Published: 13 October 2020
Last updated: 4 March 2024
YUVAL GAL’S FORMATIVE political experience came in 1996, during Benjamin Netanyahu’s first term as prime minister. Gal was then a member of Meretz's youth movement, he recalls, and was assisting homeless people in the rundown Jaffa C neighbourhood.
There, at age 16, he encountered the grimmest face of poverty in Israel and discovered, to his consternation, how its most severe victims were treated by the state.
“They erected a tent camp and slept on the grass,” he recalls. “People came from [Tel Aviv] City Hall and told them, ‘You don’t have a permit to put up tents on the grass,’ and confiscated everything in one day. The inspectors stole toys from them.
The Housing Ministry of course refused to rehabilitate them. I remember being absolutely dumbfounded. I saw the state’s attitude toward people who barely had anything to eat – as if they were its worst enemies.”
Twenty-four years later, Gal lives in the Netherlands, but he is still infected by the political bug. And, in an unlikely development, he’s in the 11th slot of the BIJ1 (Together 1) party ahead of the next parliamentary election, slated for March 21, 2021.
Founded at the end of 2016 by Sylvana Simons, a media personality, the party (originally called Article 1) is situated on the far left of the political map and is considered the standard-bearer of the country’s minorities: non-whites, migrants and their families, the LGBT community, the disabled – in a political arena that is almost totally male-dominated, straight and white.
FULL STORY How a former Israeli hummus maker ended up running for Dutch Parliament (Haaretz)
Photo: Yuval Gal (Nonye Onwuka/Made for the Move)
