Meretz UK is proud to co-host with Yachad a Zoom discussion with Tamar Zandberg, Israel’s Minister of Environmental Protection, and former Meretz Party leader, on Wednesday 10 November 2021. The title of her talk is Tackling Climate Change in the Midst of Conflict and you can register here.
Tamar took up her cabinet position on 13 June 2021. She is thus one of four ministers representing Meretz in an Israeli government coalition – the first for nearly a generation. Zandberg leads Israel’s current delegation to the COP 26, the UN Climate Change Conference in Glasgow.
Biography of Tamar Zandberg
Born on 29 April 1976 in Ramat Gan, Israel, Tamar has been a member of the Knesset (MK) for Meretz continuously since 2013.
After receiving her LLB law degree from Tel Aviv University, she obtained a BA in Psychology and Economics from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and an MA with honors in Social Psychology from Ben Gurion University of the Negev. She is currently a doctoral student at the Department of Politics and Government at BGU, where her dissertation focuses on spatial planning and human rights.
- Tamar Zandberg (r) with fellow Meretz MKs Essawi Freij and Mossi Raz visiting Palestinian politicians
From 2003 to 2008 she worked as a parliamentary assistant to Meretz MK Ran Cohen. She was then elected to Tel Aviv city council on the Meretz list, and later chaired the city’s Women’s Affairs Committee, while also working on municipal finance, affordable housing, the advancement of civil and same-sex marriage and and public transportation on Shabbat.
Zandberg played a key leadership role in the social protest movement of summer 2011.
Israeli social workers protest their working conditions and violence against them, outside the Knesset, the Israeli Parliament in Jerusalem on June 25, 2020. Photo by Yonatan Sindel/Flash90
Together with other Meretz city council members, she led the withdrawal of Meretz from the ruling council coalition after violent suppression of the protests. She also heads the opposition ‘Social Home’ faction within Na’amat, Israel’s leading union for working women.
Tamar Zandberg was elected in Israel’s 2013 elections after a campaign that featured crowdsourcing, and during her first term she founded and co-chaired the Lobby for Sustainable Transportation, assisted the Urban Renewal Lobby, headed the Israeli Beaches Sub Committee, and promoted laws for paternity leave.
In 2021, she became Minister of Environmental Protection in the thirty-sixth government of Israel. The last elections saw an unexpected yet welcome revival of the left at the polls, with Meretz receiving six MK seats. Zandberg duly resigned her Knesset seat under the Norwegian Law and was replaced Gaby Lasky. Tamar Zandberg is renowned for her passionate promotion of environmental issues, religious freedoms, women’s rights, peace between Israelis and Palestinians, and opposition to a worrying rise in racist attitudes in Israeli society. She is also highly regarded as a defender of Israel’s often-attacked democratic norms.
Tamar urrently lives in Tel Aviv with her daughter and her partner, Uri Zaki, former executive director of B’Tselem USA, and a former speaker at Meretz UK. Uri is also the founder of the Front for the Protection of Democracy. The renowned Israeli footballer Michael Zandberg is her younger brother, and their parents are Yoel Zandberg and the journalist Esther Zandberg.
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