Bennett's change of direction, and the trap awaiting Eisenkot
As polls shift, arguments change: once Bennett asked everyone to rally behind him, now the demand has relocated. The knitted-kippah public is on its way to a historic record, time to move from being Avraham Fried to Hanan Ben-Ari. To be worthy: Oren Smadja joins politics.
Chick, fly
With the arrival of summer, arguments migrate. They are carried in the air to the speaker who wants to use them at that moment — a real "narrative migration" season.
Take the argument "everyone needs to rally behind one candidate," which until recently was the exclusive property of Naftali Bennett. In April, he declared to Walla: "I am twice as popular as Eisenkot in the polls, and the only way to win is for everyone to rally behind me."
And of course, he added a military analogy: "Suppose you are an infantry platoon organizing to go to war. But there are three soldiers who each want to be the platoon commander, and they are conflicted and fighting among themselves. You cannot win like that."
Only in the meantime, they have swapped roles. Bennett is the smaller one in the two-headed opposition, and the argument has migrated to Gadi. Now Eisenkot is the one warning: "The head of the largest party in the bloc should be the candidate for prime minister. Anyone who thinks it is possible to be prime minister with six or ten mandates is wrong, and could lead to the mandate being given to Netanyahu," no less.
And this is not the only argument that has relocated: Bennett and Lieberman, as revealed here last week, plan to demand the premiership as a united technical party after the elections. To do this, they need to ensure that the coalition remains dependent on them.
To ensure this happens, they are locking the gates of the coalition to the Haredim and throwing the key into the sea. "The door is locked to those who are in favor of draft dodging," said Bennett, adding, "In my cabinet, there will be no draft dodgers," and Lieberman added this week, "Either a government will be formed that will draft everyone — or no government will be formed at all." The lack of flexibility is more than a value statement — it is an engineering tool for clearing the path to Balfour.
Everything is honey
The familiar sentence: "Good times create weak people, and weak people create hard times," can also be said about polls that are too good: good numbers create "Anyone-but-Bibi" campaigns, and "Anyone-but-Bibi" campaigns create hard times.
So Benny Gantz already saw 40 mandates in the polls on a good day, and failed to differentiate himself in real-time beyond being not-Bibi, until hard times arrived. In the same way, Bennett followed him, soared in mandates with an "I am not Bibi" campaign combined with the argument of "a right-wing prime minister," and only when he plummeted did he reach the most precise move for him, the management campaign.
Meanwhile, Gadi Eisenkot is already the third person who might drown in the honey trap of the "I am not Bibi" campaign. So far, he has conducted "boring" advocacy in the positive sense, which distinguished him from Netanyahu. Authentic, vulnerable, natural. The problem is that Bennett took the "folksy" move to the extreme. Precisely when his numbers in the polls are still good, Eisenkot needs to return to the drawing board before he experiences what happened to his predecessors. Who knows, maybe a gray shirt will help.
To mix and not be swallowed
Such a thing has not happened since the founding of the state — in all Jewish parties in the upcoming elections, there will be kippah-wearers in the party leadership. Once, religious Zionism was a small house with one key; today it has a room in every house but without the key. This is the real test.
In the outgoing Knesset, a record was set for the number of religious MKs — 27 in total. But this figure contains a more interesting phenomenon: for the first time, most of the kippah-wearing MKs or graduates of religious education were in parties that are not religious. Until the last Knesset, the religious lived in a reserve; in 2022, they went out into the wild.
There is one moment that every parent in religious Zionism knows, when the child leaves the yeshiva into the world. For years, he lived in an airtight greenhouse of people like him. And then, one day, he is thrown into a platoon where no one was in Bnei Akiva. At this point, the real test arrives: will he know how to deal with the new world around him? Will he change or integrate? Will he influence or be influenced?
In the upcoming elections, Jewish tradition will move to the forefront. With a kippah or without, Israel is a more believing, more connected, more Jewish country. Religious Zionism has reached the moment it has been educating for three generations. Now the time has come for its politicians to also turn from Avraham Fried to Hanan Ben-Ari.
And I saw a cypress
Oren Smadja joined politics this week in Ardan's "Ha-Achdut" party. He belongs to the genre of inspirational joiners in elections: these are people who are not politicians and really do not need this; we are the ones who need them.
Staff Sergeant Omer Smadja fell on his father's birthday. Since the disaster, his parents have established a pre-military preparatory program in his name. Oren is a symbol of inspiration for bereaved parents to persist in moving forward, and he moved an entire country when he brought the medal in Paris with Peter Paltchik — a fighter raised a fighter.
At his son's funeral, Smadja said: "My message to the soldiers — do not stop until we win. The people of Israel live." Yes, these are exactly who our public representatives should be.
