Israeli Election Season Opens With the Far Right Moving First

Israel's governing bloc spent the final weekend of July selecting its hardest edge. Religious Zionism, the far-right faction led by Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, held its central committee primary on Sunday, and the slate it produced dominated Israeli political coverage into Monday. Ninety-two days remain before the country elects its 26th Knesset on October 27, the latest date the law allows and the one the coalition itself announced earlier this month, according to Haaretz. Anyone expecting the campaign to open with a national argument about the war, the hostages, or the courts received something else entirely: a tutorial in how this Israeli election will actually be fought, bloc by bloc, threshold by threshold, seat by seat.

The primary results deserve close reading because they define the pole around which the right now organizes. The Times of Israel reported that Settlements Minister Orit Strock captured second place behind Smotrich, who was reelected party leader last year and did not stand in the vote. Simcha Rothman, the principal legislative draftsman of the government's judicial overhaul, followed, with lawmakers Zvi Sukkot and Ohad Tal behind him and Yesha Council chief Omer Rahamim in sixth. Haaretz observed that the ticket is now headed by a minister who urged pressing the Gaza war even at the risk of the hostages, alongside the man most identified with the 2023 attempt to curb the Supreme Court. Smotrich also intends to reserve a slot near the top for Tzvika Mor, father of a former hostage, The Times of Israel reported.

Primary engineered for survival

None of this is aimed at persuading the median Israeli voter, and that is the point. Recent surveys project Religious Zionism winning only four or five seats, and possibly missing the 3.25 percent electoral threshold altogether unless it reunites with Itamar Ben-Gvir's Otzma Yehudit for a joint run, as the two factions did in 2022, according to The Times of Israel. Smotrich, undeterred, has predicted ten seats. The slate he assembled is a survival instrument: consolidate the ideological core, demonstrate organizational discipline, and enter merger talks with Ben-Gvir from a position of strength rather than supplication.

In Israel's fragmented proportional system, this is rational behavior. Elections there are lost less often at the ballot box than in the wastage column, where votes for parties that miss the threshold simply evaporate. The right absorbed that lesson through the four deadlocked contests of 2019 to 2021 and applied it ruthlessly in 2022, when disciplined mergers on one side and threshold failures on the other converted a near-even electorate into a decisive Netanyahu majority. Sunday's primary says the right intends to run the same play again.

Netanyahu's quarrel of convenience

The prime minister, meanwhile, is performing a different kind of arithmetic. Ynet has reported that Benjamin Netanyahu launched uncharacteristic public attacks on his ultra-Orthodox partners after the electoral damage Likud absorbed from two laws passed for their benefit: one shielding Haredi draft evaders from arrest, the other a Basic Law enshrining Torah study. With the army still demanding manpower for a long war, draft exemptions have become radioactive among the broader right-wing public, and Netanyahu's response has been to pick a loud fight with the very parties he legislated for. Ynet describes the strategy plainly: distance from the Haredim before the election, restore the alliance after it.

The Haredi side has stopped pretending otherwise. Rabbi Dov Lando, the spiritual leader of the Degel HaTorah faction, ordered his lawmakers to work toward dissolving the Knesset and declared, "We no longer have confidence in Netanyahu," according to Ynet, which also reported that the Hasidic Agudat Yisrael faction is signaling openness to sitting with today's opposition. Perhaps. But the operating assumption across the political system remains that the old bloc reassembles the morning after the vote. Israeli voters are being asked to referee a quarrel that both parties expect to settle out of court, and on current polling many of them know it.

Opposition's paper majority

Set against this machinery, the opposition's lead looks softer than the headline numbers suggest. A Channel 13 survey published on July 22 gave the bloc of Jewish opposition parties 60 seats, the coalition 49, and the Arab parties 11, Haaretz reported. On paper, Netanyahu is beaten. In practice, 60 is not 61, and the opposition bloc stretches from Naftali Bennett's nationalist right through Yair Lapid's center to the left-wing Democrats, a coalition of mutual exhaustion rather than shared purpose. Its route to a majority runs through the Arab parties' 11 seats, which several of its own leaders have historically refused to count as coalition material.

Bloomberg's assessment of the race, published July 21, captured the paradox: most surveys show Netanyahu's coalition falling short of a majority, yet he remains the single most dominant figure in Israeli politics, still outpolling individual rivals on leadership measures even as head-to-head matchups with Bennett tighten. Haaretz adds a detail that should worry the opposition more than any topline: the undecided share is markedly higher among religious voters than in the rest of the electorate. That is precisely the population Smotrich's slate and Netanyahu's Haredi theater are built to mobilize.

Arithmetic beats atmosphere

Here is the uncomfortable conclusion the weekend's events point toward. One side of Israeli politics is running a machine; the other is running a mood. The anti-Netanyahu camp holds a genuine polling advantage, a public exhausted by war and scandal, and a plausible change candidate in Bennett. What it does not yet have is the mechanical discipline that decides Israeli elections: agreed mergers to protect small parties, a shared answer on cooperation with Arab factions, and a turnout operation to match the Haredi and settler machines. The right, for all its internal feuds, demonstrated this weekend that it treats list-building, threshold management and bloc choreography as the campaign itself, not as housekeeping.

The next three months will supply plenty of noise: Netanyahu's corruption trial grinds on, the confrontation with Iran remains unresolved, and the war's costs continue to compound. But the dates that matter most are the legal deadlines for submitting final party lists, when mergers harden and wasted votes are either prevented or guaranteed. Watch whether Smotrich and Ben-Gvir reunite, whether the Haredi parties' flirtation with the opposition survives contact with their voters, and whether Bennett and Lapid can agree on anything beyond Netanyahu's removal. The far right moved first, and it moved on the only battlefield that reliably decides an Israeli election. Until the opposition fights there too, its 60 seats will remain what they are today: a majority on paper, and an arithmetic problem everywhere else.