Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Breaking News

Benjamin Netanyahu Has Few Women in Inner Circle

Anyone who has gotten a look at the work environment around Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in recent years will have easily seen that it has been almost totally devoid of women.

The entire cadre of senior managers that Netanyahu has appointed to his bureau since returning to the Prime Minister’s Office in 2009 has been made up only of men. His chiefs of staff and bureau chiefs have been men—Natan Eshel, Ari Harrow, Gil Sheffer and Eyal Haimovsky. And the directors general of the Prime Minister’s Office, Eyal Gabbai and Harel Locker, are both male, as have been his cabinet secretaries, Zvi Hauser and Avichi Mandelblit.

But men also rule in other areas of the Prime Minister’s Office. All of Netanyahu’s media adviser appointments have been men—Yossi Levy, Nir Hefetz, Gidi Shmerling and Liran Dan. Policy advisers Uzi Arad, Ron Dermer and Ya’akov Amidror are male. Netanyahu appointed Michael Oren as Israeli ambassador to Washington and he is being replaced by Dermer. And Netanyahu also chose men, Jacob Turkel and Manuel Trajtenberg, to head major public policy panels.

Actually, the last women who worked in a key, influential position close to Netanyahu was current Knesset member Ayelet Shaked, who served as the head of Netanyahu’s office as leader of the opposition.

She left after a year and a half due to friction and tension with Netanyahu’s wife, Sara, among other reasons

For more, go to Haaretz

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.

If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.

Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism. 

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.