Running for chair of the Knesset House Committee
Avital names the House Committee chair as his personal target in his 2026 campaign action plan and fundraising page. He connects it to stronger ethics oversight, disclosure of financial interests and transparency around meetings with lobbyists.
Who they are
Tomer Avital is a journalist and transparency campaigner who founded the crowd-owned investigative outlet Shakuf and co-founded the public lobbying venture Lobby 99.
He was born in Tiberias in 1982 and grew up in Zichron Ya’akov, served as a medic in the artillery corps and read political science and literature at the Hebrew University. He began in journalism on the Hadera local paper Emtza Hadera, researched for the television news programme Mabat, covered the Knesset for the financial daily Calcalist for four years and reported for the investigative programme Uvda. He also published a thriller set in the Knesset, HaMishkan, with Am Oved.
He then went independent and built a series of transparency projects. 100 Days of Transparency, crowdfunded well past its target, set out to publish the meeting diaries of members of the Knesset and the ties between money and government they showed. When his permanent Knesset entry pass was revoked in 2015 he began publishing the names of pass holders, and his court petition made the full list public. He founded the Investigations Fund in 2016, which pays reporters to pursue subjects chosen by the public, and merged it two years later into Shakuf, which joined The Seventh Eye in September 2020. He has lectured in journalism at Seminar HaKibbutzim since 2015, and joined the Democrats in 2025.
Positions and record
Transparency: Publish his diary, interests, public expenses and contributors to draft bills, with exceptions for whistleblowers and sensitive political meetings.
Parliamentary ethics: Remove MPs’ power to set their own salaries and party budgets, strengthen ethics oversight and restore the transparency committee.
Lobbying: Disclose lobbying clients and goals, and politicians’ meetings with lobbyists, business owners and publishers.
Competition: Break up dominant monopolies and vary corporate tax by market share, charging smaller businesses less.
Public participation: Pilot allocating 1% of the state budget through public proposals and voting.
Where they stand
Holds the party line on every issue.