Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s advisers have no doubt that, in the end, Israel Resilience, the party of Benny Gantz, the new star of Israeli politics and main rival of Netanyahu, will merge with Yair Lapid’s Yesh Atid. Netanyahu is concerned that such a joint list would get more mandates than the Likud. A Channel 12 poll, for instance, gives a Gantz-Lapid union 35 mandates compared to 30 for Netanyahu and the Likud.

Netanyahu fears that if the Likud isn't the largest party in the Knesset, President Reuven Rivlin, with whom he doesn’t get along, will charge Gantz with trying to form a government. Thus, Netanyahu is acting on two fronts. On one, he seeks to create a Likud-right-wing bloc that would run in a joint list and ensure its place as the largest party. To do so, Netanyahu asked Likud members to reserve three places on the list for him, and not just the one he’s already reserved. Like that, he will be able to plug in three candidates of his choice without needing the party institutions’ approval.

The move was meant to offer a solution to small right-wing parties that might have difficulties overcoming the vote threshold, like Avigdor Liberman’s Yisrael Beitenu, which found itself in such a situation in 2009, or the religious Zionist party HaBayit HaYehudi. Liberman doesn’t reject such a possibility, but he unrelentingly attacks Netanyahu for failing to implement right-wing policies. HaBayit HaYehudi announced that such a possibility won’t be considered. The party’s CEO, Nir Urbach, told Al-Monitor, “We’re not an offshoot of the Likud and we’ll be a strong and impressive party.” However, it’s likely that both parties would respond to the Likud’s offer if polls leading up to the election show that they’re on the brink of the vote threshold.