Likud arranges to have firebrand MK Tally Gotliv run with Ben Gvir’s Otzma Yehudit

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party announced on Thursday that firebrand MK Tally Gotliv would run with National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir’s far-right Otzma Yehudit party in the October 27 election.

The announcement came after Gotliv’s disappointing result in last month’s Likud primary, which she has blamed on Netanyahu and said could put her “in Shin Bet detention facilities” if she is voted out and loses parliamentary immunity.

Under an agreement between the Likud and Otzma Yehudit, Gotliv will be bound by Likud faction discipline until the election and will not be declared a departing lawmaker.

Such a declaration would have barred Gotliv from running with any Knesset faction and deprived her of the roughly NIS 1.85 million ($614,700) in funding that parties get from the Knesset for every seat they control in parliament. It was unclear from Likud’s announcement if Gotliv’s funding would go to Otzma Yehudit or Likud.

Following the announcement, Ben Gvir welcomed Gotliv to Otzma Yehudit, saying she was “joining a family of fighters.”

He called her a “fighter against the deep state” and “the fact that our dear prime minister has been persecuted.”

Hebrew media had reported Wednesday that Ben Gvir told Likud officials the “window of opportunity is closing” on Gotliv’s proposed move to Otzma Yehudit.

Gotliv entered the Knesset in the last election, in November 2022, when she was number 25 on the Likud electoral slate and the party won 32 of the Knesset’s 120 seats.

As a lawmaker, Gotliv gained popularity among many rank-and-file Likud members with her attacks on anti-government protesters and her regular interruptions at the prime minister’s graft trial as well as other high-profile court and Knesset committee hearings.

Gotliv has also portrayed herself as a martyr of the judiciary, which seeks to prosecute her for revealing the identity of a Shin Bet agent as part of a conspiracy theory that anti-government activists colluded with Hamas ahead of the terror group’s onslaught of October 7, 2023. The Knesset voted in June to grant her immunity from prosecution.

In Likud’s August 17 primary, Gotliv placed 12th but was pushed down to 20th on the party’s electoral slate because of the large number of slots received for Netanyahu’s personal picks.

According to Hebrew media, Netanyahu had pushed for the slots, in part, in a bid to edge out Gotliv and other figures who are popular in Likud but considered radioactive to the broader public.

Following the Likud primary, Gotliv accused Netanyahu of a “targeted elimination” against her, alleging her name was left off ballots at some polling stations. She also publicly floated the possibility of defecting to Otzma Yehudit.

Gotliv’s move to Ben Gvir’s party came amid Netanyahu’s efforts to consolidate his coalition, as ex-IDF general Ofer Winter’s new party threatens to draw votes away from Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich’s Religious Zionism and possibly push it under the electoral threshold.

New polling indicated that this week’s merger between Smotrich and former ex-Likud lawmaker Moshe Feiglin has reduced that threat to Netanyahu’s bloc.

After uniting with Feiglin’s Zehut party, Smotrich’s Religious Zionism received five seats, while Winter’s People of Israel fell below the threshold, according to a survey released Thursday by Zman Yisrael, The Times of Israel’s Hebrew-language sister site

Last week’s Zman Yisrael poll, conducted soon after the launch of People of Israel, had shown Winter’s party winning six seats and Religious Zionism falling below the electoral threshold.

In an interview with Channel 12 news that aired Thursday, Winter said that, if polls still show his party faltering a week before the election, “we’ll evaluate our steps responsibly, because the nation of Israel is more important than we are.”

He also said he would not sit in a coalition led by Naftali Bennett or Avigdor Liberman.

Netanyahu, Eisenkot neck-and-neck as Zionist Home cracks threshold

This week’s Zman Yisrael poll also showed the centrist Yashar party, led by former IDF chief Gadi Eisenkot, running neck-and-neck with Likud at 22 seats, after leading last week with 26.

Yashar’s weeks-long lead in the Zman Yisrael poll appeared to have collapsed because the Zionist Home party passed the electoral threshold for the first time in the survey, clinching four Knesset seats.

Zionist Home, a right-leaning party led by ex-ministers Yoaz Hendel and Chili Tropper, seeks a coalition without Arab or Haredi parties, but has said it would not join a Netanyahu-led government.

Meanwhile, Zionist parties that reject any government with Netanyahu would receive 55 seats, while the parties in Netanyahu’s current government would receive just 50, the poll showed.

Neither bloc would command a 61-seat majority without help from the opposing bloc, Zionist Home or the two Arab-majority parties, which received a cumulative 11 seats in this week’s poll.

Among anti-Netanyahu Zionist parties, Eisenkot’s Yashar was followed in the poll by right-wing former prime minister Naftali Bennett’s B’Yachad, with 15 seats, up from 14 last week; MK Avigdor Liberman’s hawkish-secularist Yisrael Beytenu, with 10 seats, unchanged from last week; and former deputy IDF chief Yair Golan’s left-leaning Democrats, with eight seats, also unchanged from last week.

Other than Smotrich’s five seats, the parties in Netanyahu’s coalition all held steady, with nine seats going to the Sephardic Haredi Shas, eight to the Ashkenazi Haredi United Torah Judaism and six to Ben Gvir’s Otzma Yehudit. The poll was conducted before the announcement that Gotliv would run with Otzma Yehudit.

The two Arab-majority parties also held steady, with six seats for the three-way merger of the communist Hadash, secularist Ta’al and nationalist Balad parties, and five seats for the traditionalist Ra’am party, which this week joined forces with former Yesh Atid MK Yoav Segalovitz.

The poll was conducted September 2-3 by Tatika Research and Media in collaboration with the Adgenda panel. The sample size was 500 and the margin of error was 4.4%.