If We Accept the Bullying of Candidates, We Have All Lost the Election

An acquaintance of mine, who will remain anonymous but who knows Israeli politics better than most, told me the other day that Bibi could very well lose this election because small parties refused to pull out of the race.

I think that argument is absurd. I also think it shows just how much Israel still has to learn, and I’d like to explain why.

Why is there so much hate?

There are 37 parties in the current election after Benny Gantz officially pulled out of the election. However, over the last few weeks, candidates from at least two of the new and smaller parties have been subjected to a campaign of intimidation that has no place in a democracy.

Davidi Ben Zion, deputy head of the Samaria Regional Council, was number eight on Ofer Winter’s Amcha Yisrael list. Billboards with his face on them went up demanding that he resign. His party says he and his family, including his children, were threatened and harassed. When he announced he was leaving the race, he posted a picture of one of those billboards and wrote that his wife was devastated. Bezalel Smotrich responded by calling it a brave decision and urging other candidates on the list to do the same.

Then they went after Laly Derai, number six on the list. Laly lost her son, Staff Sgt. Saadia Derai, in the fighting in Gaza. Signs demanding that she quit were put up right outside her house in Eli. I have a hard time understanding what kind of person looks at a bereaved mother and decides the right move is to hang a sign across from her doorstep telling her to get out of politics.

It got worse. Members of Amcha Yisrael have received death threats. Winter says private investigators were sent after his candidates, their children were harassed, a false dossier was spread about Derai, and rabbis were leaned on. Someone even held a pulsa denura, the old kabbalistic death curse, against their candidates, including Derai. A death curse. Against a grieving mother. Over a Knesset seat. I would like to posit that this goes far beyond electioneering, and far beyond even basic morality.

The new HaTzibur HaCharedi party hasn’t been spared either. Videos show Haredi youths ripping down the party’s campaign signs in various places across the country. Rabbi Yehuda Oppenheimer, one of the party’s candidates, wrote a blog recently explaining how he has been ostracized and that his belonging to the party has brought threats his way. Rabbi Oppenheimer called it what it is: coercion. Dr. Nechumi Yaffe, one of the two female candidates on the list, has been threatened and verbally harassed by people from rival parties.

The pressure has come from the very top. Netanyahu and Smotrich drove out to Eli to meet with Rabbi Eli Sadan, Winter’s teacher, hoping he would talk his former student into quitting. Smotrich publicly offered Winter a ministerial post if he would drop out. Netanyahu posted an image on his X account of Ofer Winter grinning while he burned ballots.

Netanyahu also met with Moti Leitner, the chairman of HaTzibur HaCharedi, and promised him a senior position if he would step aside. Gideon Sa’ar joined in with some messaging and pressure tactics of his own. Not to mention the other Charedi parties who have been pressuring HaTzibur HaCharedi to drop out for some time.

Neither Winter nor Leitner budged. So now Bibi is doing what he always does when the backroom deals fail. He’s turning to the voters with the same scare tactics we have heard every election for years, telling them that a vote for anyone else is a vote for the left.
It is worth asking what those offers were actually worth. Netanyahu can promise the world, but he can’t guarantee he’ll have a coalition, and he can’t guarantee he’ll be the next Prime Minister. His promises are only good if he wins. These vaulted promises may very well be fool’s gold, and Winter and Leitner were correct in standing their ground so that they can represent their supporters.

But there is a threshold, isn’t this understandable?

Some will say all of this makes sense. Israel has a 3.25 percent threshold. If a small party falls short, every vote it received disappears, and in a race this tight, those votes could hand the country to the other bloc. Right?

Wrong.

The threshold doesn’t give anyone the right to vilify, antagonize, bully, or, dare I say it, terrorize legitimate candidates who are fighting for what they believe in. Calling on a rival to step aside is part of politics. Death threats and curses are not. Politicians who send people to do this, or who say nothing while their supporters do it, don’t deserve our vote. They don’t belong in a democracy at all, because they are trying to silence the very freedom we fight for.
If the people at the top are so worried about keeping their coalition, there’s a simpler solution. Make your own party worth voting for. Find better candidates. Offer a better platform. Give the people who are thinking about voting for Winter or Leitner a reason to come back to you. When your whole campaign comes down to begging the other guy to drop out, you’ve told the public you have nothing left to offer them.

Thomas Jefferson understood this. In 1801, after one of the ugliest campaigns America had ever seen, he stood up at his first inauguration in front of a deeply divided country and said, “Every difference of opinion is not a difference of principle. We have called by different names brethren of the same principle.”

Ofer Winter pledged his support for Netanyahu as prime minister. HaTzibur HaCharedi said that they will join a right-wing or broad national unity government. These are brethren of the same principle for the right-wing, and they have been treated like enemies.

How elections are actually lost

When a coalition loses an election, small parties not passing the threshold is rarely the reason. It might be the final straw, but there is a whole bale that broke the camel’s back, which was in place long before.

Elections are lost when the public no longer trusts the people leading that bloc. This happens often in countries where one side has spent so many years demonizing the other that voters can no longer picture themselves voting for the leader of the opposing bloc. Sound familiar?
If Bibi loses his coalition, or the Likud comes out of this smaller, no small party will be to blame. Bibi and the Likud did that themselves when they decided half the country wasn’t worth talking to, and in many cases was worth attacking. I’d argue it’s more than half. It started with the Arabs and the left. Now it includes parties on the right that should have been his partners.

The true shame of this whole process is that we, the voters, deserve better. But we also need to demand better.

On October 27, if things don’t go his way, Prime Minister Netanyahu will only have to look as far as his mirror to figure out why.

The writer works as a freelancer in the field of PR and Communications and is assisting the Chareidi Public party with its Communications during the 2026 Knesset elections.