Former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett has announced that he is adding four additional female candidates to his slate for the upcoming Israeli election.
The four new candidates are: Orly Harel, Bruria Naim Arman, Esti Ayalon Kobo, and Olesia Kantor.
The announcement brings the total number of women running on the slate for Beyachad (Together), which was formed by the merger of Bennett’s previously unnamed faction with Yair Lapid’s Yesh Atid, to 17, accounting for a majority of the party’s candidates.
Elsewhere, Bennett recently announced that any future government controlled by him will ensure that half of all senior public service positions within Israel will be held by women.
In that same announcement, he declared that former senior government officials Keren Turner and Liran Avisar Ben-Horin would run as part of his list for the next Israeli election.
Harel is an entrepreneur and former Likud activist, who established the party’s women’s forum in Jerusalem.
Arman is a PR specialist and the founding Director General of Together. She previously worked in senior positions in the transportation and deputy defence ministries.
Kobo, who was born in Ethiopia, was the head of Israel’s economic mission in China. The party also added that she “represented the State of Israel in numerous international economic forums”.
Kantor, who was born in Russia, is a domestic violence survivor who created a foundation that assists female and child survivors.
She also created the Heart of Fire initiative, following the October 7 massacre, which the party said “provides individual and group care free of charge to survivors who were on the front lines and are dealing with post-trauma and anxiety”.
Bennett, a former prime minister, said that the newly announced candidates represent “a true Israeli mosaic of top-tier women of action, each in her own field”.
He added that Together “has a female majority, not because of gender, but because of a simple decision we made when we set out on this path: to include the best men and women”.
More widely, Israel currently ranks 97th of 189 countries in the field of women’s parliamentary representation. Right now, only 31 of 120 MKs are women, according to data released to the Knesset’s Committee on the Status of Women and Gender Equality in the run-up to the elections, which are scheduled for October 27.
Originally, only 29 women were elected to the 25th Knesset in 2022, making up 24 per cent of the chamber. Resignations and replacements have slightly raised that figure to 26 per cent, but it remains below the global average of women’s parliamentary representation, which stands 27.5 per cent.
The number of female MKs peaked at a record of 37 between 2015-2019.
Likewise, there have been no female prime ministers of the Jewish state since the resignation of Golda Meir in 1974.
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