Maoz told 103FM in February 2026 that he had informed Netanyahu he would demand the education portfolio in the next government, and had said the same on Srugim five weeks earlier. He is Noam's only MK, so the party's demand and his own are one claim.
Who they are
Avi Maoz leads Noam and was director-general of two government ministries before he entered the Knesset. He was born Avigdor Fishheimer in Haifa in 1956, son of a Holocaust survivor. He served in the paratrooper Nahal, helped found Kibbutz Migdal Oz in Gush Etzion and was its secretary, then studied for eleven years at the Mercaz HaRav yeshiva under Rabbi Zvi Yisrael Tau. From the mid-eighties he worked with Avital Sharansky in the Let My People Go campaign for Soviet prisoners of Zion and refuseniks.
In the early nineties Maoz ran the land and property purchases of the Elad association, and was among the first Jewish residents of the City of David. Natan Sharansky made him bureau chief in 1996 and took him into government, where he ran the interior and then the construction and housing ministries, working to extend Jewish settlement in the Negev, the Galilee and the West Bank. He resigned when Effi Eitam quit over the disengagement. As deputy minister he was given a new Jewish National Identity Authority.
The Sasson report of 2005 found that much of the housing ministry’s rural building budget had gone to the territories, including unauthorised outposts. Maoz was questioned by the police fraud unit in 2006 after that report, and said nothing came of it because every government and attorney general had assisted such building.
Positions and record
Jewish identity: Israel's public character should be Orthodox: whoever wants to be a Jew should convert according to halacha.
The courts: Says judicial reform is needed like air to breathe, and wants the override clause passed before the next government is sworn in.
Sovereignty: His Judea and Samaria sovereignty bill passed a preliminary reading, and he attacks Netanyahu for freezing it.
Where they stand
Holds the party line on every issue.