New Right denies Shaked will lead party, after logo places her ahead of Bennett

Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked will not be number one on the new splinter party unveiled by her and Education Minister Naftali Bennett, a spokesperson for the New Right told The Times of Israel on Sunday, despite the official party logo placing her ahead of her fellow Jewish Home rebel.

Bennett would instead top the electoral list, the spokesperson said, but the party would enjoy a “shared leadership” by both the former Jewish Home leader and Shaked, in the upcoming April elections.

Bennett is listed as chairman in the party’s registration with the Central Elections Committee. However, on Sunday, the New Right unveiled its logo, which says it is “under the chairmanship of Shaked and Bennett.”

The two announced on Saturday night that they were departing the Jewish Home to forge a “true partnership between secular and religious,” saying that the stalwart party of religious-Zionism had lost its influence over Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and that they needed a new right-wing political platform to challenge the premier.

The Jewish Home’s first secular woman to enter the Knesset, Shaked got her start in politics as an aide to Netanyahu in 2006, when he stood at the head of a withered Likud faction in opposition to the centrist government of then-prime minister Ehud Olmert. Bennett joined shortly thereafter, as Netanyahu’s bureau chief.

A year and a half later, however, both Shaked and Bennett left abruptly. Neither has publicly explained why, but there were reports at the time of clashes between Bennett and Netanyahu, and of unwelcome meddling in the bureau by Netanyahu’s wife, Sara. Shaked would say only that she “felt there was no longer any point in being there.”

Together, Shaked and Bennett joined the Jewish Home party and successfully won the support of its members to take the top two spots in its list ahead of the 2013 elections. The move, engineered in part by Avichai Ronsky, a settler leader and the former chief rabbi of the IDF who passed away earlier this year, was based on the idea that the religious right needed to be reinvigorated and that such a move must include cooperation with Israelis who are not Orthodox.

Creating the New Right party, Bennett and Shaked appeared to admit that there is only so far that the revamped National Religious Party can take that idea.

The move was been savaged from politicians on the right and left.

Writing on Facebook on Sunday, Yisrael Beytenu leader Avigdor Liberman said his party was the true representative of right-wing Israelis unhappy with Netanyahu, as proven by his decision to leave the government last month, before elections were called.

“The source is always much better than any imitation, even if it’s a nice, glamorous imitation,” he said in a mocking post.

Taking an increasingly popular line within Likud circles, Tourism and Immigration Minister Yariv Levin said in his own Facebook post that “their entire motivation is to bring Netanyahu down.”

Seemingly answering critics who say his formation of a new party will balkanize the right and hurt it at the polls, Bennett wrote on Twitter that his move is just the Big Bang-like wallop the right needed.

“The burst on the right, with the creation of the New Right, secures the victory of the right-wing bloc,” he wrote.

Polls published Sunday predicted that the New Right would overtake Jewish Home party if elections were held today. The five wildly divergent surveys — all of which saw the Likud party with a wide lead over its rivals — gave the new Bennett-Shaked alliance anywhere between six and 14 seats.