The Bennett-Lapid alliance offers a different kind of politics

When I arrived at the Gaza Division’s war room on October 8, 2023, there were roughly 60 other soldiers and reservists already there. Men and women. Religious and secular. People from cities, settlements, kibbutzim and moshavim. From the right, center and left. It was the kind of Israeli mosaic you see most clearly in places and moments where our country’s resilience is tested: in the army, in hospitals, and after disasters and tragedies like October 7. 

Almost every corner of Israeli society was represented in the war room that day. Except for two that were barely represented. The ultra-Orthodox and Arabs. 

Those who were there came mostly from the same two Zionist communities that have largely carried the burden of defending Israel for decades: secular and religious Zionist Israelis.

When I left that same war room three months later, I told the reservists there something I still believe with all my heart: You are the Israel we need more of. Natalie from Ofakim. Amir from Givat Shmuel. Moriah from Gush Etzion. Oren from Tel Aviv. Each of them gave everything they had to the exhausting and complex work of managing the war in Gaza. And somehow, two and a half years later, many of them are still doing it. They’re still leaving their families and jobs behind and showing up when the country calls. Without complaint. Without conditions. Without asking for anything in return. 

They are who I think about when I think about the new political partnership between Yair Lapid’s Yesh Atid and Naftali Bennett’s party, now united under the name B’Yachad. 

Some commentators immediately brushed this alliance aside. They said Bennett would lose religious Zionist voters because of Lapid. They said Lapid would scare away people from the right. They said all the things that political commentators stuck in a pre-October 7 reading of Israeli society and politics would say. 

But from where I live in Gush Etzion and my conversations within religious Zionist communities, something different is happening. This partnership isn’t pushing people away. For the many Israelis tired of divisive political discourse, it’s doing just the opposite. It’s pulling people back together.

For many religious Zionists, the connection between Lapid, the secular centrist, and Bennett, the religious man of the right, is deeper than a political arrangement or technical merger. It represents the idea that in politics, just as we do in the army, at work, and in so many other frameworks in our daily lives, the Zionist elements of Israeli society can still speak and work with one another. 

At its best, religious Zionism never strived to be a closed tribe. It wanted to be a bridge. It wanted to bring together Torah, the army, the state, a sense of national responsibility, and the broader Israeli public. I’m not talking about an arrogant approach to religious Zionism like Bezalel Smotrich’s that believes it owns the whole truth and anyone who disagrees is misguided, or the violent, messianic version that Itamar Ben-Gvir has made his brand, but a religious Zionism that unites alongside a secular Zionism that respects tradition – the result being a shared Israeli language that doesn’t begin and end with highlighting our differences.

That is what Bennett and Lapid are offering. Not complete agreement. Not identical worldviews. But mutual respect. The ability to sit and work together. To disagree without destroying each other. To recall that before we are in “tribes” or political parties, we are still one people and one country.

We have seen what happens when respect disappears and politics becomes a machine for hatred, when every disagreement becomes betrayal, every opponent becomes an enemy, and every argument a decisive battle over Israeli and Jewish identity. 

That’s why for so many, the Bennett-Lapid partnership represents something rare in our politics today. Hope. The hope that maybe we can still have a government that works quietly and humbly and just gets things done. A government of ministers who understand their job is solving problems, not seeking out who to blame for them. A government that understands that public service isn’t a reality show.

We already saw a version of this in the Bennett-Lapid “Government of Change.” It wasn’t perfect. It was fragile. But during that year and a half, Bennett and Lapid treated each other with respect. They led a government that for all its weaknesses was serious, professional and composed. One without endless empty press conferences, cheap gimmicks, and a constant stream of “me, me, me.” Under Bennett and Lapid, Israelis heard a different word from their leaders: “We.”

And after all this country has been through, that word matters.

That is why I believe this Bennett-Lapid alliance has real appeal — both among secular Zionists and religious Zionists. Not because everyone suddenly agrees on everything. They don’t and they don’t have to. This alliance has real appeal because many Israelis are desperate for something much more basic: decency, responsibility, competence, and a sense that the people leading the country are trying to hold it together rather than tear it apart. In today’s Israel, that isn’t a small thing. It may be exactly what we need.