Former Prime Ministers Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid announced Sunday night that they are uniting their two parties for the upcoming election into a combined ticket called “Together – Led by Bennett.”
Addressing reporters in Herzliya, Bennett, who will head the slate and stand as its candidate for prime minister, called joining forces with Lapid the “most Zionist and patriotic act we have ever done, for the sake of our country.”
Claiming that he and Lapid — who currently leads Israel’s parliamentary opposition — were “racing forward to victory,” Bennett also called on Yashar party leader Gadi Eisenkot to join them, stating that “our door is open for you too.”
The joint run is clearly a smart move for both Bennett and Lapid, who’ve been close political allies since both entering politics in 2012.
Despite being the largest faction in the opposition, Lapid’s Yesh Atid party has been falling in recent polls. Running together with Bennett gives him a strong boost.
What Bennett receives from the merger is both campaign funding (from public funds based on current Knesset strength) and Yesh Atid’s powerful political machine.
If Eisenkot were to join them, the Together list could potentially earn more seats than any other party in the upcoming elections (but would likely still struggle to piece together a coalition 61 lawmakers).
Bennett and Lapid have shared power before as alternating prime ministers in the short-lived “change government” (circa 2021-2022). The gimmick at the time was to show parties from across the Israeli political spectrum coming together to create an alternative to Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu (Likud) that could heal the nation from his divisive brand of politics.
While most of Israel’s national camp denounced Bennett at the time as a liar and traitor for including Mansour Abbas’s United Arab List in his coalition, Abbas was actually the only figure in that government that didn’t represent the interests of Israel’s westernized ruling class.
The real problem with the “change government” is that it was a plutocracy almost entirely made up of the parties voted in by the wealthiest sliver of Israeli society.
Lapid might be a liberal and Bennett a conservative but both function within the Westcentric paradigm of liberal ideology.
It’s possible that Bennett might be more committed to retaining the West Bank as part of Israel than Lapid (although this has never been tested) but on the issues that are actually dividing Israeli society today, both men are on the same side of that divide. Both champion the notion of Israel being an outpost of the West and both seek to prevent the country from transforming into something that stands outside the liberal ideological paradigm.
In shorthand, we can say that both seek to prevent Israel’s transitioning from the Shaul stage to the David stage of our national development.
This can be clearly seen in many of Bennett’s recent policy statements on issue from “civil marriage” to public transportation on Shabbat to the Ḥaredi draft.
One of the most outlandish arguments made in defense of the short-lived Bennett-Lapid government when it ruled was that it had brought together mutually antagonistic sectors of Israeli society in a rare display of unity that placed the people of Israel before the egos and political ideologies of various faction heads (often contrasted with the media’s depiction of Prime Minister Netanyahu as a divisive narcissist putting personal interests above those of the nation).
But with the exception of Abbas and his United Arab List, virtually every party in the Bennett-Lapid coalition shared a uniform view of both the world and Israel’s place in it.
In addition to representing the wealthiest sliver of Israel’s Jewish citizens, the factions comprising that government also all represented the tribal force of Yosef and therefore shared a worldview that saw virtually all political and social issues through a liberal ideological lens.
Despite their superficial differences and various positions on territory, they all represented one broad tent camp that sought to maintain the State of Israel as an outpost of Western civilization in the Semitic region.
The Together list clearly intends to revive the spirit of the “change government” (without Abbas and UAL if possible) and is staking the future of the liberal Israel on the belief that Israel’s survival depends on its continued adherence to a “Shaul” model characterized by institutional stability, global integration, and rationalist reform.
But for those who view the state not as a neutral liberal platform but as a vehicle for the expression of the collective Jewish will, this model is less a restoration and more of an obstruction of Israel’s destiny by adherence to alien values.
If these elections teach us anything, it should be that the Western linear political spectrum can no longer contain the internal pressures of Israeli identity – the “stress test” may reveal that while the Together list is fighting to save the Israel of previous decades, a growing demographic is already looking for a way to move passed it.
This election, like all recent elections, should therefore be understood not as a race between right and left but as one between the Yosef and Yehuda camps. – between those interested in maintaining Israel as a liberal Western nation-state and those seeking to transform that nation-state caterpillar into a revolutionary Jewish butterfly.
