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

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.