Two formidable political rivals of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced on Sunday (the 26th) that they would join forces in an attempt to topple his coalition government in the upcoming elections, scheduled for the end of this year.
The former prime ministers—the right-wing Naftali Bennett and the centrist Yair Lapid—issued statements announcing the merger of their parties, Bennett 2026 and There Is a Future.
‘We are here together for the sake of our children. The State of Israel needs to change course,’ Lapid said beside Bennett at a joint press conference.
Bennett stated that the new party would be named Together and that he would be its leader. ‘After 30 years, it’s time for us to part ways with Netanyahu and open a new chapter for Israel,’ he said.
Since his first term in the 1990s, Netanyahu has become a polarizing figure both in his country and abroad.
Uniting Forces
Bennett and Lapid had joined forces before, ending Netanyahu’s 12-year consecutive term in the 2021 elections, only to form a coalition government that, with a slim majority and deeply divided on important issues such as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, survived for just over 18 months.
Their coalition included, for the first time in Israel’s history, a party formed by members of the country’s Arab minority—Palestinians by descent, Israelis by citizenship—the United Arab List (UAL).
Before that, the duo forced their entry into the 2013 coalition government, in a maneuver that excluded Netanyahu’s traditional ultra-Orthodox Jewish allies.
Netanyahu, the prime minister who has served the longest in Israel, returned to power by winning the November 2022 elections and forming the most right-wing government in Israel’s history.
But Hamas’s attack on southern Israel in 2023, which plunged the Middle East into chaos and forced Israel to fight on multiple fronts, left Netanyahu’s security credentials in tatters, and polls since then have forecast that he will lose the next election, due to be held at the end of October.
Netanyahu’s Survival
Netanyahu, the most influential Israeli politician of his generation, has nonetheless shown, in the past, a remarkable capacity for political survival.
On Sunday, he posted a 2021 photo of Bennett and Lapid with the head of the UAL, Mansour Abbas. ‘They did it once, they will do it again,’ Netanyahu said in a Telegram post, in what appeared to be a jab at the brief 2021 coalition that included the UAL.
Bennett said that he would not seek another coalition with Arab parties and ruled out the possibility of ceding any territory to enemies, in an apparent reference to the Palestinians’ aim to establish an independent state in the territories occupied by Israel.
Changes in the Landscape
Bennett, 54, a former combat army commander who became a tech-millionaire, trails Netanyahu in the polls.
A survey conducted on April 23 by Israel’s N12 News showed Bennett with 21 of the 120 Knesset seats, versus 25 seats for Netanyahu’s Likud.
The poll found Lapid’s party with only seven seats, compared with 24 he currently holds, while Netanyahu’s coalition, formed by right-wing and religious parties, had only 50 seats, versus at least 60 seats for the likely Bennett-Lapid coalition, which would include several smaller factions.
This is a controversial issue in Israel, which has become even more urgent since the armed forces warned about overburdening their resources, with the last two years recording the highest number of military deaths in decades.
Both Lapid and Bennett have made this a central theme of their campaigns. They also criticized Netanyahu for failing to translate military gains into strategic victories over Iran and the groups he supports in Lebanon and in Gaza—the Hezbollah and Hamas.
