MK Elazar Stern announces Yesh Atid exit ahead of likely run with Eisenkot

Longtime Yesh Atid MK Elazar Stern announced Friday that he was resigning as a Knesset member with the party after 11 years in office.

Stern has indicated in recent interviews that he is likely to join Gadi Eisenkot’s Yashar party ahead of the national election scheduled for October 27.

In a statement, Stern said that he was “convinced that if I remain in politics,” he and Yesh Atid will continue to collaborate in a way to “get the State of Israel out of the very serious situation that the current government has brought us into.”

Yesh Atid chair Yair Lapid — who has joined forces ahead of the election with former prime minister Naftali Bennett in the B’Yachad party — said he thanks Stern “for his many years of friendship and partnership in working for the State of Israel and wishes him success in the future.”

According to Channel 12 news, Stern swiped at Bennett on Thursday, saying that it was time he got behind Eisenkot as the anti-Benjamin Netanyahu bloc’s candidate for prime minister. Yashar is polling significantly ahead of the B’Yachad slate in recent surveys.

“Bennett needs to announce as soon as possible that whoever is leading the bloc according to the polls is the one the entire bloc is behind,” Stern reportedly said. “I am pleased that it’s Eisenkot. He is perhaps the only leader on whom there is consensus, in that everyone believes him.”

Stern was the subject of controversy in 2021 over comments he made asserting that he had ignored sexual harassment complaints during his time as head of the IDF’s Manpower Directorate. In response to the backlash, Stern dropped his candidacy for head of the Jewish Agency but remained a member of Knesset.

Prior to joining Yesh Atid, Stern was a member of Tzipi Livni’s Hatnua party.

The announcement came a day after former Yesh Atid MK Yoav Segalovitz and Ra’am chairman Mansour Abbas confirmed they were holding discussions regarding the former’s potential membership in the Islamist party.

Segalovitz submitted his resignation letter to Knesset Speaker Amir Ohana on Sunday, having announced his exit from Yesh Atid several days before that.

A former senior police officer, Segalovitz has been credited with helping reduce crime in Arab Israeli communities during his tenure as deputy minister for public security in the previous government headed by Bennett and Lapid.

Rumors of Segalovitz’s contacts with Abbas have been circulating for weeks, with a recent television poll showing that if he joined Ra’am, the party would pick up two more seats, going from five to an unprecedented seven. The move could boost Abbas’s legitimacy as a possible coalition partner in the eyes of opposition parties, some of which are opposed to a potential government that includes Arab-majority factions.

Meanwhile, a poll published Thursday by The Times of Israel’s Hebrew sister site Zman Yisrael found that Eisenkot’s Yashar party would win 25 seats in the Knesset while Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud would win just 21 if elections were held now.

But overall, the poll showed little change in the sizes of the pro- and anti-Netanyahu blocs of parties. The so-called change bloc of Netanyahu’s opponents would win 58 seats, short of a majority of 61 in the 120-seat Knesset, while the pro-Netanyahu parties would win 50 seats.

Arab parties would win 12 seats, split evenly between Ra’am and Hadash-Ta’al.

Sam Sokol contributed to this report.