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.

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.

Shaked was born in Tel Aviv 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.

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.

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".