Bezalel Smotrich and the Religious Zionist Party<\/a>. Several of the people who won that party\u2019s primaries live here, and so do the voters who chose them.<\/p>\nI won\u2019t present what follows as reporting. It\u2019s what I\u2019ve been hearing for weeks at kiddush, the supermarket, and the park: people who\u2019ve voted the same way for 20 years telling me they have no idea what they\u2019ll do this time. None of them has drifted left. A few have gone further to the Right. They\u2019ve simply stopped being sure.<\/p>\n
A few weeks ago I wrote about a couple I know here, where the wife plans to vote the way she always has and the husband, who is no less right-wing than she is, can\u2019t bring himself to vote for Smotrich again. When I wrote about them, he was looking at a former chief of staff. He\u2019s now looking at Winter. He hasn\u2019t landed anywhere. That\u2019s the part I\u2019d ask you to notice.<\/p>\n
Israelis have been splitting and reforming parties since the 1970s, and if that were the whole story here it wouldn\u2019t be worth your time.<\/p>\n
The reshuffle<\/p>\n
For two years I\u2019ve been writing about Jews who came loose from their institutions after October 7 and keep turning up in arrangements nobody planned. I\u2019ve called it the reshuffle, and the people caught in it are hanodedim, the wanderers.<\/p>\n
I treated it as a Diaspora story. That was too narrow, and this is where I stop pretending otherwise. The same thing is happening here, in Hebrew, and this year you can vote for it.<\/p>\n
Take Laly Dery, who\u2019s on Winter\u2019s list. She buried her son in this war. She\u2019s religious, she lives in a settlement, and in Israeli shorthand that tells you exactly where she stands on religion and state.<\/p>\n
Except it doesn\u2019t. She came from France and spent years advocating for French olim (immigrants to Israel), and French Jews arrive with an assumption that startles Israelis: religion and state are separate things, because in France they are. I\u2019ve met plenty of French olim who look strictly observant by any Israeli measure and will tell you they see no reason the buses shouldn\u2019t run on Shabbat.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve known Dery for years, from long before any of this. She was a Likud member. She told me she couldn\u2019t run for office again through Likud.<\/p>\n
Fleur Hassan-Nahum arrived from Gibraltar 25 years ago and built a career on olim and public diplomacy. Natali Shem Tov left a news desk. Winter\u2019s own family was expelled from Gush Katif, which is why, when people on the Right spent this week questioning his credentials, he told them nobody was going to teach him what the Right is.<\/p>\n
Two weeks ago I asked in this column why so few immigrants from Western countries turn up on Israeli party lists, and used Michael Oren as the case. Voters never rejected him. Nobody asked them to consider him. Likud set aside slot 43 for a new immigrant while the party was polling at 23. What this week suggests is that waiting for that door to open was never the route.<\/p>\n
The evidence against me<\/p>\n
Ofer Hadad\u2019s breakdown at N12 on Thursday cuts against most of what I\u2019ve written here, and it\u2019s the most useful piece of analysis published all week.<\/p>\n
Sixty percent of Winter\u2019s support is coming from inside the existing Right: 30% from Likud, 15% from Smotrich, 15% from Itamar Ben Gvir. That\u2019s not a realignment; it\u2019s the same voters moving between rooms in the same house, and it means the argument Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made this week rests on something solid.<\/p>\n
The other 40% is where it gets interesting. A quarter of Winter\u2019s voters had already been telling pollsters they intended to vote for a party that didn\u2019t exist yet. Another 15% were undecided. Four in 10 of them had let go of everything on offer before this party had a name.<\/p>\n
I don\u2019t know which of those numbers ends up mattering more, and I\u2019d be careful of anyone who says they do.<\/p>\n
The refusal<\/p>\n
The sharpest thing I saw this week wasn\u2019t in a poll.<\/p>\n
Benny Biton, the mayor of Dimona and a Likud man, said publicly that Winter had been slated for a reserved slot on Likud\u2019s list and answered by cutting contact and screening calls from the Prime Minister\u2019s Office. Netanyahu is holding five realistic slots, three of them high, to compensate candidates who give ground in mergers. People around Winter explain the refusal simply: they won\u2019t join a party that was in charge on October 7.<\/p>\n
Biton\u2019s own interpretation is worth as much as what he revealed. He said Netanyahu isn\u2019t worried, that this is what campaigns look like, and that the two of them will sit in a government together when the time comes. That\u2019s the establishment\u2019s answer to everything I\u2019ve written here, and he might be right. Lists are filed Monday and Tuesday.<\/p>\n
Nobody can find these voters<\/p>\n
Two polls came out Wednesday, one by Lazar Research for Walla and one by Direct Polls for i24, and they disagree about almost everything. Likud at 21 or at 26. Naftali Bennett at 15 or at eight. Smotrich out of the Knesset, or comfortably in with four. Across the week\u2019s polling, Winter himself ranges from zero to six seats.<\/p>\n
The whole Israeli argument this week has turned on whether Winter pushes Smotrich under the threshold, and two competent houses sampling on the same day can\u2019t agree on it.<\/p>\n
I\u2019d treat that instability as the real result. Pollsters find people when the categories are stable enough to ask about. Three days before lists close, in the middle of a campaign, they can\u2019t.<\/p>\n
Not a foreign story<\/p>\n
Reading this in New York or London or Melbourne, the easy move is to file it under Israeli political dysfunction, which is a familiar genre and requires nothing of you.<\/p>\n
I\u2019d file it somewhere else. The categories that organized Jewish life outside Israel for 50 years \u2013 denomination, affiliation, where you stood on Israel \u2013 don\u2019t predict much anymore either. Most of us have watched people walk out of communities that fit them perfectly on paper and turn up somewhere that makes no sense at all. Institutions have mostly settled on calling it polarization, which I think is wrong, since polarization assumes there are still poles.<\/p>\n
Israel is going through the same thing with the lights on and pollsters in the room, failing to measure it.<\/p>\n
I have no idea whether Winter will sit in the next Knesset. What I can tell you is that the people who built these categories keep assuring us they\u2019ll hold; the categories aren\u2019t behaving that way, and I\u2019m not where mine says I should be either.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Let me get my own record out of the way first, because it\u2019s relevant to everything that follows.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":267710,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[33],"tags":[11285,37,30318,73155,73268],"class_list":["post-267709","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-israel","tag-haredi-draft","tag-israel","tag-israel-elections-2026","tag-ofer-winter","tag-people-of-israel"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@iran\/117170960368965676","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/267709","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=267709"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/267709\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/267710"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=267709"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=267709"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=267709"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}