Itamar Ben Gvir has refused to sit down with Bezalel Smotrich — and made clear he won’t be changing his mind.
On Friday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu publicly invited both far-right figures to a Sunday meeting to discuss a joint list ahead of the October 27 election, warning that right-wing votes would be thrown away without unity. “No vote can go to waste; the parties must unite in order to save the right-wing bloc!” the PM declared.
Ben Gvir’s Otzma Yehudit party responded within hours. Their decision to keep the parties separate was “final and complete,” the statement read, and there would be “no talks, or meetings, or discussions on the topic, not directly, and not indirectly.”
Otzma Yehudit counter-proposed two alternatives: either all the small right-wing parties that can’t reliably clear the 3.25% electoral threshold should run together, or Netanyahu should use one of his reserved Likud slate spots to prop up Smotrich’s party, which is hovering around the threshold in the polls.
Likud’s response was a full-blown declaration of political war. The party accused Ben Gvir of “burning tens of thousands of right-wing votes” and, in doing so, “coronating a left-wing government of Gadi Eisenkot, Avigdor Liberman, Yair Golan, and the Arab parties.” The statement invoked the specter of 1992 directly: “Or will Ben Gvir, out of political considerations, burn right-wing votes in order to coronate a left-wing government — exactly like in 1992, when we got Oslo?”
The election is now seven weeks away. Polls show Yashar’s Gadi Eisenkot leading, with the new party of Gadi Yonatan Winter surging. Smotrich’s Religious Zionism remains in no-man’s land, and the right-wing bloc’s fate now turns on whether Ben Gvir’s ego bends before October 27 — or whether Likud really does face the government it has spent every election cycle since 1992 trying to prevent.
Source: Times of Israel, Aug 28, 2026