The Together party (“B’Yachad in Hebrew”) has five women among its top 10 Knesset candidates.
“The women on the list are professionals. They are women who have been active either in the Knesset or in the halls of government,” MK Merav Ben-Ari told JNS. “The next Knesset will be complex. We can’t have people who don’t have experience or don’t understand the way the parliament works.”
Ben-Ari is No. 4 on the Together list, after party leader and former prime minister Naftali Bennett at No. 1, another former premier, Yair Lapid, at No. 2 and Keren Terner, previously director-general of the Finance and Transport ministries, at No. 3.
Bennett joined forces with Lapid’s Yesh Atid in April, running on a joint list for the Oct. 27 national election.
They shared the premiership under a rotation agreement in a government that lasted from June 2021 to December 2022 and included left-wing parties and the Arab Ra’am party.
Ranked fifth on Together’s list is Liran Avisar Ben Horin, who has served as head of the Jewish Agency’s Aliyah delegation in the United States, chief of staff to the director-general of the Prime Minister’s Office and CEO of Masa Israel Journey, among other positions.
Michal Hirsch Negri, former CEO of the Ra’anana Municipality, whose son Maj. (res.) Roee Negri died fighting terrorists at Kibbutz Be’eri during the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023, massacre, is seventh on the list.
Former Minister for Social Equality Meirav Cohen is ninth.
“The more women involved, the more liberal, democratic and equal the country is. Women represent 51% of the population, and in the outgoing Knesset occupied a quarter of the positions,” Ben-Ari said.
“Scandinavian countries are successful because there are women everywhere. This is the essence of equality,” she added. “We need to push so that women are in the room when decisions are made, in spaces such as the municipality and in the Knesset.”
As an opposition legislator in the outgoing Knesset, Ben-Ari serves on several committees, including the National Security Committee and the Committee on the Status of Women and Gender Equality.
“There are a lot of topics that are of interest to me. I am interested in welfare and domestic issues and foreign affairs. There needs to be a welfare minister. There has not been one for almost two years,” she said.
Ben-Ari was elected to the Tel Aviv-Jaffa City Council in 2013, and then entered the Knesset in 2015 as part of Moshe Kahlon’s now-defunct Kulanu party.
Kulanu was part of a center-right government led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu from 2015 to 2019. During this period, she was named the most socially conscious lawmaker several times.
Throughout her parliamentary career, Ben-Ari has been active in caucuses addressing issues such as higher education, LGBT rights, lone soldiers, celiac disease, and at-risk children and youth.
In the most recent Knesset, she served as opposition coordinator and faction chair for Yesh Atid, a role that includes refining legislation and budgets as well as submitting reservations—proposed amendments to bills ahead of their second and third (final) readings in the plenum.
