Ayelet Shaked ( ; born 7 May 1976) is an Israeli former politician, activist, and software engineer. She served as Minister of Interior from 2021 to 2022 and as Minister of Justice from 2015 to 2019. Between 2013 and 2021, she was a representative in the Knesset as a member of The Jewish Home from 2013 to 2018, and then as a founding member of the New Right from 2018 to 2019 and again from 2019 to 2020. Shaked also served as the leader of the defunct right-wing electoral alliance Yamina. Despite her tenure in The Jewish Home, a religious political party, she has identified as a secularist.
Before entering politics, Shaked began her career in the Israeli high-tech industry, working as an engineer at Texas Instruments shortly after graduating from Tel Aviv University.Talks with a Tel Aviv Settler Haaretz, 22.06.2012Meet the most surprising candidate of "Jewish Home" NRG 11/26/2012 In 2010, she co-founded the "My Israel" extra-parliamentary movement alongside Naftali Bennett and led it until May 2012. Later, in 2019, Shaked, Bennett, and Shuli Mualem founded the New Right, which did not pass the electoral threshold in the April 2019 legislative election. Afterwards, Shaked planned to join Likud, but Miri Regev did not allow her to do so. When Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu failed to form a coalition government in the run-up to the September 2019 legislative election, Shaked ended up succeeding Bennett as leader of the New Right.
Shaked was considered to be one of the country's most active and influential legislators. She has initiated and drafted various laws, including the 2016 NGO law, the comprehensive national anti-terrorism law, a version of the proposal for Basic Law: Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People, and a law limiting the powers of the Israeli Supreme Court.
Early life Shaked was born in Tel Aviv on 7 May 1976, to a well-educated, upper-middle-class family of Israeli Jews. She is of Mizrahi descent on her father's side (Iraqi-Jewish) and of Ashkenazi descent on her mother's side (Russian-Jewish and Romanian-Jewish): her paternal grandmother immigrated to Israel from Iraq as a single mother in the 1950s, as part of the Jewish exodus from the Muslim world, and carefully invested her money into property and the education of her children; and her maternal ancestors immigrated to Ottoman Palestine from the Russian Empire and Romania in the 1880s, as part of the First Aliyah. Her father was an accountant by profession and hailed from a right-wing background, having voted Likud, while her mother was a Bible teacher and hailed from a centre-left background. Shaked has described herself as "half-Iraqi and proud of it" with regard to her heritage.
In Tel Aviv, she grew up in the upper-middle-class neighbourhood of Bavli. She identified her political awakening and right-wing orientation to when she was eight years old, after watching a television debate between Yitzhak Shamir and Shimon Peres, wherein she supported the conservative views of Shamir. As a teenager, she was a main instructor in the Hebrew Scouts Movement in Israel.Meet the most surprising candidate of the "Jewish Home" NRG, 26/11/2012
Education and military service Shaked served in the Israel Defense Forces as an infantry instructor with the Golani Brigade; she was enlisted in the 12th Barak (Lightning) Battalion as well as in Sayaret Golani. She later enrolled in Tel Aviv University, graduating with a Bachelor of Science in the disciplines of electrical engineering and computer science, and subsequently began her career in the Israeli high-tech industry; Shaked was employed at Texas Instruments as a software engineer and later became manager of the company's marketing department.
Political career From 2006 to 2008, Shaked was office director for the office of Benjamin Netanyahu. In 2010 she established My Israel with Naftali Bennett and led it until May 2012.
From the end of 2011, Shaked campaigned against illegal immigration from Africa to Israel, saying that it poses a threat to the state and also involves severe economic damage. She also campaigned against Galei Tzahal saying it had a "left-leaning agenda".
In January 2012, Shaked was elected to serve as a member of the Likud's Central Committee; however, in June 2012 she resigned and joined the Jewish Home. On 14 November 2012, she won third place in the party's primaries and was placed in the fifth spot on the Jewish Home list for the 2013 elections. With the list winning 12 seats, Shaked became the only secular Jewish Home MK. She subsequently joined the Economic Affairs Committee, the House Committee, and the Committee on Foreign Workers, and served as an alternate member on the Finance Committee. She also chaired the Knesset Committee for the Enforcement of the Security Service Law and the National-Civilian Service Law and the Special Committee for the Equal Sharing of the Burden Bill.
In June 2014, Shaked posted an article by the late Israeli writer Uri Elitzur on Facebook. The Facebook post was variously described in the media as calling Palestinian children "little snakes" and appearing to justify mass punishment of Palestinians. Based upon the Facebook post, the then Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said that Shaked's mindset was no different from Adolf Hitler's. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu condemned Erdoğan's comments, stating "Erdogan's anti-Semitic comments profaned the memory of the Holocaust." The leader of Israeli leftist Meretz party, Zehava Gal-On, suggested that "because of the presidential election Erdoğan has lost control." Shaked stated that her post was portrayed falsely in the media, especially in that the article was presented as her own words rather than Elitzur's. She said, "I refer specifically to 'Daily Beast' writer Gideon Resnick, who so misrepresented the facts in one of my recent Facebook posts, one has to wonder if his hatred for my country hasn't rendered him outright useless to his website and his readers."
In 2015, Shaked won the primary election for the Jewish Home Party, which was considered an achievement as a secular female politician within a religious party.
In December 2018 Shaked was amongst the Jewish Home MKs to leave the party and form the breakaway New Right party. In the April 2019 Knesset elections, New Right narrowly failed to cross the electoral threshold; as a result, Shaked did not gain a seat in the 21st Knesset. Following the loss, Shaked initially announced that she will take a break from politics for an undetermined period of time.
On 30 May 2019, after Netanyahu failed to form a governing coalition, the Knesset voted to dissolve itself and a snap election was called which was set to be held on 17 September. Shaked announced on 21 July that she would take part in the elections as the leader of New Right and on 29 July as the leader of the Yamina alliance, which is composed of the New Right, Tkuma and the Jewish Home. Yamina won seven seats at the elections. After no MK was able to form a government, yet another election was called, set to be held on 2 March 2020. At this election, Yamina won six seats.
Minister of Justice Shaked was placed third on the Jewish Home list for the 2015 elections,The Jewish Home Central Elections Committee and was re-elected to the Knesset. On 6 May 2015, it was reported that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had agreed to appoint Shaked as Minister of Justice as part of a plan to form a new coalition government. Shaked took office as Justice Minister on 14 May 2015.
In July 2015, Shaked announced that she was forming a committee to create a stable legal structure for the Israeli settlements in the West Bank. The formation of the committee was agreed upon in the coalition agreement between Bayit Yehudi and Likud. She has stated: "There are many areas in Judea and Samaria, whose legal status has not been organized. It's time to remove the legal ambiguity, and allow the residents of Judea and Samaria, many of whom live in settlements that were built by the Israeli government, to live without the persistent fear of challenges to their property ownership". The legal status of the West Bank is disputed; the Palestinians, the UN, human rights organizations and most of the international community consider it to be occupied Palestinian territory.
In January 2016, Shaked sponsored a bill in the Knesset that would require non-governmental organizations ("NGOs") that receive a majority of their funding from "foreign government entities" to be so labeled. In an interview in The Washington Post she stated that the law would foster transparency by giving the public the right "to know which NGOs are receiving most of their support from foreign governments and therefore representing foreign government interests." She further explained that this was a standard she wasn't willing to apply to foreign private donors, pointed out to provide the disproportionate source of funding for conservative NGOs, because she viewed countries' governments' diplomatic channels in and of themselves as providing so much interference "above the radar" that they compensated that given "below the radar" by the private donors, with the ability for them bypassing this process upsetting the already-fair equilibrium.
In June 2016 the Israeli Knesset passed a comprehensive 2016 Counter-Terrorism Law, forbidding any kind of terrorism and support of terrorism, and setting severe punishments for terrorists. The law also regulates legal efforts against terrorism and counter-terrorism measures. The law was sponsored and promoted by Justice Minister Shaked.
In June 2019 Netanyahu dismissed Shaked from the government.
Retirement from politics After Yamina failed to win Knesset seats in the 2022 Israeli legislative election, Shaked as party leader decided to retire from politics. By January 2023, she has taken a position heading Kardan Real Estate Group.
In June 2026, ahead of the 2026 election, there were reports that Shaked is discussing cooperation with Yuli Edelstein and religious community figures for founding a new party targeting dissatisfied right-wing voters. In July, Edelstein and Shaked discussed a potential alliance with Benny Gantz of Blue and White, but it fell apart due to disagreements over leadership. On 6 September, Shaked announced that she would not return to politics and run in the election, saying that she did not see a path for a "broad, cross-bloc government."
Views and activism
Jewish identity and Israeli democracy Referencing the Knesset's basic law that Israel will be a Jewish and democratic state, Shaked opposes the view that the two values are in any way incompatible, arguing that "alongside the view that there is a constant struggle and a clash of civilizations between 'Jewish' and 'democratic,' I believe we can propose another model."Pathways to Governability by Ayelet Shaked, Hashiloach, October 2016, Issue 1
Shaked argues that the key of concepts of property rights, the rejection of the divine right of kings, the importance of the separation of powers, and civil liberty are a byproduct of the Jewish philosophical tradition. She states: "On what did Locke base the right to property if not the chapters on creation? After all, Locke's Second Treatise of Government is inspired by a close textual reading of The Book of Genesis." She concludes that it was "not primarily Roman law or the democratic tradition of the Athenian polis that shaped and forged the modern democratic tradition in Europe or the United States, but Jewish tradition—joined, of course, by other traditions." She proposes that "it is precisely when we wish to promote advanced processes of democratization in Israel that we must deepen its Jewish identity. These identities clearly do not contradict each other; on the contrary, I believe that they strengthen each other."
Zionism