Gal, a Jewish woman is in her late thirties and a mother of a five year old son, is one of the founders of the Social Justice Program at the Kibbutzim College in Tel Aviv, where she is also one of the leading teachers on topics of education for social and environmental justice and peace education. Alongside this, she teaches in a graduate program on social change in the Society and Arts College in Netanya and in various other academic programs across the country and abroad. Gal also facilitated conflict groups in a number of organizations over the years. She wrote her dissertation on gender analysis of Jewish-Palestinian dialogue. She is politically involved in social change organizations, among them the ‘Community Education Center’- a center that offers courses to asylum seekers and migrant workers. She also serves as a board member of Amnesty International Israel.
In 1988 at the age of 14 Gal was a participant in a group of an organization which later became part of Sadaka-Reut. In 1992 she began to facilitate youth groups at Sadaka-Reut, and between 1998 – 2001 she worked as the Educational Coordinator of the organization.
When a participant in Sadaka–Reut, Rabbi Kahana visited her school as part of a program called “Meet the Politician:
I knew it was wrong but I didn’t know how to say it politically. We decided that we’d demonstrate and our facilitators from Sadaka-Reut gave us the words to express what we felt, and through the demonstration I got the tools to speak about it.
I was asked what changed the course of my life from being a mainstream Zionist to who I am today. I answered that at a young age I met Palestinians that I could converse with and engage in political debates that would change my social and political perceptions and my identity… I suddenly felt that I was an activist.