Snagging only a few votes, far-right party stands by decision to stay in race

Otzma Yehudit head Itamar Ben Gvir defended his decision not to drop out of the election race late Monday, despite exit polls showing his ultra-right-wing party failing by a wide margin to enter the Knesset, saying he was proud to have remained loyal to the party’s principles.

Exit polls from three TV networks indicated that the party of followers of extremist rabbi Meir Kahane had managed to receive just 15,000-20,000 votes, well shy of the roughly 125,000 — or four seats’ worth of votes — necessary to make it into the Knesset. Later, with 10 percent of votes counted, his party was seen garnering just half a percentage point of the national vote, far below the Knesset threshold of 3.25%.

The result, if confirmed, would be a massive slip from September elections, when it got 80,000 votes, enough for at least two seats, but still below the threshold.

Likud leader Benjamin Netanyahu had pressured Ben Gvir to drop out of the race, worried that he could siphon votes away from other right-wing parties that would cross the threshold, thus weakening the bloc, but the Otzma Yehudit leader refused.

Speaking to dozens of supporters at the Otzma Yehudit party headquarters in Jerusalem late on Monday night, Ben Gvir lamented how “over the last few weeks, and until the last minute of this election campaign, we became the target of an ugly campaign of attacks.”

“We couldn’t believe how low they were willing to go,” Ben Gvir continued, going after his right-wing rivals in the Likud and Yamina parties. “They invested all of their strength and energy to eliminate our way, our truth.”

Throughout the final hours of voting on Monday, Ben Gvir released campaign videos telling supporters that his party was just a bit shy of the electoral threshold and that while the right-wing, religious  bloc had already reached 61 seats, a vote for Otzma Yehudit would determine whether the new government would be “right-wing in action or right-wing in name only.”

However, the claims appeared to have been fabricated.

Hours earlier, his party claimed Likud had sent text messages to supporters saying that Otzma Yehudit had pulled out of the race. Ben Gvir petitioned the Central Elections Committee on the matter, but the CEC’s chairman, Supreme Court Justice Neal Hendel, ruled that Otzma Yehudit’s claim lacked evidence.

Otzma Yehudit chose to run independently after Jewish Home chairman Rafi Peretz reneged on a merger deal with the far-right party hours before the January filing deadline in order to rejoin the Yamina alliance with Naftali Bennett’s New Right and Bezalel Smotrich’s National Union.

While Peretz wanted to fold Otzma Yehudit into Yamina as well, Bennett, who leads the national religious alliance, vetoed the idea, saying that Ben Gvir was too far beyond the pale.

Otzma Yehudit supports encouraging emigration of non-Jews from Israel and expelling Palestinians and Israeli Arabs who refuse to declare loyalty to Israel and accept diminished status in an expanded Jewish state whose sovereignty extends throughout the West Bank.

Netanyahu was widely pilloried at home and abroad last year for helping broker an agreement that merged Otzma Yehudit with Jewish Home, nearly landing Ben Gvir in the Knesset.

On Sunday, Otzma Yehudit claimed that it had reached a deal with the Likud party according to which it would drop out of Monday’s election, but that Netanyahu had walked back the agreement, which included a number of far-reaching concessions from the prime minister.

There was no confirmation from Likud of any deal.

Exit polls and early results showed Likud on its way to 36 or 37 seats, well ahead of rival Blue and White, but still shy of a majority coalition. Those numbers were still changing as the vote count continued into Tuesday.