Lapid and Eisenkot meet, agree to convene leaders of ‘Change Bloc’ to plan next government

Opposition Leader Yair Lapid met with former Blue and White-National Unity number two Gadi Eisenkot last night, a spokesman for Lapid announces.

At the meeting, it was agreed to convene a meeting of all of the leaders of the the so-called “Change Bloc” to “deepen coordination and begin formulating the basic guidelines for the next government, following the talks and meetings that have taken place in recent days,” the spokesman says.

According to Lapid’s spokesman, the meeting will be attended by Lapid, Eisenkot, Yisrael Beytenu leader Avigdor Liberman, Bennett 2026 chairman Naftali Bennett, Blue and White-National Unity chief Benny Gantz and The Democrats head Yair Golan.

Eisenkot, who had been No. 2 in Blue and White, quit both the faction and Knesset over the summer, stating that while he and Gantz had worked together for many years and respect each other, their differences eventually drove them apart politically.

Eisenkot later called on Gantz to step down because his party was hovering around the electoral threshold and at risk of failing to return to the Knesset after the next election.

In addition to meeting with Lapid, Eisenkot also sat with Bennett on Sunday to discuss a new Israeli leadership, according to a statement from Bennett’s office reported by Hebrew media.

According to the Maariv daily, the two have held a series of meetings recently as part of Liberman’s larger effort to create a broad bloc to serve as an alternative to the current Likud-led coalition.

Liberman also met with Bennett last week as he sought to galvanize the “Zionist opposition party heads” to come up with a “basic outline” for the next government.

In leaked comments from a speech at a conference in Kfar Saba last week, published by the Walla news site on Sunday, Bennett declared that “we need to form a national Zionist unity government based on the ‘alliance of service’: those who serve and who accept the government’s guiding principles.”

“I have a role, and that is to unite the various centrist parties. We’ll talk to Liberman, to Eisenkot, and get everyone into one big party,” he said, telling the conference that their role is to “convince everyone to vote for this party and win a clear and decisive majority.”

Bennett also said that, if this party were elected, his plan would be to “lay down a constitutional foundation” and “pass a constitution for Israel,” something that he said he had thought was “unnecessary” in the past.