The Story of the Merger Began, According to Two People Involved in the Negotiations, with an Offer to Yair Lapid to Join Forces with Gadi Eisenkot
The story of the merger began, according to two people involved in the negotiations, with an offer made to Yair Lapid to join forces with Gadi Eisenkot. Lapid discussed it with Naftali Bennett. “The offer is generous,” Lapid said, “but I would rather join forces with you.” Lapid feels comfortable with Bennett; they have stolen quite a few horses together. In the first political alliance they formed, in the 2013 election, Benjamin Netanyahu did everything he could to separate them. Bennett did not take the bait. Lapid was threatened by the electoral threshold, but why did Bennett get involved?
For months, Bennett explained that Lapid was toxic in the eyes of right-wing voters, but that really wasn’t fair to Lapid. Lapid was a decent man, he argued, but Netanyahu had managed to create a left-wing image for him among right-wing voters, and therefore Bennett could not join forces with him.
Bennett has a reputation as an impulsive decision-maker who likes to surprise people and make quick decisions, believing that this is what leadership means — and then has great difficulty repairing the damage. The failed ultimatum he gave Netanyahu in November 2018, the creation of the New Right party, signing a commitment alone in Channel 14’s studio that he would not bring Mansour Abbas into his coalition — the merger with Lapid once again looks like a decision of this kind.
Bennett convinced himself that if Lapid joined forces with Eisenkot, the poll on the day after the election would show that the new party was winning a similar number of seats, or even more, than his own party. From there, it was a short step to also losing recognition of the fact that he is the leader of the alternative bloc to Netanyahu, and perhaps even losing seats from his own party, as has happened to him several times in the past.
Put more harshly, Bennett had to choose between his personal interest in continuing to lead the bloc and the not-insignificant price of seeing right-wing voters return to the Netanyahu bloc. He chose to defeat Eisenkot rather than defeat Netanyahu.
Bennett and his people have a different explanation. It may not be an ideal alliance, they say. In the short term, we will bleed votes on the right, but the bottom line is that the only way to keep right-wing voters in Bennett’s party is for them to be certain that Bennett will be the bloc’s prime minister. If that leadership is undermined, and they fear that voting for Bennett will make Eisenkot — supposedly a prime minister from the left — prime minister, they will abandon him and Netanyahu will remain in power.
Therefore, Bennett’s people argue, Netanyahu barely attacks Eisenkot, does not portray him as left-wing, and does not revive his “left-wing” statements from the past. According to them, Netanyahu wants Eisenkot, rather than Bennett, to be his main rival.
This explanation should not be dismissed outright. At the same time, it should be noted that there is no certainty that right-wing voters’ sentiment toward Eisenkot is more negative than their sentiment toward Bennett. For now, it appears that Bennett and Lapid’s pressure on Eisenkot is being interpreted more as hysteria.
Bennett and Lapid’s people argue: Eisenkot played us. He gave all of us the impression that he had no ego, that he was merely looking for the right alliance, but the truth is that he simply wants to be prime minister. Legitimate, they say, but Bennett’s competition with him requires him to court the left flank rather than woo right-wing voters.
“Those leftists need to stop being so stupid,” a senior figure in the Bennett camp told me. “They’ve been losing elections for 16 years and still haven’t understood. You have to do what they did in Hungary: win from the right, give Bennett some peace from all their dreams. This isn’t the time for that. Now is the time to defeat Netanyahu and save the country, and that can only happen from the right.”
And Eisenkot’s camp will say: Eisenkot has a better chance of bringing over Netanyahu voters from 2022 than the hated Bennett does, especially if he continues patiently climbing toward the leadership of the bloc. That will cause all those center-left voters who went with Bennett to ask themselves: Actually, why should we crown a right-wing prime minister like Naftali Bennett?