MEFILES

Ben Gvir refuses Netanyahu’s merger order, and Likud accuses him of crowning Eisenkot

The prime minister spent Sunday on a friendly channel warning that Israel’s existence is on the ballot. His own far-right flank spent it telling him no.

Netanyahu asked Itamar Ben Gvir to fold Otzma Yehudit into Bezalel Smotrich’s Religious Zionism, whose support is hovering at or below the 3.25% threshold in most current polling, to “save the right-wing bloc.” Ben Gvir refused. Otzma Yehudit, according to the Times of Israel, countered that Netanyahu should instead unite all the small right-wing parties polling below the threshold, or hand Smotrich one of the premier’s reserved slots on the Likud slate. Likud replied with a written statement — issued in the party’s name, not an individual’s: “In his decision to burn tens of thousands of right-wing votes and not unite with Smotrich, Ben Gvir decided today to coronate a left-wing government of Gadi Eisenkot, Avigdor Liberman, Yair Golan, and the Arab parties.”

On Sunday evening Netanyahu sat for a lengthy appearance on Channel 14’s “The Patriots” — a venue the Times of Israel describes in its own copy as pro-Netanyahu, and not a press conference. He said Israel’s existence was at stake on 27 October, credited himself with overriding domestic and international pressure to act in Gaza, Lebanon, Syria and Iran, and named former IDF chief Gadi Eisenkot as one source of that pressure. “From a situation in which we have become a global power — certainly a regional power, but in certain respects a global one as well — we could deteriorate all at once,” he said. On Ben Gvir, per the Jerusalem Post: “He is coming out with great anger, I do not understand why. When Smotrich was high and he was low, Ben-Gvir called on him to put his ego aside and unite, and Smotrich did the responsible thing.”

The Kan News poll published around 30 August supplies the reason the fight is unresolvable. It found a Smotrich–Ben Gvir merger is backed by 57% of coalition voters — and would leave the two with ten seats where running separately yields twelve, with Ofer Winter’s new party rising to five in that scenario. Kan also had the opposition bloc slipping from 57 to 55 and the coalition rising from 51 to 52, with the Arab parties at 13, and Eisenkot ahead of Netanyahu on suitability to serve as prime minister, 40% to 37%. Kan did not publish a sample size in the version available here.

Assessment: Ben Gvir’s refusal is rational and Likud’s fury is also rational; that is the trap. A merger satisfies the bloc’s voters and costs the bloc seats, so Netanyahu is asking his most transactional partner to absorb a loss for a collective good — the one thing that partner has never done. Read the Likud statement as a positioning document rather than an argument: it pre-assigns blame for a defeat that has not happened, which is what parties do when internal polling has stopped improving. Distrust the framing that this is about ideology. It is about who eats the threshold.

Six Israeli polls in eight days put Netanyahu’s bloc anywhere between 43 and 59 seats

One pollster gives the prime minister a majority. Every other house gives him a defeat. The spread is the story, and the new variable is a retired brigadier general.

Maariv’s poll of 28 August, by Lazar Research with Panel4ALL, put Netanyahu’s bloc at 43 seats without Ofer Winter’s new party and 48 with it, the Zionist opposition down one to 59 and the Arab parties at 13 — with 11.5% of voters undecided, a reservoir larger than the gap between most of these blocs. Walla, on 26 August, had the same shape: Netanyahu 43, opposition 59, Winter six, Religious Zionism below the threshold at 2.6%. Channel 13’s poll of 26 August, conducted by Hamadad with Stat-Net, Midgam Project and Askaria, had Eisenkot’s Yashar at 24 and Likud plunging four to 19; Haaretz’s own dek put the coalition at 48 while its body text said 49. Zman Yisrael, sampling 500 with a stated margin of error of ±4.4%, had Yashar 26, Likud 22 and the pro-Netanyahu bloc including Winter at 51.

One poll dissents entirely. Direct Polls, for i24NEWS, published around 27 August, gave Winter’s party — rendered in Hebrew as Amcha Yisrael — eight seats and the right-religious bloc 59 against the centre-left’s 49, with Likud largest at 26 and Yashar second at 23. It is the only survey in the set that puts Likud ahead and the only one that hands Netanyahu a governing majority. Winter, who launched the party in Jerusalem on 25 August, told Haaretz on 27 August that Netanyahu is the only candidate he would endorse for prime minister — a statement that followed, per Haaretz, a two-day Likud campaign warning voters he would recommend Liberman or Eisenkot instead. Liberman, on 30 August: “I welcome any good man who joins the political system. Winter is a man of values, a combat soldier, and I welcome [him].”

Assessment: Do not average these. A poll average built across Direct Polls and Channel 13 produces a number no pollster believes and hides the only finding they agree on: Winter’s seats come out of Smotrich’s hide, and in most scenarios push Religious Zionism under the threshold, which subtracts from the bloc he says he wants to serve. The Likud trend line is the harder datum — 24 seats on 30 June, 23 on 4 August, 22 on 11 August, 19 on 26 August. Netanyahu’s Monday warning that Winter could bring his coalition down is an admission that the threat is arithmetic, not ideological. Note also that Winter was Liberman’s military secretary at the defence ministry, which is why his endorsement is being read in Israel as reversible.

Shas’s spiritual leader curses the attorney general and warns Temple Mount visitors of agonising death

Rabbi Yitzhak Yosef aimed at Gali Baharav-Miara and at Itamar Ben Gvir on the same day — the clearest sign yet of the Haredi–Kahanist fracture inside Netanyahu’s coalition.

On 30 August, according to the Times of Israel, Rabbi Yitzhak Yosef called Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara “evil” and “crazy” and said “may God finish her” — the paper’s rendering of the Hebrew — over her order postponing a state-funded memorial service for his father, Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, until after the 27 October election. The same day he attacked National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir, saying those who visit the Temple Mount may “die in excruciating agony.” The peg was a handout photograph of Ben Gvir displaying an Israeli flag atop the Temple Mount alongside an Otzma Yehudit MK. Only the headline and dek of these items were retrievable here; the full Hebrew remarks were not.

Assessment: Two attacks in one day, one on the state’s chief legal officer and one on a sitting minister from the same bloc, and only the first is about the election. The Temple Mount rebuke is doctrinal and old — mainstream Haredi rabbinic authority forbids ascending the compound — but its timing, the same weekend Ben Gvir refused Netanyahu’s merger, is what makes it political. The prime minister’s problem is not that his flank is too small; it is that its two components regard each other as illegitimate. Treat the quoted curse cautiously: it reaches us as an English rendering of Hebrew remarks whose full text we have not seen.