Eisenkot says Bennett-Lapid uniting without him is ‘not how you build partnerships’

Yashar chairman tells party activists he wanted to join merger, condensing Zionist opposition into three separate slates representing left, right and center

Yashar chairman Gadi Eisenkot criticized the union of former prime ministers Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid, telling party activists during a conference on Thursday that he had pushed for months to create a large centrist party to challenge Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Eisenkot was previously reported to have proposed a merger in January with Bennett and Lapid, both of whom had courted the former IDF chief of staff for their own parties.

“The main alternative I tried to promote about six months ago was organizing the camp that the media calls center-left, and which I call the statesmanlike camp, that would go with the liberal right. My thought was to form an optimized structure that would bring the maximum number of votes and lead to victory — certainly not to repeat what happened in the last elections,” Eisenkot said in a recording published by the Ynet news site on Sunday, alluding to fragmentation and lost votes among opposition parties.

Such a party, he said, would have included the electoral slates led by Bennett and Lapid, but not Yair Golan’s The Democrats or Avigdor Liberman’s Yisrael Beytenu, in order to give voters three alternatives: a “super-party” in the center alongside left- and right-wing alternatives.

However, he did not succeed and ultimately received a phone call informing him of Bennett and Lapid’s union only minutes before it was publicly announced, after which the two said they had “opened the door for me and were even saving the second and third spots for me,” Eisenkot continued.

“That’s not how you build partnerships, but I’m not insulted. I immediately picked up the phone and said let’s meet and continue to cooperate. What guides me is how we defeat this bad government and build an alternative,” he asserted.

“I have no anger, and I am not taking any merger off the table. What matters is how to win,” he added.

‘The era of division is over’

Bennett and Lapid announced their merger late last month, with Bennett telling reporters during a press conference in Herzliya that forming their united “Together” list was the “most Zionist and patriotic act we have ever done,” and that “the era of division is over.”

Bennett and Lapid worked together in 2021-2022 when they led a short-lived, diverse coalition of right-wing, centrist and left-wing parties, along with the Arab party Ra’am. Their new union will not officially merge their respective factions into one party but will produce a united list for the election, which is scheduled for no later than the end of October.

Declaring that he and Lapid were “racing forward to victory,” Bennett also invited Eisenkot to join them, stating that “our door is open for you too.”

Lapid also informed Bennett that he was willing to take third place, rather than second, on their joint electoral slate if it would help secure a broader merger with Eisenkot, a source close to Lapid said last month — an offer dismissed by a source close to Eisenkot.

After Bennet and Lapid’s announcement, Eisenkot joined other opposition figures in lauding the merger, framing it as part of a wider effort to unseat the current government, although he seemed to suggest the union might find it hard to draw votes away from the pro-Netanyahu right.

He subsequently invited most of the opposition leaders to convene to coordinate a path to a victory by a “Zionist majority” over Netanyahu.

Deepening coordination with Liberman

Despite telling party activists that his proposed centrist alliance had not included the hawkish Yisrael Beytenu, there have been recent reports that Eisenkot has been in talks with Liberman, its leader, about a potential merger.

Eisenkot told reporters last week that he and Liberman have “maintained a long relationship” and have met and spoken in recent months, but that he did not want to get into specifics.

While the two politicians did not confirm any plans to run on a unified slate, they did announce in a joint statement last Thursday that they were working to expand cooperation ahead of the election.

If elections were held today, and the Yashar party were to partner with Yisrael Beytenu, they would together form the largest faction in the Knesset, with 26 of its 120 seats, according to a poll conducted last week by Zman Yisrael, The Times of Israel’s Hebrew-language sister site.

According to Zman, without such a merger, Bennett and Lapid’s “Together” party would win 26 seats, as would Netanyahu’s Likud.

A spokesman for Lapid’s Yesh Atid party declined to comment and a spokesman for Bennett did not immediately respond to a written inquiry.

An opposition source told The Times of Israel that they were “confused why Gadi isn’t joining the unified party he himself called for and pushed for.”