The Political Upstarts That May Decide Israel’s Election
Less than a week before an election that many Israelis consider the most significant in the country’s history, the two leading candidates are deadlocked. On one side is Benjamin Netanyahu, battle-hardened, beset by corruption charges, and increasingly desperate. (Early this week, his campaign polled voters on whether they would be more likely to turn out if this were his last run for office.) On the other side is Gadi Eisenkot, a centrist former military chief who is temperate and broadly liked but lacks the political instincts to become a clear favorite.
On October 18th, Donald Trump tried to tip the balance. Breaking a long tradition in which American Presidents at least pretend not to intervene in foreign elections, he praised Netanyahu on Truth Social as a “Great Warrior Prime Minister.” He also suggested that he would abandon the war against Iran if Netanyahu lost: “If Israel has the wrong Leader, which would be anyone other than Bibi, America will have to do this work ourselves, and I am not inclined to do so.”
Trump remains hugely popular in Israel, and in a normal news cycle his endorsement would have given Netanyahu an electoral boost. Instead, it was cancelled out by one of the Prime Minister’s most vocal supporters. Yinon Magal, a right-wing television host, aired a segment in which he called Eisenkot a “monkey.” Many Israelis viewed this as a racist slur against Eisenkot, whose parents emigrated from Morocco. To make matters worse, Magal also suggested that Eisenkot was the puppet of Jews of European descent: “All the Ashkenazi élitists who are managing him stand behind him, telling him what to say.”
Yet, even with all the media frenzy, the polls have hardly budged. For weeks, Eisenkot’s party, Yashar (meaning “straight,” or “just”), has generally maintained a small lead over Netanyahu’s Likud, while both candidates remain far from securing a majority in the parliament. After Israeli elections, the candidate with the most support from legislators in the Knesset (typically the head of the largest party) has forty-two days to assemble a majority coalition. If that candidate fails, his rival gets a chance. In practice, this gives smaller parties disproportionate power in determining who becomes the Prime Minister.
The upcoming election may well be decided by two small parties that didn’t even exist a few months ago. They are strikingly different, but both are headed by hawkish politicians, and both seem designed to appeal to right-wing voters who hold Netanyahu’s government responsible for the attacks of October 7, 2023, but don’t feel prepared to join the opposition. Polls show that both parties are currently hovering around the threshold necessary to enter the parliament.
The first one, Amcha Yisrael (People of Israel), was formed in August by Ofer Winter, a former brigadier general in his mid-fifties. Winter, a stern nationalist who famously encouraged the “voluntary” migration of Palestinians from Gaza, represents a new generation of military leaders who grew up on Jewish settlements and belong to the Religious Zionist movement. For months, he seemed to have electoral momentum—but his numbers dipped recently, as he declared an unequivocal allegiance to Netanyahu. “Winter is an enigma,” Amnon Abramovich, a veteran commentator on Israel’s mainstream Channel 12, told me. “He entered politics because of October 7th, with a slate of candidates who were not in charge on October 7th, but he pledged to go only with the Prime Minister of October 7th.” Abramovich said that Winter’s supporters wish he hadn’t tied his political fate to Netanyahu: “If he were smart—and he is not smart—he would have vowed that he would go according to principles and not according to people.”
Winter’s support comes overwhelmingly from voters who previously cast ballots for Likud or one of its coalition parties, Abramovich said. After the catastrophe that befell Israel on the coalition’s watch, many of those voters would likely have stayed home this time if not for a candidate like Winter—which led many observers to suspect that Netanyahu had encouraged him to run in the first place. But as polls began to suggest that Winter’s party may not gain enough votes to enter the parliament—that he might be “wasting” right-wing ballots—Netanyahu embarked on a campaign to force him from the race. It recently emerged that Netanyahu had met with a rabbi close to Winter, hoping that he could persuade Winter to drop out. “Netanyahu is right to be fearful,” Abramovich said. “He sees a scenario in which Winter brings in two to three per cent and still fails to pass.”
The second party, announced just last month, is an alliance between a center-right faction called the New Economic Party, which is focussed on pocketbook issues, and another one, the Reservists, which is intent on making the military draft mandatory for everyone—including ultra-Orthodox men, who are currently exempt. The alliance’s leader, Yoaz Hendel, is more sophisticated than Winter, and more telegenic: in campaign appearances, he presents himself as part tech executive, part combat soldier. He served as a senior aide to Netanyahu and as a communications minister under both Netanyahu and Naftali Bennett. Since leaving Netanyahu’s office, he has become a prominent critic.
“We’re the protest vote,” Hendel told me by phone recently. He said that his target voters were Israelis under the age of forty: reserve-duty soldiers with young families who are buckling under the high cost of living and disillusioned with the government’s promises of security. “We want to convince everyone in the State of Israel not to vote for Netanyahu,” he said. “I think he is responsible for October 7th.” Still, Hendel was quick to add that he had no qualms about praising Netanyahu where he felt it was due, as in the case of the Israeli operation that blew up Hezbollah militants’ pagers in Lebanon and Syria two years ago.
The Reservists Party has attracted roughly equal support from the pro-Netanyahu and the anti-Netanyahu blocs. Abramovich calls it a “splits party”—“one leg here and one there.” The ruling coalition and its opposition have thus largely spared Hendel the barbed political attacks that they direct at their enemies.
But it is unclear how Hendel would align himself after the election. He does not endorse the opposition motto “Just not Bibi.” He told me, “I am concerned with how to establish a Zionist state. If [Netanyahu] insists on staying with ultra-Orthodox parties, I will not join him. By the same token, if Eisenkot joins Arab parties that do not denounce Hamas, then I am not there, either.” He is also unwilling to contribute to a minority government—an increasingly likely scenario, in which Eisenkot fails to secure a majority but still manages to form a coalition with the support of Arab parties. As Hendel sees it, “You put together a government like that and you’re out in about two weeks, while giving Netanyahu seventy seats in the next election.”
If either party succeeds in securing enough votes to enter the parliament, it will be tougher for Eisenkot to cobble together a majority. If both fail, Netanyahu may be unable to continue as Prime Minister. Given that polls in Israel can be off by as much as four per cent these days, there is no way of predicting the outcome.
Yet the new parties’ emergence, so close to election day, indicates a real reckoning. “They are both a response to the frustration of many voters with the polarized bloc voting that is common among the parties of yesterday,” Yagil Levy, a professor at Israel’s Open University, told me. They also underscore the outsized importance of military service in a country that has been at war for three years.
Yohanan Plesner, the president of the Israel Democracy Institute, a nonpartisan research center in Jerusalem, told me that Israelis remain so entrenched in “identity politics and tribalism that new political frameworks are needed in order to create any kind of movement.” Still, he is skeptical of Hendel’s attempt to provide a platform for disaffected voters of all kinds. “There are a ton of reservists, and only a fraction of them will vote for him,” he said. What his party seems to represent is a kind of “safe haven for right-wingers who are uncomfortable with the government’s polarizing approach, its surrender to ultra-Orthodox demands, and an over-all sense of incompetence.” Plesner noted that this leaves some crucial concerns unaddressed: “There’s no substantive debate about Israel’s security approach, no real maturity to have a genuine discussion about the Palestinians or the war.”
A poll released earlier this month shows few points of commonality on pressing political issues. There is overwhelming support among Jewish Israelis for establishing a state commission to investigate the events of October 7th, and for imposing the draft on the ultra-Orthodox. (The exemption has rallied Israelis of all political persuasions around the idea of “sharing the burden.”) There is far less pronounced agreement on restarting peace talks with the Palestinians; three-quarters of those surveyed rejected the idea. On all the rest, the country is split—often bitterly so. It seems astounding, in light of what has happened in Israel over the past three years, that what may end up tipping the election is a pair of niche parties that no one in the country had heard of until this summer. The two versions of Israel that could result are so divergent as to seem impossible to reconcile. ♦