Like most Israelis, I was surprised on Sunday when Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid announced they were merging their parties for the upcoming election.
Most assumed Bennett would go first to Gadi Eisenkot. Some thought Avigdor Liberman. Almost nobody expected Lapid.
The political logic of the move is real. Bennett looked at a fragmented opposition that had spent three years failing to convert anti-Netanyahu sentiment into a governing majority and decided to be the one who consolidated it. He moved first. He took the top of the list. He forced Lapid to accept his leadership. By any traditional reading of Israeli coalition arithmetic, that’s a serious play.
The arithmetic is no longer traditional: The April 27 cluster of polls puts the new Together list at an average of 25 seats, against the Likud’s 28. Eisenkot’s Yashar trails at 13.
The combined anti-Netanyahu Zionist bloc lands at 55 seats, the Netanyahu bloc at 55, Arab parties at 10. Complete deadlock. The merger, meant to break the bloc problem, has frozen it in place at a slightly bigger scale. The whole has become smaller than the sum of its parts.
The deadlock is structural, not seasonal. Bennett has been clear that he will rely only on Zionist parties, meaning no Arab list will sit in his coalition. That position helps him with soft-right voters who remember 2021.
Bennett can still change the picture by announcing visible right-wing names on his list.
It raises a brutal arithmetic question: where do the 61 seats come from?
If Bennett rules out the Arab parties and Benjamin Netanyahu’s bloc holds together, his only paths to power are an Eisenkot-Liberman-Gantz consolidation that swallows half the opposition into one list, a Likud collapse, or a haredi defection from Netanyahu. All three are possible. None should be assumed.
Bennett has spoken of forming a government of 80 or 85 MKs. That is a beautiful ambition, but it sounds detached from the math.
To understand why, look at the two electorates Bennett needs.
The first is what we call the soft-right or liberal-conservative vote. People who have had enough of Netanyahu and are looking for somewhere else to go. Bennett could have been that destination. He’s a former prime minister, religiously observant without being aggressively so, hi-tech, security-minded, internationally presentable.
The right-wing voters I know who were considering him have been turned off. The Lapid name carries years of tribal coding in their world, and the merger triggered immediate flashbacks to 2021, when they felt Bennett let them down. The Likud now has the easiest possible attack line: Bennett is Lapid with a kippah. Unfair, perhaps. Effective, almost certainly.
The second electorate is left-wing voters who considered Bennett because they thought he was the only one who could beat Netanyahu, and because he seemed to them the least objectionable of the right-wing options.
Many of these voters are disappointed in Lapid himself. They feel he let them down as opposition leader during a historic period of war, hostage crisis, and the most right-wing government in Israel’s history. Bennett has bound himself to a politician half his target audience finds tired and the other half finds untrustworthy.
Some of this can be repaired. Bennett can still change the picture by announcing visible right-wing names on his list. People with security backgrounds, ideological clarity, and religious credibility. But that should have happened yesterday. Every day that passes locks the early framing in further.
On X this week, the conversation among Hebrew-speaking users tilted heavily negative. A sample of high-engagement Hebrew posts about the merger found roughly 60% framing it in critical or mocking terms, with about 40% explicitly calling it desperate, expired, or fake.
Only 23% read as positive or hopeful, and most of that energy stayed inside the existing anti-Netanyahu bubble. Right-wing accounts drove 65% to 70% of viral content. The dominant register is sarcasm. “Expired political goods.” “Stand-up comedy.” “Fake union.” Positive posts get likes and rarely get crossed out. First impressions on a political brand harden quickly, and the first 72 hours have not gone well.
THIS IS not to say the merger cannot work. Bennett and Lapid have political instincts. They’ve done this before, and they ran a functioning government under genuinely strange conditions for 18 months.
But the country they built that government for is gone. After October 7, what Israelis call “the conception” – the entire framework of assumptions held by the security establishment about deterrence, about Hamas, about the border – blew up in our faces.
The same word now describes the broader collapse of trust in the institutions that were supposed to be running the country. Many Israelis said in the months after October 7 that they wanted something new. Some said we needed 120 new Knesset members. The Bennett-Lapid merger is the opposite of that. It is two veteran politicians with a previous joint government, presenting themselves as the answer to a public mood that wants the slate cleaned.
Israel has become more conservative, more right-wing, more religious, and more traditional since October 7. Every serious data set confirms it. The Jewish People Policy Institute found that 27% of Jewish respondents observe more traditions since the war, rising to 33% among those under 25. Faith in God increased among 28% of Jewish respondents and 35% of young Jews.
The hard Right grew from 11% before October 7 to 19%. The Pew Research Center found that only 21% of Israeli adults now believe Israel and a Palestinian state can coexist peacefully, the lowest figure since 2013. A Midgam poll in February found that 75% of first-time Israeli voters identify as right-wing.
Numbers are one thing. Conversations are another. I cannot count the number of times I have met people from Tel Aviv or Herzliya Pituah, some of the wealthiest and most secular addresses in the country, who tell me about their own children or their neighbors’ children. Kids from secular, left-wing families who started keeping kosher or observing Shabbat.
Parents who mention, sometimes in disbelief, that their son or daughter will be voting for Itamar Ben-Gvir while they themselves are voting for Yair Golan.
The cultural tide has turned harder than the political class wants to admit, and it has turned in a direction Bennett’s new vehicle was not built to ride.
If Bennett has done the deep research he claims to have done into Israeli society, how does this merger fit it? The honest answer is that it doesn’t.
Two things are smart. The haredi draft issue is one of them. Bennett identified early that conscription has become an existential and emotional issue after October 7, particularly for the families of reservists and the bereaved, and a campaign built around it can attract centrist and even right-wing voters.
The other smart move is being the first to consolidate. Whatever its flaws, the merger has made Together the largest political object outside the Netanyahu camp, and that has its own gravitational effect on the next round of negotiations.
What is missing is a serious answer to legal and institutional reform. A large segment of the public supports dramatic change. The Israel Democracy Institute found that 71% of Israelis think the country needs a constitution; 46.5% of Jews and 47% of Arabs agreed in 2025 that it would be better to dismantle all political institutions and start over. The desire for an institutional reset is cross-camp. It is one of the few places in Israeli politics where Right and Left sound similar.
Bennett and Lapid have not made it a headline issue. Voters who want dramatic legal reform, including many who soured on Yariv Levin’s package but still believe the system needs structural change, will look elsewhere.
Bennett can still win. He has time, money, organization, and a real argument against the man in the prime minister’s chair.
But he is running on an architecture built for the question Israel asked in 2021: Who can replace Netanyahu without scaring the Center?
The question Israel is asking in 2026 is another one: Who can rebuild the country after “the conception” collapsed?
The Bennett-Lapid merger does not yet answer this question. Whether it ever will depends on what Bennett does next, and how fast he does it.
