On Wednesday, the day after the High Court of Justice handed down its landmark ruling regarding haredi conscription, the Knesset was buzzing.
“It is not scientific, but I’ve been in the Knesset since the morning, the building is shaking – everyone is fighting with everyone else,” said Yesh Atid leader Yair Lapid. “This is the point where the Knesset suddenly understands that it is on the way to falling apart.”
Lapid, obviously, is no neutral oracle. He is interested in the Knesset dissolving itself and going to new elections, and has been working tirelessly toward that goal since the moment it was sworn in on December 29, 2022. His words, therefore, could legitimately be dismissed as the wishful thinking of the head of the opposition.
But they are not.
Something is afoot. You could feel it when National Unity Party head Benny Gantz left the government earlier this month; you could feel it when a couple of Likud MKs broke ranks and threatened to vote against the “Rabbis Law” last week, and you felt it this week in the coalition’s jumbled efforts to somehow circle the square when it comes to the High Court of Justice’s ruling regarding the draft: come up with legislation that will satisfy the court’s demand for conscription of haredim yet keep the ultra-Orthodox parties in the coalition.
A sense of new elections lurking just around the bend, therefore, is one reason there is a surge of talk about the formation of a new right-wing party – a Likud B so to speak – made up of former prime minister Naftali Bennett, Yisrael Beytenu head Avigdor Liberman, New Hope–The National Right leader Gideon Sa’ar, and former Mossad chief Yossi Cohen.
In two television polls taken this week, this party would be dominant – Channel 12 giving it 25 seats and a Channel 13 poll giving it 34. In either case, it would be the largest party in the land and in the driver’s seat regarding building a coalition and crowning a new prime minister.
As strategic and political consultant Roni Rimon said, people are warming up on the sidelines. And you only warm up on the sidelines when you think your part in the game is about to begin.
RIMON, A partner in the Rimon Cohen & Co public relations firm that has advised numerous politicians over the years, said that “game changers” do not come about all that often but that this party – which would tap into the country’s move to the Right while reflecting a deep unhappiness with the way Likud has run things and an aversion to extremes – could be just such a game changer that could shake up the country’s political map.
If so, this would be yet another way – in addition to changing the country’s fundamental security doctrines and the surge to conscript haredim – that October 7 will leave its lasting imprint on Israel: by realigning the political chessboard. If this new framework does materialize, then it could end Likud’s nearly four-decade dominance of the Israeli political scene, to the same degree that the failures of the Yom Kippur War, as well as rampant corruption at the time, led to Likud’s ending Labor’s dominance of politics in 1977.
The names at the top of this list – Bennett, Liberman, Sa’ar, Cohen – are all household names, however, meaning they have been around for a long time and are part of the political, defense, and intelligence establishment that failed so miserably on October 7.
What has fallen by the wayside in recent months are the voices that were a constant feature in the immediate aftermath of October 7 calling for a “clean sweep,” voices calling for new leaders – people tainted neither by the colossal failures of October 7 nor by sharing responsibility for sowing the divisions that invited that catastrophe.
Unrealistic to expect an entirely new government
But, said Rimon, a “clean sweep is unrealistic and wishful thinking.”
“In the end,” he explained, “voters choose from what is available, not from what is not. Look at the elections in the US. Is the best that 330 million Americans can come up with a choice between [President Joe] Biden and [Donald] Trump? No, there are more talented people in the US than these two, yet these are the two on the table and you choose between a and b. You choose between what is, not between what is not. The same thing will happen here.”
Wars, however, mint heroes, and this war has minted its fair share – reservists who have shown unfathomable courage in battle, bereaved relatives who have shown uncommon grace, ordinary citizens who have risen to the occasion and given of themselves and their time in extraordinary ways.
Many of these people have burst unwittingly onto the nation’s stage – Fauda star Idan Amedi is one example; Iris Haim, whose kidnapped son was accidentally killed by the IDF when trying to escape his Hamas captors, is another – and they have spoken in ways that touched many hearts and preached a message of unity. Might they or others like them, Rimon is asked, not emerge and form a new political framework that would represent something entirely new – new wine in new bottles, rather than old wine in new ones?
“These are people who I think can join existing frameworks, I don’t think they will have enough strength to lead entirely new frameworks on their own,” he said.
Rimon said that while “theoretically it is possible that someone will start something new – a party revolving around reservists or the hostages – on its most successful day, it might pass the electoral threshold [3.25% of votes cast] and get a few seats. But it will not be a game changer. This Likud B could be a game changer.”
This potential party, as well as the existing ones, will be eager to integrate these new faces into their ranks, he predicted. But even then, they will not tilt the elections since Israelis – when they vote for a party – vote in most cases for the top of the list, not candidates in the 10th, 15th, or 25th position on the party’s slate.
While there have been some murmurings of new political frameworks forming – be it a party of business leaders, reservists, or bereaved families – nothing significant has yet emerged.
Moshe Klughaft, a political strategic consultant, Channel 12 commentator, and former adviser to prime ministers Benjamin Netanyahu and Bennett, said this is to be expected.
Despite a thirst in the country for new leaders with a new message and new style, politics, he said, “is not a romantic hobby. It’s a tough profession with rules written in blood, and only players willing to acknowledge this will eventually reach positions of real influence.
“For a new party to enter the Knesset, it needs to create a well-oiled machine that knows how to work in the political space, logistically, financially, with clear leadership, a sharp platform, a clear position on the issue of ‘will you sit with Netanyahu’ – and here the task is difficult to almost impossible.”
Klughaft said that while it is clear that there is tremendous public frustration towards the government – evident in the fact that in all polls, the current coalition gets no more than 50 seats – setting up a new party that can thrive is an arduous chore.
While the Yom Kippur War helped catapult the Democratic Movement for Change (Dash) Party – a party expressly made up of non-politicians – from nowhere to 15 seats in the 1977 election, Klughaft warns against drawing parallels between then and now. Moreover, he pointed out that the party fell apart in two years because it did not have a strong, charismatic leader nor a clearly defined platform.
The Dash example, he said, represents precisely the amateurism inherent in establishing “romantic parties” that look promising on paper. The obstacle course involved in establishing a new party will probably – in the best case – cause it to “crash against the ground of reality even before launch,” he said, and in the worst case, “break up after its launch.”
Still, Klughaft acknowledged the country wants change. He said that among the country’s Jewish population, “66% of the people define themselves in the space between Center-Right to extreme Right, and only 13% of the public define themselves in the opposing camp from Center-Left to extreme Left.
Regardless of where they fit on the political spectrum, Klughaft said that “according to in-depth studies, the Israeli public is primarily concerned with state systems not functioning properly, with the state being poorly managed, and with inappropriate appointments. If experienced managers and businesspeople come, they will be able to integrate into existing parties and respond to the public’s need for better state management.”
Time to integrate new people into the government
Klughaft said the best way to achieve this is to integrate new people into existing frameworks rather than create more parties that will only complicate eventual coalition math.
He said the disease plaguing Israel’s political system is not a shortage of parties but rather narrow governments, pointing to the Bennett government that was sworn in with only 60 MKs and Netanyahu’s current government that relies on the far Right with little room for maneuver.
In the future, he said, “One of the central issues will be who will succeed in forming a broad government, where no one side will feel excluded from decisions that tear the nation apart. The problem is the nature of the government and its breadth, not the need for new party structures.”