Israel’s Right is conducting an experiment in political self-sabotage.
On August 20, I argued that the Israeli Right needs a merger, not another messiah. Since then, the case has become even more obvious. Ofer Winter has People of Israel. Gilad Erdan and Yuli Edelstein have Unity. Yoaz Hendel and Chili Tropper have Zionist Home. Sharren Haskel has Israel First.
Everyone wants unity so badly that they keep starting new parties to achieve it. This is not a voter shortage. It is a politician surplus.
The math now moves almost daily.
A Walla poll conducted September 1-2 put Winter below the threshold while the newly united Smotrich-Feiglin list crossed it.
A Channel 13 poll that same evening put Smotrich-Feiglin at six seats and Winter at four.
The exact winner changes by poll. The structural problem does not. The Right keeps moving overlapping voters among competing political vehicles.
Bezalel Smotrich and Moshe Feiglin have now signed a technical-bloc agreement, with Feiglin accepting second place and with room left for Winter to join ahead of him.
Whatever one thinks of that list, the mechanism matters. Somebody accepted second place.
Winter has refused so far, and reportedly rejected five guaranteed Likud slots, arguing that Israel needs leaders untainted by the failures of October 7. Fair enough. Israel needs new political blood.
But every new leader does not need a new ballot slip. Renewal and consolidation are not opposites.
The larger bench is no longer hypothetical. Winter already has Yoseph Haddad and Fleur Hassan-Nahoum. Unity has Erdan, Edelstein, and Aliza Bloch. Zionist Home has Hendel and Tropper. Israel First has Sharren Haskel and Jonathan Pollard, with additional candidates still to be announced.
Put those networks under one roof, and you have ministers, a former Knesset speaker, diplomats, commanders, and new blood shaped by October 7.
The Israeli Right is not merely wasting votes. It may be wasting the makings of an entire government.
That bench is also why consolidation is difficult. Erdan has the résumé. Edelstein has the stature. Winter has military credentials and momentum. Haskel has ideological breadth and diplomatic experience.
The tragedy begins when each concludes that being qualified for first makes third unacceptable.
Being number one in a four-seat party may feel more important than being number three in a governing movement. It is not. One gives a title. The other gives power.
Benny Gantz and Erdan continue discussing a merger while both parties remain below the threshold in the latest Walla poll.
But Gantz said he will not sit with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu; Unity deliberately left that door open. A merger can solve an electoral problem while creating an identity problem.
That brings me back to Menachem Begin. Israelis remember the 1977 mahapach (revolution) as the night he ended almost three decades of Labor dominance. But the lesson came before election night.
Herut joined the Liberal Party to form Gahal. Gahal later joined other factions to create Likud. Politicians who disagreed about plenty discovered that common purpose mattered more than their individual vehicles.
The Hebrew word “likud” means consolidation. Before Likud became a proper noun, it described an action. Israel does not necessarily need another Likud. It needs another act of likud.
The next Begin will not be whoever quotes Begin most often or insists on heading the newest party. It will be whoever persuades ambitious people that being second, third, or fourth together is more consequential than being first alone.
We do not yet know who that is. Of all the people in this space, Haskel is the one I am watching closely.
The next mahapach
I know Sharren. I have advised her and consider her a friend. I have watched her when the cameras were on and off. That may create blind spots. It has also shown me something I value in a culture addicted to performance: she works.
More importantly, Haskel pushed consolidation before the current proliferation made the need impossible to ignore. She has said her first campaign was a campaign of unity and that she still believes these forces need to connect. Consolidation came first. The splinter parties came after.
Haskel has already surrendered something political. She resigned as deputy foreign minister over haredi (ultra-Orthodox) military exemptions.
After Oct. 7, reservists returned repeatedly, and Israel needed manpower, yet politicians were still negotiating how to protect draft evaders. Principles are popular until they cost somebody a chair. This one cost Haskel hers.
Now comes the harder sacrifice. As Israel First fills out its slate, any new momentum should become leverage for consolidation, not an excuse to abandon it. If Israel First really means Israel first, Haskel may have to accept being number two, three, or four on a consolidated list.
Someone else may head it. Israel First may disappear into something larger. She has said her party is not a personal campaign for prime minister, but an effort to fix broken systems. Good. That is exactly the test.
The standard applies to everyone. Winter must decide whether independence is an achievement when one poll gives him four seats, and another leaves him outside the Knesset. His argument for renewal is legitimate, but renewal without consolidation can still produce newer names competing for the same voters.
Erdan, Edelstein, Hendel, and Tropper must decide which red lines are principles and which are obstacles.
That is consolidation: not everyone becoming identical, but everyone understanding that power requires giving something up.
A constituency is waiting: right-wing Israelis who cannot stand Netanyahu yet will never vote for the Left; secular Israelis who love Judaism; religious Israelis who serve and resent unequal sacrifice; entrepreneurs suffocating under bureaucracy; reservists who feel the system does not represent the people carrying the country.
Commentators call them the moderate Right. I hate that description. Oct. 7 made many more hawkish. They want a country strong enough to survive and serious enough to deserve what it asks from its citizens.
For 2,000 years, Jews could say somebody else controlled the army, borders, and machinery of government. Zionism ended that excuse. Sovereignty means that there is no someone else. We are the someone else.
Millions of Israelis increasingly feel they carry responsibilities their political system does not represent: responsibility without representation. Begin understood that possibility. He did not merely find voters. He helped voters find one another.
The ideological home already exists: national strength, individual liberty, Jewish identity, and shared responsibility. Call it national liberalism. Israel should be strong and unmistakably Jewish. Its citizens should be free. Its economy should reward people who build. Citizenship should carry rights and obligations.
The Right does not need to become less right-wing. It needs to remember that anger is not an ideology and outrage is not a governing program. That is why the next mahapach has to happen inside the Right.
We do not yet know who the next Begin is. But we know what the job requires. Someone has to convince a remarkable collection of Israelis that being second, third, or fourth together matters more than being first alone. Someone has to make common purpose larger than ego. Someone has to turn Likud back into a verb.
Sharren Haskel may understand that task better than most. The question is whether she can make the others understand it, too.
That is how the next mahapach begins.
The writer is the founder and CEO of The Israel Innovation Fund and author of the forthcoming book What Is Zionism?