Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Thursday beseeched Otzma Yehudit leader Itamar Ben Gvir and Religious Zionism leader Bezalel Smotrich to unite their far-right parties ahead of the upcoming elections, as a poll showed that the newly launched People of Israel party would win six seats in the upcoming vote and push Smotrich out of the Knesset.
Earlier, former IDF general Ofer Winter said his new People of Israel party would back only Netanyahu for prime minister. However, the proclamation did little to allay Netanyahu’s repeatedly expressed fears that multiple small right-wing parties could fracture the bloc, lead to wasted votes, and ultimately cost them the election.
Netanyahu’s entreaties and Ben Gvir’s dismissive responses played out on social media with both issuing a series of videos and posts aimed at each other, and the voters.
In a video statement, Netanyahu warned that divisions on the right could cost the bloc the election, pointing to the 1992 election, when Yitzhak Rabin’s Labor ousted the right, as a cautionary example.
“In 1992, the right, like today, had more votes than the left, but because there were three parties, we didn’t cross the electoral threshold, we lost to the left, we got the Oslo disaster, Arafat here, Hamas here, and everything that followed was disaster after disaster,” Netanyahu said. “And so it could happen this time as well. Every time we went together, we won.”
