The Opposition Also Splinters
Recently I wrote about the religious-Zionist right consolidating out of necessity as Israel’s October 27 election approached — Smotrich merging with Feiglin’s Zehut to avoid falling beneath the threshold, Ben-Gvir refusing to join them, Ofer Winter’s new party siphoning nationalist voters from all of them. The assumption embedded in that piece was that the other side of the map was doing the opposite: consolidating out of strength. On September 6, Naftali Bennett unveiled the final B’Yachad slate — his party merged with Yair Lapid’s Yesh Atid — and called it “the most talented” list running. A day earlier, Bennett and Gadi Eisenkot had quietly held merger talks of their own, and quietly decided against them. That reversal is worth taking seriously, because it says the fragmentation isn’t a right-wing phenomenon. It’s an Israeli one.
The numbers explain why Eisenkot said no. When Bennett and Lapid first merged in the spring, the combined list polled at 26 seats — enough, on paper, to anchor an opposition government. By this week’s slate unveiling, B’Yachad was being projected at 12 to 15. Eisenkot’s Yashar, over the same stretch, has done the opposite: founded only last year, it has spent August and September trading the lead with Likud outright, with recent surveys putting it at 22 to 26 seats against Likud’s 21 to 23, and at least one poll showing Eisenkot personally edging Netanyahu on prime-ministerial suitability. The Zionist Home faction that might once have shored up Bennett’s list instead merged into Yashar on September 6. Ayelet Shaked, Bennett’s longtime partner and a politician with her own national profile, chose not to run at all rather than join either project. The math has an obvious reading: Bennett is no longer the opposition’s center of gravity. Eisenkot is.
The reasons are not mysterious, and they mirror something I’ve written about before regarding Smotrich’s slate: credibility follows the war, not the brand. Eisenkot is a former IDF chief of staff running a party built around the idea that competence and restraint are themselves a platform, at a moment when, as one Israeli political scientist put it to Haaretz this summer, security has become an even greater priority since October 7 than it already was. Bennett, by contrast, is running on a merger with a party — Yesh Atid — whose leader has already served as prime minister and already lost to Netanyahu twice. Voters appear to be treating the two propositions differently, whatever the seat count said in the spring.
None of this should be mistaken for opposition strength. It’s the same fragmentation problem I described on the right, just running in the other direction. A recent Kan poll had Netanyahu’s coalition at 52 seats to the opposition’s 51 — a rounding error, and nowhere near the 61 needed to govern without the other side’s help or an accommodation with Arab parties that every major leader has ruled out. Fragmentation doesn’t just cost individual parties seats at the threshold; it costs blocs the ability to present voters with a clean choice. Netanyahu is still working the problem from his own side — his three approaches to Beersheba’s mayor, Ruvik Danilovich, offering him the number-three slot on Likud, a senior ministry, and the title of deputy prime minister, were reportedly turned down three separate times this week. If a sitting prime minister needs a mayor that badly and can’t get him, the anxiety about seat counts is not confined to the opposition benches.
What both stories — Smotrich’s forced merger and Bennett’s failed one — actually describe is the same underlying fact: Israeli politics has stopped organizing itself around two blocs and started organizing itself around individuals whose personal brand is doing more work than their party’s ideology. Eisenkot’s rise, Winter’s emergence, Ben-Gvir’s insistence on standing alone, Bennett’s inability to hold his own coalition together for five months — these are not five separate stories. They are one story about what happens to a party system when the thing voters are actually buying is a face and a résumé, not a platform.
Whether Eisenkot can turn a polling lead into a governing majority is a different question from whether he can win one, and Israeli politics has punished that distinction before — coalitions built only around removing Netanyahu have collapsed the moment they succeeded. But the shape of this election was supposed to be right-wing chaos against opposition unity. Five weeks out, it looks more like chaos on both sides of a line that is getting harder to draw.
