Former prime minister Naftali Bennett on Sunday named two highly regarded women as the first announced members of his party slate in the upcoming elections, which are set to take place by the end of October.

Bennett said Keren Terner, who resigned as director general of the Finance Ministry in 2021, and Liran Avisar Ben-Horin, who resigned as director general of the Communications Ministry in 2023, will run with his party, which is temporarily called “Bennett 2026.”

“In order to go back to running the state, we need the best managers and executives in the state,” Bennett wrote on X.

“Keren and Liran are the most professional and experienced women in management in Israel, with a deep love for our land and the citizens of Israel,” said Bennett, who has made outreach efforts in recent months to court female voters.

“The two of them successfully led courageous and complicated reforms in the economy, transportation, and media, and they will do it again, at an even greater scale,” he said. “Israel is stuck and unmanaged, and we have no time to waste.”

The current government has 24 ministers, of whom only five are women.

Though a government decision in 2020 set a goal of having women fill half of senior civil service roles by 2023, as of late 2025 only nine percent of the senior roles were held by women.

The two ultra-Orthodox parties represented in the Knesset — both of which are in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s governing coalition — do not allow women to serve as lawmakers.

Both were first women to serve in their roles

Terner (formerly Terner Eyal) began her career at the treasury, but soon transferred to the Transportation Ministry, where she climbed the ranks and was appointed director general in 2016 — the first woman to serve in the role.

There, she served under now-defense minister Israel Katz, before Miri Regev became transportation minister in 2020 and fired her.

Shortly thereafter, she became the second woman ever appointed to serve as director general of the Finance Ministry, when Katz, then leading it, tapped her to help manage the country’s finances amid a steep economic downturn caused by the coronavirus pandemic.

Within months of her appointment, however, Terner publicly clashed with Katz when she came to the defense of her colleague Shaul Meridor, who resigned while leveling sharp criticism at the then-finance minister. After five months on the job, Terner also resigned, reportedly complaining of an unprofessional, incompetent leadership.

Avisar Ben-Horin, 43, is the former head of Masa, the Jewish Agency-affiliated company that funds semester- and year-long Israel programs for Diaspora youth.

She served in senior positions in the Prime Minister’s Office, as chief of staff to former director general Harel Locker, and as a legal aide to then-attorney general Menachem Mazuz.

In 2020-2023, she was director general of the Communications Ministry, the first woman to hold that position. When she resigned, she lamented the lack of female representation in public service, saying, “I call on all women in the ministry, and in the civil service and government, to climb up the ranks to senior leadership.”

In 2022, Avisar Ben-Harin was named by Globes Magazine as one of Israel’s 50 most influential women.

In December 2025, she told a women’s outreach event for the Bennett campaign that for the past 18 months, she had been leading the former premier’s “100 Days” project — a plan to rehabilitate what she described as “everything that has been destroyed in government ministries in recent years.”

At that event, Bennett — a right-wing former lawmaker who has positioned himself as an umbrella candidate representing a broad swath of Israeli society — stressed that six of his party’s nine co-founders were women in senior positions, “not because they are women, but because they are excellent.”

Addressing the crowd, Bennett declared that any future government led by him would advance a move to fill 50% of all senior public service positions with women within five years.

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