How political survival broke Israeli military independence

One camp looks at the sudden explosion of new right-wing parties and sees a disaster that'll waste hundreds of thousands of votes below the threshold.

The other camp looks at those exact same new lists and sees the only way to capture voters who left Likud, but refuse to vote for the center-left.

I'm Maya.

And I'm Amos. This is another episode of Sixty One, a Daily Lion production, where we ask what kind of country Israel is supposed to be, one week at a time.

This is a week where fighting for political survival systematically dismantled the boundaries protecting Israel's security and state institutions. Today we're looking at the third bloc gamble, and whether new right-wing parties'll capture disillusioned voters or just waste their ballots. We're tracking Netanyahu's list, as the fight over reserved candidate slots bypasses the primary system entirely. We're following the security detail, where the push to transfer West Bank enforcement to the police looks like a quiet move toward annexation. And we cover the core curriculum ultimatum tearing at the coalition. Then, for our members, we go deep on dismantling the political firewall over military command and draft enforcement, and why the collapse of exemptions is fracturing religious Zionism.

The first story on the desk today is the math on the Israeli right. The electoral threshold sits at three point two five percent.

That number's driving a sudden panic across the pragmatic right. We've seen third-bloc slates like Zionist Home-The Reservists quickly emerge to capture disillusioned voters. The immediate fear from the center-right is that these lists'll just cannibalize the camp, fall short of the threshold, and hand the election away.

The people making this case look at the right and see a massive crisis of political homelessness. They argue Likud's increasingly shrunk from a broad political home into a coalition-maintenance system.

That maintenance system relies heavily on protecting Haredi draft exemptions and elevating extremist leadership, which leaves a significant bloc of conservative voters with nowhere to go. They don't want Itamar Ben-Gvir defining the right.

The demand here is for political realism over ego. The argument is that the leaders of these new factions can't accuse Likud of abandoning the national-liberal right and then divide that constituency.

Politicians like Sharren Haskel have recognized the danger of this fragmentation. She's publicly called on other right-wing figures to join forces.

Without a unified ballot, this reading warns, that fragmentation risks right-wing votes disappearing from the Knesset. You don't solve political homelessness by building five separate houses that nobody can actually fit into.

The populist right has a completely different view of voter psychology. A column in Mida points out that the Israeli right constantly warns that forming new right-wing parties'll split the camp and waste votes.

That column argues the electorate isn't a fixed pie. The writer insists that not every vote cast for a new party is a vote taken from an existing one.

The case for new lists is about pure mobilization. The argument goes that the Israeli right needs to stop fearing internal competition in the national camp.

They point to the new political alliance between Ofer Winter and Yosef Haddad. The piece calls it a perfect illustration of how new lists reach untapped audiences.

In this reading, the right doesn't split — it expands. The bet is that competition forces veteran parties to address neglected issues and brings apathetic voters back to the polls.

Ashley Perry, writing in The Jewish Chronicle, maps out how this third bloc actually functions in practice. He suggests a collection of new parties could become a third bloc that refuses to align automatically with either Netanyahu or the current opposition.

The leverage they hold is the draft. Perry notes that Israeli society's moved to the right on security. The unequal burden of military service is fast becoming Netanyahu's Achilles heel.

He points out that the new alliance formed by Yoaz Hendel and Chili Tropper makes widespread enlistment a condition for joining any coalition.

Recognizing the political danger, Netanyahu's stated that those who don't study Torah must enlist.

As we said last week, Yair Golan's rejecting centrist line-blurring, leaving these new right-wing lists as the only option for soft-right undecided voters. If these new parties pass the electoral threshold, Perry argues, they could determine who governs Israel and under what conditions—assuming neither established bloc reaches sixty-one seats.

The entire opposition strategy now rests on that exact wager. The opposition's refusal to sit with Arab parties or Netanyahu means their only path to sixty-one seats requires these new right-wing lists to perfectly thread the needle — crossing the threshold without cannibalizing existing factions.

Those right-wing voters looking for a new home are doing it because of what just happened to their old one.

The Likud primary.

Right. We've been watching this build since July, when Likud postponed its Central Committee vote. Benjamin Netanyahu was demanding reserved spots on the list, and a contingency plan to cancel the primary entirely if the war escalated. He got the power he wanted, and the week's writing is focused on what he did with it.

The reading from the center points out just how thoroughly he locked down the slate before a single public vote was cast. He guaranteed seats for key allies, and he's effectively shaped eleven of the top twenty-nine places on the list.

That's a massive structural advantage. He used those reserved slots to bypass the primary voters entirely, shielding figures like Israel Katz and Gideon Sa'ar from having to run at all.

That leaves the actual primary voters fighting over whatever slots are left. And the people tracking this from the center are looking at exactly who those voters decided to reward.

They rewarded the architects of the judicial overhaul. The centrist reading notes that the party's voters handed the second and third spots on the list to the most prominent figures fighting the justice system.

It's a complete embrace of that agenda. Criticizing the Supreme Court and using the Attorney General as a slur have just become the standard party line.

As we said last week, center commentators look at these primary fights and see an erosion of civil service professionalism—a shift toward patronage. But this week, the writing is focused on the electoral math. The argument from the people looking at the numbers is that this list speaks to the base, not past it.

The ideological distance between the party's activist core and the far right has narrowed dramatically. The success of former Otzma Yehudit members like Almog Cohen proves the point.

That purity comes with a cost. The people making this case point out that the moderate right-wing voters who abandoned Netanyahu's bloc because they felt the social cost of the overhaul was too high—they probably haven't come back.

There's an irony here, though. Eli Cohen actually secured the top spot in the primaries, and he's perhaps the most moderate Likud minister when it comes to the judicial system.

The center reads that as a sign that the base isn't just rewarding noise. They're also rewarding people who know how to run something.

Knowing how to run something doesn't solve the coalition's math problem, though. Exempting ultra-Orthodox men from military service is still the Achilles heel of Netanyahu's political bloc.

It's a wound that refuses to heal.

The internal pressure is building, too. There's a louder demand from loyal right-wing Likud members for greater burden-sharing, which complicates the party's traditional alliance with the Haredi factions.

The only thing that might fix that math, according to this reading, is external pressure. Establishing a Palestinian state in Gaza could be the issue that reunites the right-wing camp and brings those defectors back to the bloc.

All of this shapes the party Netanyahu's built. Ashley Perry, writing in The Jewish Chronicle, argues that the most significant outcome of this primary isn't who got promoted. It's that no single politician emerged as a viable successor or rival to Netanyahu.

Nobody even came close.

Perry traces this back to the weeks right after October seventh. He notes that Nir Barkat tried to assemble support for a constructive vote of no confidence. That's the Knesset mechanism that lets you replace a prime minister without immediately sending the country to a new election.

Barkat denies the allegations.

He does. But Perry's point is that the party structure makes any challenge impossible. That's the central paradox he sees in the party today: almost every senior figure dreams of succeeding Netanyahu, but none of them can actually afford to behave like a successor. Netanyahu has spent decades systematically marginalizing potential rivals. In his words, Netanyahu has ensured that no tree grows tall beneath him.

He controls those eight reserved positions within the top thirty. He uses them to reward the people who stay loyal and punish the ones who step out of line.

Everyone reading this week's results sees the same picture. There's no real split here. Nobody thinks this primary was about building a broad national movement or reaching out to undecided voters.

The consensus, from the center to the right, is that this was a systematic elimination of any potential successor. The writing's unanimous: the party has been hollowed out into a mechanism for personal survival.

That's the design. He's set it up so the party is completely tied to his survival, meaning nobody inside can actually challenge him, no matter how bad things get for them.

Let's step away from the Likud list and look at the opposition campaign. Gadi Eisenkot's emerged as Benjamin Netanyahu's primary challenger in the October election. And the Shin Bet's decided he won't get a state security detail.

The agency's chief, David Zini, says there's no specific threat against him, and the Israeli media's reporting that as the official reason. The response from Eisenkot's camp is that the denial's got nothing to do with threat assessments. They claim the government's simply trying to keep him from looking like a prime minister when he travels on the campaign trail. That argument only works if you assume the optics of a security detail actually move votes, but in a tight race, every image counts.

We've seen this climate play out before, which is why the baseline expectation is that major candidates are guarded. During the twenty twenty-two election, both leading candidates received full security details, though that was because one was the sitting prime minister and the other was a former prime minister. But the precedent's there. So the demand from the center is that granting Eisenkot state protection's the surest way to clear the air of political bias. Because without it, every decision the Shin Bet makes looks like it was drafted in the prime minister's office.

Naftali Bennett's making a version of this case too. He's warning that the relentless smear campaigns against opposition figures are exactly what persuades someone that a politician's a monster who has to be stopped with violence. And Bennett's got his own history with how the prime minister treats rivals.

He does. He says that when he took over the premiership, Netanyahu gave him a rushed, thirty-minute handover and volunteered almost nothing. And he claims Netanyahu threatened to use all of his political artillery to brand Bennett a traitor. That's the climate the opposition's pointing to when they warn that leaving Eisenkot unprotected is dangerously irresponsible.

The math here's about the contrast. The center's looking at Eisenkot standing exposed on the campaign trail, and then looking at Netanyahu's adult son, Yair. He lives in Miami, and he receives full Shin Bet protection there. The prime minister just went on television to claim that Iran attempted to assassinate one of his sons, using that to justify the security.

He made that claim in an interview right as his coalition's trailing in the polls ahead of the election. And he gave zero details about when this plot supposedly happened. At the same time, he's launching a blitz of appearances to get directly in front of voters.

Right, Netanyahu just released a video giving out what he claimed was his personal phone number, asking voters to message him with their problems. The WhatsApp account was blocked almost immediately because of the volume of messages. The reporter Michael Shemesh pointed out it was probably just a stunt designed to harvest the phone numbers of potential voters. And details visible on the screen made it highly unlikely the phone in the video was actually his.

Because he's facing a difficult reelection campaign with a huge bloc of undecided voters. And that desperation feeds directly into how the center's reading this entire episode. The argument from these writers is that Netanyahu views political defeat as something close to dispossession. Anyone who threatens his hold on power's treated as an enemy whose legitimacy has to be destroyed.

And that requires blurring the line between the state and the incumbent. You see that dynamic even in the rhetoric from the right. Jonathan Pollard's out claiming he could never support a government headed by Eisenkot, because the former chief of staff supposedly weakened the military. The responsibility for the country's security gets shifted onto the challenger, while the incumbent controls the actual security apparatus.

Which brings us back to the Shin Bet. The agency can't afford to look like it's carrying out the prime minister's political will. If it's seen as denying protection to a rival just to serve the incumbent's campaign optics, it loses its basic standing. The whole premise of a state security service is that it operates outside the election cycle.

The cost isn't just about one candidate's safety. When you refuse to protect a leading electoral challenger, while extending state protection to the prime minister's family abroad, the public can no longer trust the security services to act independently. The Shin Bet transforms from an independent state agency into just another tool for political campaigning.

Away from the primary fights, there's a different kind of ultimatum on the table this week. Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara's warning the government that the grace period for Haredi schools is over. She insists that continued funding will depend on schools actually teaching the core curriculum. They have to employ qualified teachers and accept state supervision.

The High Court in February demanded that the government explain why full funding continues for institutions that fail to teach required secular subjects. And this is a system that usually runs on sheer political inertia. The two major Haredi education networks are supposed to get full state funding in exchange for teaching the core curriculum, but enforcement's historically been ignored to keep the coalition intact.

The mechanism was always built on looking the other way. The Israel Democracy Institute points out that over the years, very few of the Haredi boys' schools that ignored the core curriculum actually saw their budgets cut. But the math's finally forcing the issue.

A column in The Forward runs those numbers, and they're stark. Haredim already make up almost a sixth of the population. The argument here's that a poorer, undereducated Israel will eventually lack the economic resources required to maintain its military superiority. You can't fund a high-tech military without a high-tech economy.

That's the core of the secular analysis. The phrase they use is, an Israel run by undereducated Haredim risks being overrun by its enemies. For the people making this case, it's a strategic crisis that requires immediate state enforcement to keep the economy from collapsing. The reading from the religious right looks at the exact same unsustainability, and pleads for voluntary introspection instead.

A column in The Jewish Press is asking the Haredi world to look at the immense burden the rest of the country's carried for the past year. The writer points out that for a very large part of Klal Yisrael, lately began on October seventh, twenty twenty-three.

But that reality's not penetrating the internal discourse. The piece notes how Haredi media's framed the loss of school funding and the draft orders. It quotes Yated Ne'eman, which described enforcement as persecution for the crime of Torah study. The writer argues that distance and insulation are blinding the community. The messaging, especially the fundraising campaigns aimed at American donors, has presented a distorted and radically incomplete account of what's happening in Israel.

The Sanzer Rebbe's quoted pushing back on this isolationism, warning his own community that most ordinary Israelis don't hate Torah, and it's a serious mistake to pretend they do. The column insists the spiritual work for the community right now is to enlarge the boundaries of the word we. To actually acknowledge the thousands of dead and wounded non-Haredi soldiers as their own.

It's a profound plea for the community to voluntarily expand its definition of shared sacrifice, rather than treating every demand for a core curriculum as an attack on religion.

But a voluntary expansion of the word 'we' doesn't balance the state budget, and it doesn't staff the military today. Waiting for a cultural shift doesn't solve the immediate political ultimatum sitting right in front of them.

The political reality of this ultimatum is that the elected echelon's avoided the Haredi education crisis for decades. Successive governments handed over the funding without demanding the curriculum, precisely because nobody wanted to be the one to break a coalition over it.

The politicians simply refused to touch it. They bought political survival by ignoring the demographic math.

That leaves a vacuum at the exact moment the math catches up with the state. The political class abdicated, and now the only actors left to force a resolution on the country's economic and military future are unelected civil servants and the courts.