These are the five most influential women in Israel in 2021

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Sharon Alroy-Preis

Head of public health services at the Health Ministry

The public and political hazing Dr. Sharon Alroy-Preis suffered this year will probably go down in the annals of public service in Israel: A professional woman of senior rank, with a long list of medical degrees and management experience, wound up serving as a lightning rod for the frustrations of a weary, aggravated public, which couldn’t stand the bad news about mounting infection rates and the need to resort to masking and more. She also served as a punching bag for politicians seek a scapegoat to divert fire from themselves.

So even though she wasn’t even responsible for making the decisions but only for analysis and advising the cabinet, she found herself under attack on all fronts, as though there were no officials or ministers above her actually making the decisions.

Thus politicians and ministers held press conferences and policy briefings in which they directed especially cutting statements at Alroy-Preis; social activists marked her as the villain of the pandemic; and opponents of vaccination protested in front of her home, dubbing her a “murderer” and a “Nazi.”

Sharon Alroy-Preis.
Noam Moskowitz / Knesset Spokesperson

Throughout, she demonstrated awe-inspiring resilience and maintained her professional demeanor, continuing to make public appearances even after being tarred and feathered day by day. Nor did she seem to water down her recommendations or statements or otherwise succumb to the pressures brought to bear on her.

Alroy-Preis remains the masterful authority spearheading, or who will at least attempt to spearhead, Israel’s policy on the coronavirus in the year to come, though her influence depends first and foremost on the support she gets from Health Minister Nitzan Horowitz and ministry director-general Nachman Ash, from members of the “coronavirus cabinet” and the prime minister. Without that backing, her recommendations will be moot.

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Her predecessor, Professor Sigal Sadetzky, was also subjected to volleys of insult and rage and ultimately resigned, due to her sense that her professional recommendations were not being accepted. For now, Alroy-Preis forges on.

Text by: Ronny Linder-Ganz

Transport Minister Merav Michaeli. She needs to rid the government corporations of political appointments made by her predecessor, Miri Regev.
Eliyahu Hershkovitz

Merav Michaeli

Minister of Transport

Transport Minister Merav Michaeli is responsible for one of the most important aspects of modern Israeli society: transportation. Her mandate includes handling the terrible congestion on the roads, vehicle emissions, and the inadequate state of public transportation. On the upside, the job gives her the opportunity to influence transportation mega-projects. In the last decade the ministry has tended to be sidelined by the domineering Finance Ministry.

Michaeli will also have the opportunity to exercise tighter supervision of public transportation infrastructure projects already in execution, including the light rail system in Tel Aviv, electrification of the railroad network, and introducing high-speed bus lanes. She will have to conditions are appropriate to in order to avoid budget overruns and delays. There are several options: expanding the powers of the entities carrying out the work over the objections of local authorities; enabling infrastructure work to be done on Shabbat in order to avoid disrupting traffic midweek; and backing to professionals when they lock horns with politicians.

One way she could improve transit services is to establish metropolitan authorities, empowered to make and actualize local decisions on transport. This was already supposed to happen but bogged down in a spat between the Transport Ministry and the Finance Ministry. Michaeli vowed to pursue the initiative and now it’s time.

MK Merav Michaeli with her partner TV host Lior Schleien and their son, last month.
From Michaeli’s Facebook page

Her position on congestion tolls (a fee paid in order to enter metropolitan areas at times of heavy traffic volume), a controversial move that the Finance Ministry loves, is muddy. She reportedly opposes it, but voted to have it included in the annual Economic Arrangements Law, undermining her authority over transportation policy.

More urgently, Michaeli needs to rid the government corporations of political appointments made by her predecessor, Miri Regev. This may sound less pressing than stepping up the pace of electrification of the railways, or converting buses to electrical propulsion, but these appointments augur ill for companies such as the National Transport Infrastructure Company and Israel Railways. Among other problems, frictions they cause encourage professional employees to quit, and it is the man in the street who will bear the consequences. While purging the ranks of political appointees, Michaeli can beef up the expert ranks at the Transport Ministry, which sustained significant damage during Regev’s term of office.

Under Michaeli, we can expect to see a number of initiatives begun years ago come to fruition, including the light rail in greater Tel Aviv and building two new seaports that compete with the existing ones. Additional opportunities on her doorstep, where she could leave her mark, are to instate public transport on Shabbat and move the “New Central Bus Station” in Tel Aviv. Moving that eyesore depends on what might be done with its building, which is being negotiated with the relevant company, Nitsba. Meanwhile the volume of bus traffic flowing in and out of this colossal white elephant continues to cause air pollution far above the legal levels.

Text by: Osnat Nir

Esther Hayut. Nearly always, it was Hayut who headed the judicial panels that took up the most incendiary issues.
Ilan Assayag

Esther Hayut

President of the Supreme Court of Israel

Under the leadership of Esther Hayut, the Supreme Court was been the primary brake on Israel’s decline into an authoritarian regime under the stewardship of the former prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. In her two-year stint and especially during the past year, Hayut set a furious pace of rulings on constitutional and governmental issues, including in expanded juridical panels, and in setting precedents. Under her the court struck down an amendment to a Basic Law, invalidated unlawful laws, engaged in always courteous but firm wrangles with Netanyahu, and came to the defense of human rights at times of emergency.

Nearly always, it was Hayut who headed the judicial panels that took up the most incendiary issues. A hot potato? She’ll pick it up. Hayut showed her mettle as a leader, precisely when the Supreme Court and Israel needed one.

Hers is not leadership of revolution, nor tempestuous demagoguery. On the contrary, Hayut believes in stability and moderation. On a polyphonic Supreme Court that still has slightly more liberal than conservative justices, she stands in the middle. Hayut has been compared to a ship’s captain in a stormy sea, holding the wheel firmly, keeping a stable course out of the storm’s path.

Under her, the High Court of Justice defended the right to demonstrate even at the height of the coronavirus closures, in the face of attempts initiated by Netanyahu to restrict that right. She criticized the government over dragging its feet on making appointments, such as that of the state’s attorney. In March 2021, she criticized the Shin Bet’s unconstrained use of virtual handcuffs to watch people who tested positive for the coronavirus. Subsequently, she criticized the closure of Tel Aviv’s international airport, Ben-Gurion, without adequate prior warning, which resulted in thousands of Israelis being stuck abroad.

Shortly afterward, a High Court of Justice panel she led ruled that Netanyahu was obligated to desist from any involvement in the judicial system, due to his own trial. In a restrained tone, Hayut hinted that Netanyahu had acted in bad faith by committing in the High Court to accept a conflict of interest arrangement to be drafted by the attorney-general, but then did not do so.

Esther Hayut.
Ilan Assayag

Her courageous rulings went far beyond the emergency situation. Under her leadership, following a 15-year legal struggle, the High Court recognized Reform and Conservative conversions. She also chaired an expanded panel that overturned the decision of Justice Alex Stein in the matter of “the adulteress.” In that case, Hayut ruled in defiance of the rabbinical court that a divorced woman is entitled to half of the property rights to her domicile even she was, allegedly, unfaithful to her husband. In July, an expanded panel she headed ordered the government to enable surrogacy in Israel to LGBT couples.

The sheer pace of cases and intensity of the issues made it necessary for the High Court during the Hayut presidency to invalidate more laws. This summer the High Court struck down a section of the National Insurance Law that denied stipends to parents of children (mainly Palestinians) who have been sentenced to prison terms for security offenses such as stone-throwing. Conversely, on the very same day, the High Court justices ruled by a 10-1 majority not to invalidate the Basic Law: Israel – The Nation-State of the Jewish People. Instead, the court ruled that it should be interpreted along egalitarian and democratic lines.

In this instance, the High Court evaded a decision on a thorny issue, from the Knesset’s perspective: Can the High Court invalidate a Basic Law on the grounds that it is unconstitutional? Hayut insinuated that she did not rule that out, should the fundamental values of Israel, Judaism and democracy, be at stake. She wrote that a constitution should reflect the everlasting values of the society and the state.

“In order to ensure that they not lead to a serious impairment of the rights and principles anchored in the Basic Laws, it should be ascertained that directives that are liable to cause mortal harm to the core of the entire constitutional system not be integrated into the Basic Laws themselves, directives that would contradict Israel’s character as a Jewish and democratic state,” she put it, adding that it is easy for an incidental majority to make material change to the existing constitutional order.

In an even more dramatic decision, adopted by a 6:3 majority, the High Court under her leadership determined that legislation initiated by the Netanyahu-Gantz government designed to approve budgets without passage of a Budget Law, by means of laws graced with the title of “Basic Law,” was essentially “inappropriate use of the constitutive authority.” The High Court struck down the amendments to this Basic Law,

Meanwhile, the conservative wing of the court has grown much stronger. In the year to come, Hayut will be engaged in shaping the composition of the Supreme Court, to which two new justices are scheduled to be appointed. Awaiting her on the conservative-right side of the Judicial Selection Committee are Justice Minister Gideon Sa’ar, Minister Ayelet Shaked and MK Simcha Rotman. The presence of this trio ensures that at least one of the appointments will be from the conservative side. The question is not if the post-Hayut Supreme Court will be more conservative, but to what degree.

Text by: Ido Baum

Dalit Zilber. Essentially Zilber is shaping the face of Israel for decades to come.
Niv Kandor

Dalit Zilber

Director-General, Israel Planning Administration

What is the most precious resource in Israel? Money is the wrong answer. The one resource we are short of, and can’t get more of, is land. Israel is already one of the most crowded countries in the world, and given our high population growth, it’s on its way to having the greatest population density in the world second only to Bangladesh.

Land allocation is therefore a strategic issue, and the person responsible for it is Dalit Zilber, head of the Planning Administration.

Dalit Zilber.
Moti Milrod

Zilber, 54, is a city planner who has headed the Planning Administration for four years. She has been forcing the ministries to define their land needs up to the year 2050, and to integrate these needs into the National Master Plans. She allocates land based on anticipated uses, leaving room for roads, electricity lines, water pipelines and treatment plants, solar power stations, prisons, schools, shopping malls and hospitals, for instance.

Essentially Zilber is shaping the face of Israel for decades to come. These allocations will determine the size and location of cities and their services such as power stations, and perhaps even the shape of the future health care system, determining between hospitals requiring huge compounds versus community-based care.

Through land allocation, Zilber is also redesigning the government of Israel, because she is compelling the government ministries to adopt long-range strategic planning. This is quite the conceptual change in the manner in which these ministries operate. Until now, they focused mainly on putting out fires.

Text by: Meirav Arlosoroff

Interior minister Ayelet Shaked. The Interior Ministry brings Shaked a great many decision options.
Ohad Zwigenberg

Ayelet Shaked

Interior minister

No, said a coalition figure when asked if the interior minister isn’t the weak link in the coalition. One person working with Shaked asserts that she has swapped her qualms about the unity government with centrist and left-wing parties with a joy of work and accomplishment, so much so that it is hard to recall her disappointment at not receiving the Finance Ministry in the coalition negotiations.

The Interior Ministry brings Shaked a great many decision options, such as promoting the light rail project, helping resolve the housing crisis by reconstituting the National Committee for Planning and Building of Preferred Residential Complexes, and promoting urban renewal. She is also discovering the immense influence she wields over hundreds of local councils in Israel. She plans to offer planning independence to certain council leaders who are considered knowledgeable in construction, and to compensate the mayors in the affected councils with extra powers.

Ayelet Shaked.
Alex Kolomoisky

She also wields a great deal of ideological clout, which she is determined to capitalize on. At present she is working on leveraging the normalization process with Sudan so that Israel can repatriate Sudanese citizens now living in Israel. Shaked is also keen to ensure that two of the four Supreme Court justices who will be appointed in the near term by the judicial selection committee will be of a conservative bent.

And there’s one more thing. Ever since 2013, when she was elected to the Knesset for the first time, there has always been one place from which she was barred: The Prime Minister’s Office. The reason was her poor relationship with the Netanyahus. Now she is welcome in the prime minister’s near environment and is a partner to his decision-making, which is a refreshing novelty for her. The close proximity makes her Prime Minister Naftali Bennett’s right-wing commissar, ensuring he doesn’t veer to the left, heaven forbid. At the end of the day, once Bennett concludes his discussions with the rest of his coalition colleagues, there remains one partner who he cannot let down.

Text by: Hagai Amit