Israeli Press
Netanyahu blessed a far-right ballot bloc after Ben Gvir's refusal
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Image credit: Itamar Ben Gvir, 2022 — Alon Nuriel / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0 · License
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Benjamin Netanyahu has given his blessing to a joint ballot slip on the far right of Israeli politics, put together without the minister who was supposed to be at its centre.
The account is by Anna Barsky, the political correspondent of the Israeli daily Maariv. She reports that Itamar Ben Gvir instructed his advisers two months ago not to hold talks on a merger or a technical bloc, and has held that line even through intermediaries.
With Ben Gvir out, negotiations between Bezalel Smotrich's Religious Zionism and Moshe Feiglin's Zehut have moved quickly. The arrangement under discussion is a technical bloc: each faction keeps its own identity and they run on one slip, pooling the votes that would otherwise be lost.
Feiglin is asking for second place on the list and a rotation on the eighth and tenth slots, Barsky writes, on the argument that his party brings voters Smotrich does not reach.
Netanyahu welcomed the move and gave it a green light, according to people around him quoted in the report. The arithmetic explains the welcome: seats lost by parties that fall under Israel's 3.25 per cent threshold are redistributed, and in 2026 they would be redistributed away from his bloc.
Why Ben Gvir said no#
Maariv also published the calculation behind the refusal. An internal poll shown to Ben Gvir put his party four seats lower running jointly than running alone, its political desk reported, which turns a question of ideology into a question of price.
The pressure on him is now public. The Likud member of Knesset Tally Gotlib told the paper the responsibility for wasted right-wing votes lies with Smotrich rather than Ben Gvir; Yair Netanyahu answered that the split comes from "personal hatreds and ego".
For Palestinian readers the substance sits underneath the seat-counting. These are the parties whose declared programmes are annexation of the occupied West Bank and the removal of its Palestinian population, and the question the technical bloc settles is whether those programmes arrive in the next Knesset with ten seats or with none.
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