Is Israel ready for a new political model? Is the divided, torn Jewish state, split by internal and external disputes, able to forge a model of two political blocs similar to the one of the US Republican and Democratic parties? Probably not, but that did not prevent the idea from germinating and taking over the political agenda and discourse of the past week. It was orchestrated by two people: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, on the right, and Labor-Gesher party Chair Amir Peretz, on the left.

Peretz went first, presenting what he dubbed the “Peretz road map for defeating Benjamin Netanyahu” in a Jan. 7 Channel 12 TV interview. The idea is quite simple, Peretz said. Rather than trying to unite the small Labor and Meretz parties (known in their current incarnations as Labor-Gesher and the Democratic Camp), all the forces on the left and in the center would be unified in one bloc comprised of Blue and White, Labor-Gesher and the Democratic Camp, he explained. Such a move is the only way to shatter the glass ceiling of Netanyahu’s hold on power, to imbue hope in voters that a political upset is feasible, to loosen the dependence on Yisrael Beitenu leader Avigdor Liberman’s capricious whims and to form a political bloc that forestalls a Knesset majority for Netanyahu’s Likud and its allied parties.

According to Peretz, such an alliance would garner 44 Knesset seats based on the current strength of its constituent parts, and would probably go up to 48 if united; a repeat of the 13-seat result achieved by the Arab Joint List in the September 2019 elections would bring the bloc to 61 seats of the Knesset’s 120 — and bingo, preclude a Netanyahu-led majority and remove him from power.

A day after Peretz’s appearance, Netanyahu was reported to be examining a possible joint ticket with all the parties on the political right. No more strange, perverse, shifiting alliances between the HaBayit HaYehudi party led by Rabbi Rafi Peretz, the National Union party led by Bezalel Smotrich, the Otzma Yehudit party formed by disciples of arch-racist Rabbi Meir Kahane and led by radical right provocateur Itamar Ben-Gvir and the New Right of Defense Minister Naftali Bennett and Ayelet Shaked. This intrinsic, cumbersome complexity afflicting the right-wing parties and their various splinter groups has resulted in a massive vote drain — hundreds of thousands in the April 2019 elections and tens of thousands in the September 2019 voting — for the bloc of parties that was supposed to save Netanyahu and protect him from criminal prosecution on charges of corruption. According to the leaked reports, Netanyahu is fed up. Why not just create one large Knesset list, a Republican-style party stretching from the farthest corners of the radical right all the way to the edges of the pragmatic right and political center?