Ben Gvir refuses Netanyahu’s merger demand, saying the prime minister wants him small
Netanyahu spent Thursday and Friday pressing Otzma Yehudit and Religious Zionism to run on a joint slate before the 27 October election. Ben Gvir read the request as a plan to make room for Gadi Eisenkot after the vote.
Netanyahu opened the sequence on Thursday 27 August with a video on his Telegram channel appealing to Itamar Ben Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich to merge slates, hours after a poll from Zman Yisrael, the Times of Israel’s Hebrew sister publication, put Ofer Winter’s newly launched People of Israel party at six seats and pushed Smotrich’s Religious Zionism below the threshold. “They have to unite,” Netanyahu said, warning, per The Media Line’s summary, that separate candidacies could cost the right-wing bloc representation if smaller parties fail to clear the bar. Ben Gvir answered the same day with the line that has framed everything since: “We both know the truth: you want a small Otzma Yehudit so that you can go with Eisenkot, so that you can establish a ‘broad national government,'” adding that Smotrich should unite with Winter instead.
On Friday Netanyahu invited both men to meet on Sunday to discuss a joint list, saying an alliance was needed to “save the right-wing bloc.” Ben Gvir ruled out talks entirely; Likud responded, in the Times of Israel’s rendering, by accusing him of crowning Eisenkot. Otzma Yehudit’s counter-figure is that a joint run would cost the party three to four seats — a party claim, not a published poll. Haaretz reports Ben Gvir’s aides argue Smotrich is driving ultra-Orthodox and Mizrahi voters toward Winter. Smotrich, for his part, defended the 2022 pact roughly two weeks earlier: “The fact is it brought 64 mandates, put me as finance minister, and brought the National Camp the victory.”
Assessment: The dispute is not about seats, it is about who Netanyahu governs with on 28 October. Ben Gvir has decided that the threshold argument is a pretext and that a diluted Otzma Yehudit is worth less to him than a credible veto over a unity coalition; refusing publicly costs him nothing with his base and prices him into any post-election bargain. Distrust the three-to-four-seat figure — it is Otzma Yehudit’s own number, offered to justify a decision already taken. Watch Sunday: if the meeting happens without Ben Gvir, the story becomes Smotrich’s survival, not the bloc’s.