human beings in Israel.[6] She chaired the resulting committee, which included members of Knesset from across the political spectrum and operated for more than four years.[6] The committee worked with government ministries, courts, NGOs, victims, and brothel owners, and conducted site visits to brothels, detention facilities, and shelters.[6]

The committee defined its purpose as bringing attention to what it called "the modern slave trade" in Israel and fundamentally reorienting how trafficking victims were treated — as victims whose rights had been violated, rather than as offenders or people with no legal right to remain in the country.[6][7] It also sought more stringent treatment of traffickers, monitored government action, and promoted comprehensive legislation.[6]

The committee's report highlighted a striking gap in public awareness: its own opinion survey found that most Israelis were generally unaware of the connection between trafficking and human-rights violations, and that the issue was commonly perceived as involving foreign women and therefore remote from everyday experience.[6] The report also noted a particularly forgiving attitude among men toward customers of trafficked women.[6]

On the scale of the problem, representatives of Israel's tax authorities told the committee that the trafficking industry had an annual turnover of around one billion dollars.[6] Historical committee findings described victims as predominantly women aged 18–35, smuggled across the Egyptian border and subjected to rape, beatings, and sale at public auctions for between $1,000 and $5,000; traffickers typically held victims' passports to prevent them from fleeing.[7]

The committee report recorded serious implementation failures alongside any progress: the Prior Testimony in Trafficking of Women Law had been enacted but was not being implemented, punishments were routinely mitigated, law enforcement was weak, brothels operated without interference, and victims lacked consistent access to legal assistance, permits, medical services, or identity documents.[6] The committee's recommendations included establishing specialized police capacity, stronger victim protections and shelter referrals, more effective enforcement, and full implementation of existing laws.[6]

The inquiry also extended to the phenomenon of matchmaking businesses arranging marriages between Israeli men and Ukrainian women. The committee examined the women's ability to consent and seek help, their dependence on their husbands for immigration status, and the risk of exploitation if marriages failed; Galon indicated the committee would consider whether anti-trafficking protections should be broadened to cover forced labor and slavery.[8] Witnesses offered competing assessments, with some denying any criminal element in such arrangements.[8]

In 2006, a bill jointly initiated by Galon and coalition members passed the Knesset Justice Committee in its second and third readings. The proposal would have broadened the legal definition of trafficking beyond women to include people subjected to coercive labor in other industries and trafficking in organs, with penalties of up to 16 years' imprisonment — or 20 years if a minor was involved.[9] It also defined slavery as a condition in which the same powers are exercised over a person as if that person were owned; the cited report did not establish that the bill had completed final passage by the full Knesset.[9]

In 2017, Galon jointly promoted legislation with MK Shuli Mualem-Rafaeli to criminalize the purchase of prostitution and initiated separate legislation to rehabilitate battered women leaving shelters; both measures were described as among the social laws passed during that summer Knesset session.[10] She also chaired the Subcommittee on Trafficking in Women and founded the Zulat for Equality and Human Rights NGO in 2019.[11]

Beyond anti-trafficking work, Galon was active on economic and democratic-governance issues during her Knesset tenure. In July 2012, she and Shas MK Yitzhak Vaknin co-sponsored a bond-debt "haircut" bill, which the Knesset passed by a vote of 32–0 in its second and third readings.[12] The measure provided for a commissioner to review debt settlements and seek to prevent arrangements that discounted debt at the expense of small savers; Galon described it as a means of protecting the public's savings from large financial interests.[12]

On democratic governance, she was an outspoken critic of proposed changes to electoral rules. On January 20, 2014, as Meretz chairwoman, she criticized the government's proposed increase in the electoral threshold, saying it was an attempt to "throw out of the political arena populations that are already discriminated against" and to "mortally harm Israeli democracy."[13] Galon and other opposition figures had previously supported an earlier threshold increase, although the cited account did not specify its date or level.[13]

She also used her parliamentary platform to advocate for openly acknowledging Israel's nuclear arsenal. In a radio interview published on December 12, 2006 — shortly before Prime Minister Ehud Olmert departed for Germany for talks on armaments and security — Galon stated that "everyone knows that Israel possesses nuclear weapons and that it ought to be stated openly," positioning herself as a proponent of ending Israel's traditional policy of nuclear opacity.[14]

Galon also identified her parliamentary work against economic concentration, campaigns for women, and advocacy for the LGBTQ community among the sources of satisfaction she derived from her years in the Knesset.[15]

Galon was elected chair of Meretz in February 2012.[2] Under her leadership, the party doubled its Knesset representation from three to six seats in the January 2013 election.[2][4] The result was notable for another reason: three parties represented in the new Knesset were headed by women — Labor by Shelly Yachimovich, HaTnuah by Tzipi Livni, and Meretz by Galon.[16]

She was re-elected as Meretz leader in January 2015 and again headed the party list in the March 2015 election.[17] Meretz won five seats and received support from about 165,000 voters.[15]

In 2017, Galon resigned her Knesset seat while remaining Meretz chair, saying she wanted to devote her energy to expanding the party and promoting open primaries.[18] In her letter to party members, she argued that Meretz should not be a "closed club" and that open primaries could make it a larger, more inclusive home for people who shared its values.[18] She withdrew from the party leadership race in early 2018, and Tamar Zandberg took over later that year.[15][4]

She described her reasons for stepping down as including her sense that party members wanted new leadership and her own determination not to cling to office; she also expressed concern that Meretz was becoming dispirited and might lose its identity or cease to exist.[15] She referenced internal disagreements over the party's direction and its willingness to cooperate politically with Avigdor Lieberman.[15] Looking back on her first period of leadership, she described having served sixteen years in the Knesset and six years as Meretz chair, and said she had doubled the party's strength.[15]

After leaving the Knesset, Galon taught courses on legislation as an instrument of social change at the Peres Academic Center and the Interdisciplinary Center.[19] She also founded the Zulat Institute for Equality and Human Rights, which she described as publishing policy papers and distributing them to Knesset members to encourage practical rights-protective legislation.[19] One paper she highlighted addressed access to vaccination for prisoners, migrant workers, asylum seekers, and Palestinians.[19]

In a 2019 interview, she assessed the Israeli left as being in a deep and prolonged crisis, accepting some personal responsibility for that situation.[20] She called for a new political framework bringing together Jewish and Arab participants and argued for broader cooperation among left-wing groups rather than internal fragmentation.[20] She continued to describe a two-state solution as the only viable path forward, opposed annexation of the Jordan Valley, and argued that the occupation and the weakening of Israeli democracy were connected phenomena.[20]

Several years after stepping away from electoral politics, Galon returned in 2022 to contest the Meretz leadership held by outgoing chair Nitzan Horowitz.[21] In the August 2022 primary, she defeated Yair Golan by 60% to 40%.[21] The contest reflected a substantive ideological disagreement: Golan proposed repositioning Meretz as a "Zionist left" party, while Galon viewed it as an "Israeli party" representing a broader range of progressive causes.[11]

In her victory speech, Galon described equality between Jews and Arabs, gay rights, ending the occupation, peace, social and economic justice, climate action, freedom of religion, and democracy as interconnected struggles that could not be separated from one another.[22] She also stated her desire for Meretz to join a government led by Yair Lapid or Benny Gantz.[22] She said she was not running for a personal seat on the Knesset list because, after sixteen years as an MK, she did not want to prevent other candidates and recently elected members from advancing.[21]

The November 1, 2022 election produced a painful result for Galon and her party. Meretz received approximately 3.16% of the vote — just below the 3.25% electoral threshold — and won no seats in the 25th Knesset.[23][24] Depending on the source, the shortfall amounted to roughly 3,800 to 4,124 votes.[23][25] It was the first time since Meretz's founding in 1992 that the party was left without Knesset representation.[24] Final turnout was 70.6%, with 4,793,641 Israelis voting.[25]

Galon characterized the outcome as a personal as well as a party and national disaster.[23] She said she had pushed for an alliance with Labor and had warned Yair Lapid that the campaign strategy risked leaving Meretz outside parliament.[25] She nonetheless accepted personal responsibility for having taken on the challenge of leading the party into the election.[25] The refusal of Meretz and Balad leaders to form joint lists with ideologically similar parties was identified as a contributing factor in the right-wing bloc's victory.[26]

Throughout her political career, Galon articulated a consistent set of positions on Israel's security situation, civil liberties, and democratic character. On the West Bank — known by its original, indigenous Jewish name of Judea and Samaria — she argued that Israel's occupation was always intended to be temporary, not a decades-long reality, and described proposals to annex territory without granting citizenship as a "messianic fantasy" and, in her own term, "apartheid."[27] She expressed concern about what she viewed as anti-democratic legislation and restrictions on critical voices inside Israel.[27]

After the passage of the Basic Law: Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People by the Knesset on July 19, by a vote of 62 to 55, Galon argued that it represented "a declaration of war on Israel's Arab citizens and on Israel as a democratic and advanced society."[28]

On the Law of Return, Israel Hayom reported that Galon called in 1999 for ending the law — which grants Diaspora Jews automatic eligibility for Israeli citizenship — and described it as "discriminatory," a politically contested position that placed her at odds with broad Israeli consensus.[11]

Her stated political priorities encompassed a wide range: she consistently supported a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, opposed annexation of the Jordan Valley, advocated for Jewish-Arab political partnership, and framed the defense of civil liberties, women's rights, LGBTQ equality, and economic justice as aspects of a single, interconnected progressive agenda.[20][22]

Galon's clearest legislative legacy is her work against human trafficking. A historical account reports that Israel subsequently prohibited human trafficking, increased police enforcement and trafficker convictions, created a rehabilitative shelter, and issued visas allowing victims to remain and work legally in the country.[7] Her broader political record includes doubling Meretz's representation from three to six seats in 2013 and continuing rights-focused work through the Zulat Institute after leaving parliament.[4][19]

A defamation lawsuit filed in 2020 by the settler regional council of Samaria against Galon remained pending at the end of 2022, according to the U.S. State Department's human-rights report.[29] The suit arose from Galon's criticism of two settlers who allegedly shot and killed a Palestinian attacker. The State Department's report described the lawsuit as one aimed at discouraging public criticism of Israel's presence in the West Bank, and identified Galon at the time as a former Knesset member and head of the Zulat Institute for Equality and Human Rights.[29]