In preparation for the upcoming election on March 2, the chairman of HaBayit HaYehudi, Education Minister Rabbi Rafi Peretz, decided that his party would run as part of a joint list with Otzma Yehudit, a party that failed to pass the electoral threshold in last September’s election. Much has been written over the last year about the racist Otzma Yehudit party. Due to pressure from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, it ran as part of the Union of Right-Wing Parties last April (together with the HaBayit HaYehudi and the National Union parties), as part of a concerted effort to save the right's votes from factional splintering.
Netanyahu’s jockeying on behalf of Otzma Yehudit before April’s election reeked of political bribery. The prime minister meddled in the affairs of other parties, promising their members rewards if they ran as a single list, to get Peretz to run together with Otzma Yehudit. He even gave Eliyahu Ben Dahan of HaBayit HaYehudi the 28th slot on the Likud list, with an agreement that right after the election, he could switch back to his own party. The state attorney general, already busy with all the other cases facing Netanyahu, did not intervene in this particularly flawed agreement.
The Union of Right-Wing Parties won just five seats in last April’s election, and none of Otzma Yehudit’s representatives entered the Knesset. In last September’s election, Otzma Yehudit decided to run independently. It received 83,000 votes, which may have been worth two seats, but was still not enough to get them across the electoral threshold.
The first polls leading up to the new election this March show that HaBayit HaYehudi and Otzma Yehudit will not pass the threshold if they run separately. The numbers seem to have motivated them to run together, with Itamar Ben Gvir of Otzma Yehudit filling the number-three slot on the joint list. Ben Gvir is infamous for hanging a photo of mass murderer Baruch Goldstein in his home. As a young man, he infamously showed off the emblem that he ripped off Yitzhak Rabin’s car, promising, “We got the car. We’ll get to Rabin too.” It now looks like he will soon join the Knesset, and may even get a powerful position that he has long coveted: chairman of the Knesset’s constitution, law and justice committee.
AL-MONITOR All-Access gives you unlimited access to all our journalism, the full Daily Briefing, exclusive interviews, premium newsletters, and live events — for less than $2/week.
