Stav Shaffir

Stav Shaffir (Hebrew: סְתָיו שָׁפִיר; born 17 May 1985) is an Israeli politician and former member of the Knesset. She is the leader of the Green Party and was a member of the Knesset for the Democratic Union alliance. She came to national prominence as one of the leaders of the 2011 Israeli social justice protests, focusing on housing, public services, income inequality and democracy, and later became spokeswoman of the movement. She was subsequently elected to the Knesset as a member of the Labor Party in 2013. The party contested the 2015 elections as part of the Zionist Union alliance, with Shaffir retaining her seat. She was re-elected again in the April 2019 elections, in which Labor ran alone. However, after losing a Labor leadership election to Amir Peretz in June 2019, she left the party and resigned from the Knesset and became head of the Green Movement. Her new party formed the Democratic Union alongside Meretz and the Israel Democratic Party. Shaffir lost her Knesset seat in the 2020 election.

Shaffir was born in Netanya, Israel, to a family of Ashkenazi Jewish, Polish-Jewish, Lithuanian-Jewish Romanian-Jewish and Iraqi-Jewish descent. At the age of 12, Shaffir's family moved to Pardesiya, a small town in the Sharon area, where her parents had an accounting firm. Shaffir joined HaNoar HaOved VeHaLomed (Federation of Working and Studying Youth). After high school, Shaffir worked for a year in Tiberias as a part of a volunteer group affiliated with the Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel. She served in the Israel Defense Forces as a cadet in the flight academy of the Israeli Air Force. After five months, she began to write for the IDF magazine, Bamahane. In this position she covered the Israeli disengagement from Gaza and the 2006 Lebanon war.

After completing her military service, Shaffir was accepted into the Olive Tree Scholarship Program by the City University of London, an initiative to support future leaders who desire to change the status quo of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. During her studies in London, Shaffir worked as an intern in the British Parliament as part of the Undergraduate ParliaMentors program and was awarded runner up in the JRS Competition for Student Journalists in 2008 for her piece covering Iraqi refugees in England. Shaffir received a B.A in Sociology and Journalism in 2009. Shaffir, who plays the piano, drums, guitar, violin and oud, continued her studies in Israel at the Rimon School of Jazz and Contemporary Music in Ramat-HaSharon for a year. She then enrolled in the M.A program at the Cohn Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Ideas at Tel Aviv University.

Shaffir worked as a freelance journalist and an editor for National Geographic, the Ha'ir weekly newspaper, the Mako Magazine and Yedioth Ahronoth internet site Xnet, where she published the first article to appear in the Israeli media about the 2011 Israeli social justice protests.

In 2021, Shaffir took part in the second season of The Singer in the Mask as the Beetle (Ladybug) and was the ninth contestant eliminated.

Shaffir, along with Daphni Leef and Itzik Shmuli, was a founder, organizer and unofficial leader of the 2011 Israeli social justice protests, when about 400,000 Israelis went to the streets in a series of public demonstrations.

On 17 July 2011, Shaffir debated with Likud MK Miri Regev on the current events television program "Erev Hadash" about the protest against the housing prices. In the following months, she helped found over 120 tent camps throughout Israel, led demonstrations, including the March of the Million, and lobbied with members of the Knesset to pursue a social justice agenda. She served as spokesperson for the Israeli media and represented the protest movement in foreign media outlets. In 2012, Shaffir was a keynote speaker at three U.S.-based conferences: J Street, together with Israeli writer Amos Oz, the Jewish Federations of North America's TribeFest and the Personal Democracy Forum.

In February 2012, Shaffir and fellow tent protesters Alon-Lee Green and Yonatan Levi founded the Israeli Social Movement. In August 2012, Shaffir and her colleagues embarked on a tour from the southern sea port of Eilat to Kiryat Shmona on the Lebanese border, to listen to activists and citizens regarding their concerns. Their last status was published in Facebook on 9 September 2012, and a month later Shaffir announced her intent to run for the Knesset as a member of the Labor Party.