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Gal-On initially announced her candidacy for the 2018 Meretz leadership race, but eventually dropped out. Tamar Zandberg was elected Party chair.

In October 2017 Gal-On resigned from the Knesset, but said she would remain leader of Meretz. Her seat was taken by Mossi Raz.

Prior to the next election, Gal-On had said during the campaign that she would resign if the party won only four seats. When preliminary results of the 2015 election indicated that the party would be reduced in representation, Gal-On announced she would resign as chairperson of Meretz as soon as a successor is chosen, and from the Knesset in order to open a place for Tamar Zandberg, the party's fifth-place candidate, who appeared to have lost her seat. Zandberg, Ilan Gilon and others urged Gal-On to reconsider her decision. Once absentee and soldier ballots were counted, Meretz gained a fifth seat.

With this success, Gal-On announced that she continue as party leader. She said: "Meretz received a fifth seat from young supporters, from Israeli soldiers, who raised the party's rate of support. That allowed Meretz to maintain its strength in terms of the number of voters – some 170,000 – compared with the last election. Under the circumstances and against all odds, that is a success."

On 7 February 2012 Gal-On was elected Meretz party chair, with more than 60% of the vote in the party's primary. In the 2013 legislative elections Meretz doubled its number of seats from three to six.

Gal-On volunteered her third spot on the Meretz list for the 2009 elections as a gesture of respect for Nitzan Horowitz, but lost her seat when the party was reduced to three seats. She attributed the party's failure to its uncertain response to Israel's Operation Cast Lead, and said: "My opinion was different than that of most party members. Because Meretz is an ideological party, it must have a clear statement even in such a situation". In March 2011 she returned to the Knesset after Haim Oron retired.

In 2007, Gal-On launched an unsuccessful bid to become the leader of Meretz. She believes that the party has to reinvent itself and promote a civilian agenda, which encompasses human rights and civil liberties, in order to remain politically viable. Gal-On said that Meretz could not afford to watch while other parties adopted some of its long-time positions, and it must work to cement the principles of democracy and equality in Israeli society. She lost to Haim Oron, as the polls predicted.

She was elected to the Knesset in 1999, and served as chairwoman of the Knesset committee for the struggle against trafficking in women. She was a member of the Knesset law and constitution committee and the Knesset committee. That same year, she also called for a repeal of the Law of Return, stating that "The Law of Return is discriminatory, it discriminates between Jews and non-Jews. I can accept that after the Holocaust, it was kind of a necessity. But maybe after 51 years, we are not in the same situation, and we don't need to run our country based on such undemocratic laws."

Zehava Gal-On (Hebrew: זֶהָבָה גַּלְאוֹן ; born 4 January 1956) is an Israeli politician, serving as a member of the Knesset from 1999 to 2017. She was the chairwoman of the Meretz political party from 2012 to 2018, when it had five to six seats in the Knesset.

Gal-On is married to Pesach (born 5 December 1953). They have two sons, Yiftah (born 4 March 1980) and Nadav (born 28 January 1982), and still lives in Petah Tikva.

Zehava Schnipitzky (later Gal-On) was born in 1956 in Vilnius in the Soviet Union (now in Lithuania). She immigrated at age four to Israel in 1960 with her parents: father Aryeh (born 30 December 1925), a plumber for a subsidiary of Solel Boneh (a construction company), and mother, Yaffa (19 February 1923 – 10 March 2012), a teacher. They lived in a ma'abara transit camp and eventually moved to a housing project in Petah Tikva. During her service in the Israel Defense Forces, Schnipitzky served as a clerk in the Paratroopers Brigade. She earned a bachelor's degree in Special Education and Linguistics from Beit Berl College, and an M.A. in the Philosophy of Education from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.