Ayelet Shaked

Ayelet Shaked (Hebrew: אַיֶּילֶת שָׁקֵד [aˈjelet ʃaˈked]; 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. 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.