Likud’s Court Hands Netanyahu Eleven of the Top Twenty-Nine Slate Positions in Two Days
Three reserved slots were settled on 11 and 12 August, six days before postponed primaries, while the party that holds 32 Knesset seats polls at 23 to 24.
Likud’s internal court unanimously approved reserved slate positions for Defence Minister Israel Katz and Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar on Tuesday 11 August, and on the same day blocked a vote on a reserved slot for Central Committee chair and senior minister Haim Katz. On Wednesday 12 August the three-judge panel approved Haim Katz’s slot by majority. The Jerusalem Post’s 13 August analysis puts the cumulative result plainly: Netanyahu will control 11 of the top 29 positions on Likud’s next Knesset slate. The primaries themselves were originally set for 4 August and moved to 17 August, per Ynet, with some coverage citing 18 August; the date may slip again. The general election is 27 October.
The same JPost analysis carries the arithmetic that makes the slate fight worth having and worth losing: Likud currently holds 32 seats but is polling at an average of 23 to 24, a figure described as a polling average with no sample sizes stated. Older surveys point the same way. A Channel 12 poll reported by Times of Israel on 3 August gave Zionist opposition parties 56 seats against 50 for Netanyahu’s bloc, with Tropper–Hendel’s tentatively named Zionist Home on 4, Ra’am on 5 and Hadash-Ta’al on 5 — a 60-seat anti-Netanyahu bloc, one short in a 120-seat Knesset. The Center for Israel Education’s summary of late-June and July polling put the Likud–Haredi–far-right bloc at 49 to 52.
Two Haaretz items on 13 August bear on how the campaign will be covered. One, behind the paywall and uncorroborated elsewhere, reports that NVP, a production company employed by Likud, has begun publishing and promoting podcasts hosted by pro-government media personalities, including the prime minister’s brother. The other, an analysis pegged to the primaries, argues Likud is no longer enabling the far right but has become it.
Assessment: Reserved slots are an insurance policy against the electorate, not a bet on it: they guarantee ministers seats in a caucus the polls say will shrink by roughly a third. That is the tell. The 62 percent of Israelis who told Channel 12 on 3 August that “total victory” will never arrive is the number Likud’s internal engineering is designed to survive rather than answer. Treat the 23–24 average as a range without published methodology, and treat the NVP podcast report as one outlet’s until a second confirms it — though a party-contracted production house pushing friendly audio six days before a primary is the more testable claim of the two Haaretz pieces.