Sometimes political change comes through a great ideological realignment. Sometimes it comes because politicians who cannot stand one another refuse to sit in the same room.
Israel may be witnessing the latter. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been pleading with Itamar Ben Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich to run together in the Oct. 27 election. His concern is straightforward. Israel’s 3.25% electoral threshold means that votes cast for a party that fails to qualify effectively disappear. Smotrich’s Religious Zionism is now hovering below that line.
Ben Gvir, however, has rejected Netanyahu’s request even to meet with Smotrich, declaring the matter “final and complete.”
Netanyahu understands the arithmetic. The latest Maariv poll gives Gadi Eisenkot’s Yashar 25 seats, Likud 20 and the Zionist opposition parties collectively 59 — within two seats of governing. Netanyahu’s current bloc has only 43 seats, rising to 48 if Ofer Winter’s new People of Israel party is included. Most consequentially, Winter’s emergence pushes Smotrich below the threshold.
That is why Netanyahu’s alarm is real. But Israelis should consider whether the possible result is necessarily something to fear.
For nearly four years, Netanyahu has governed while extraordinarily consequential power over policing, settlements and West Bank policy rested with Ben Gvir and Smotrich. Their supporters can fairly argue that they represented voters whose views had long been marginalized. That is democracy too.
But influence has consequences. Settler violence has grown into a serious national and international problem. Israel’s social cohesion has been battered. The Haredi draft issue has become intolerable to growing numbers of Israelis carrying an extraordinary military burden. And ideological maximalism has too often substituted for sober governing.
Now the political marketplace may be responding. Ofer Winter is especially significant because he cannot easily be dismissed as another creature of the Israeli left. He is religious, deeply hawkish and opposed to Palestinian statehood. But he also advocates Haredi military service and argues that October 7 requires new political leadership. His appeal appears to be drawing heavily from Netanyahu’s own camp.
Nor is Eisenkot easily caricatured as the dangerous leftist of Likud campaign rhetoric. He recently called belief in a two-state solution after October 7 “delusional.” Yet, he has also attacked settler violence, criticized E1 construction as strategically damaging and accused Ben Gvir and Smotrich of harming Israel’s national interests.
That combination may describe an emerging Israeli center better than the familiar labels do: security-minded, skeptical of Palestinian intentions, unwilling to abandon the settlement enterprise — and equally unwilling to allow ideological extremists to dictate national policy.
Nothing is settled. Polls move. Small parties merge. Netanyahu is a formidable campaigner, and two months remain before Israelis vote. And Ben Gvir may even eventually reconsider.
But there is something worth celebrating in what is happening. Israeli voters may be creating the possibility of change without repudiating Israel’s security needs, Zionism or the political right. If so, the great irony of this election could be irresistible.
Ben Gvir and Smotrich entered government to move Israel dramatically rightward. Their inability to live politically with one another may instead help return it to the center.
