Joining legion of Likud castoffs, Edelstein may not yet be clear of Netanyahu’s pull

Splitting from the party that already quit him, the former Knesset speaker becomes the latest senior Likud politician to strike out on his own, though breaking free may not be so simple

Yuli Edelstein said Friday that he would be leaving the Likud party to find a new political home. He saved the formal announcement for Saturday night, in a “Meet the Press” interview with Amit Segal and Ben Caspit.

The bookend was almost too neat: nearly five years ago, on that very same program, Edelstein announced that he would challenge Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for the leadership of Likud. In Israeli politics, it turns out, it’s easier to switch parties than to break old habits.

Back then, in the innocent days before the war, what consumed Edelstein and the Israeli public was Netanyahu’s inability to form a government through four straight election cycles. Edelstein’s argument was blunt: if Likud didn’t replace Netanyahu, the country would be stuck in an endless loop.

In that old world, where COVID and fractious politics were the biggest problems, Edelstein believed he was the solution. Once he realized Netanyahu would crush him in a leadership race, he backed down and fell in line. But it was too late. When the party held its primaries to determine its Knesset slate, Edelstein fell from the top to 17th place.

Though Netanyahu made him pay, shutting him out of the cabinet, he did hand his would-be rival the chairmanship of the powerful Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee — but then stripped that from him in the summer of 2025.

The removal of Edelstein, who had refused to accede to Haredi demands regarding a bill regulating military draft exemptions, was a signal to the ultra-Orthodox parties that Netanyahu was serious about doing good by them.

The instant Edelstein’s departure from Likud became public this weekend, Netanyahu’s senior adviser Topaz Luk fired off a mocking tweet implying his exit didn’t bother the party one bit, just as former minister Limor Livnat’s departure hadn’t bothered it back in 2014.

A well-worn exit ramp

Since the exit of Livnat, a former communications minister who was supplanted by Miri Regev as the party’s top-ranking woman, the list of senior Likud figures who’ve resigned or been pushed out has expanded. Every election cycle, Netanyahu has found a way to clear out whichever Likud heavyweights struck him as too moderate, too independent or simply too competent.

Moshe Kahlon, Dan Meridor, and Benny Begin all left or were forced out. Gideon Sa’ar, Ze’ev Elkin, and Tzachi Hanegbi are remembered for defecting, then crawling back to become political zombies hanging around the king’s court. Some managed to stick around as the eternal leader’s doormat by using flattery and keeping their heads down. Sa’ar and Elkin, in particular, may yet end up paying with a rocket-propelled exit from politics, punishment for having once admired Netanyahu too much.

Yoav Gallant stands out as the exception on Netanyahu’s list of the discarded — he was fired mid-term, part of a much longer pattern of Netanyahu clashing with nearly every defense minister who’s ever served under him.

Former minister Ofir Akunis was tossed the consolation prize of consul general in New York. When he later angled for the chairmanship of Keren Hayesod – United Israel Appeal, Netanyahu blocked him — and now Akunis has essentially nowhere to go back to.

Gilad Erdan fared little better. Once a genuinely popular figure near the top of Likud, he was sent by Netanyahu to the most senior diplomatic posts America has to offer — ambassador to both the UN and the US — though in the end he only held the first job.

When his term wrapped and he came home, Netanyahu and Defense Minister Israel Katz personally blocked his bid to chair Israel Aerospace Industries. They preferred to leave that critical post empty for 18 months — in the middle of a war — rather than hand it to him.

Erdan, it seems, simply doesn’t fit into the party’s chorus of yes-men, exemplified by Likud MK Tally Gotliv. So now he’s being pushed toward building a new party — one that hopes to pull in voters from the right’s more statesmanlike, dignified flank, a cadre the Likud could badly use.

Watch the minnows

There’s a case that all of this is simply how politics works. Senior departures tend to cluster right before elections rather than mid-term, once the person leaving concludes every door is closed and there’s no path back to power. That’s opportunism, not ideology.

But there’s a counter-case too: In other parties, defections have ended political careers outright, not launched new parties that chip away at the mothership. Kahlon, Avigdor Liberman, Sa’ar, Elkin, and Begin all ate away at Likud’s edges before some crawled back.

So what happens to a frustrated Edelstein now? He’ll most likely team up with Erdan. So far, neither man is behaving like someone consumed by revenge — not the way Sa’ar was for years, when he said harsher things about Netanyahu than any opposition figure ever did. Instead, they look like politicians chasing something almost extinct: substance, seriousness, a fair fight — bordering on gentlemanly.

Which is almost funny, because nothing of that spirit survives in Israeli politics anymore — certainly not in the cannibalistic right-wing bloc.

Still, Edelstein was onto something real back in 2021, when he first considered running against Netanyahu. In that same “Meet the Press” interview, he put it plainly: “Four times Likud was the largest faction in the Knesset — and four times we failed to form a government.”

In the 2022 election, Netanyahu’s maximalist right-wing coalition landed at 64 seats for one reason: Meretz failed to clear the electoral threshold. Had Meretz cleared it, Netanyahu would still be stuck today at 58 or 59 seats — 60 on a good day — and we might still be cycling through elections.

Which is exactly why the anti-Netanyahu bloc needs to keep its eyes on the small parties that might siphon votes without clearing the threshold themselves. In polls, the pro-opposition bloc currently leads Netanyahu’s presumed coalition by five or six seats. But if a party like Ra’am falls short of the threshold, the whole calculation collapses — and Netanyahu wins again.

The new right-leaning parties now taking shape — Edelstein and Erdan, who could join with Ayelet Shaked; as well as a speculative alliance between Yoaz Hendel’s Reservists party, Benny Gantz’s Blue and White and political newcomer Dedy Simhi — could draw votes from Likud’s fringes and from the political center.

And should one or more of them manage to clear the electoral threshold and make it into the Knesset, they might well incline to partner with Netanyahu, offering him a way to move toward centrist coalition partners and away from far-right figures like Itamar Ben Gvir or anti-Zionist parties like United Torah Judaism.