Settlements Minister Strock tops Religious Zionism vote as party unveils Knesset slate

The far-right Religious Zionism party unveils the results of its internal vote, with incumbent lawmakers largely filling the only realistic spots on the party’s Knesset slate, beginning with Settlements Minister Orit Strock. Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich was reelected to lead the roster in a vote by the central committee last year and did not participate in today’s vote.

Strock is followed by MKs Simcha Rothman, Zvi Sukkot, Ohad Tal, and newcomer Omer Rahamim, who heads the Yesha Council, an umbrella organization representing West Bank settlements, supplanting incumbent lawmaker Michal Woldiger, who falls to seventh place.

Next in line were Rabbi Shmuel Sasson, Petah Tikva Deputy Mayor Tzvika Weizengrad, Rosh Haayin Deputy Mayor Eitan Tam, and Natan Zaubman, who heads a program assisting French immigrants to Israel.

The list is not yet final, however, as Smotrich controls two reserved spots in the party’s top 10 and is expected to use one of them for Tzvika Mor, the father of former hostage Eitan Mor, who joined the party in May.

Voting was limited to members of the party’s central committee, rather than its full membership.

Polls project the party to win just four or five seats — or fail to cross the threshold altogether — unless it mounts a joint campaign with fellow far-right party Otzma Yehudit, as it did in the 2022 election.

Despite the polls, Smotrich asserts tonight that the party will win 10 seats in the October 27 election. Hailing the internal vote results, he warns that “the right and the national camp are in a slumber reminiscent of the 1992 election on the eve of the accursed Oslo Accords,” adding that if Yashar party leader Gadi Eisenkot, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s main rival, is elected, the country will “wake up the day after the election with a dangerous left-wing government backed by the Arab parties.”

Eisenkot “will destroy everything we have built in Judea and Samaria and, together with his left-wing partners, return to the Oslo path of establishing a Palestinian state,” he says. Eisenkot has called the notion of Palestinian statehood “irrelevant” after the October 7 attack, and has largely voiced centrist and center-right positions.

Amid rising violence, including ongoing daily settler attacks on Palestinians in the West Bank, Smotrich pledges to continue strengthening “the pioneering settlers and the heroic farm outposts,” and to “cancel the Oslo Accords and abolish the division of the Land of Israel into Areas A, B, and C.”