Editor's Notes: The argument splitting religious-Zionist households before Israel’s election

ByZVIKA KLEINJULY 31, 2026 05:59Gilad Erdan is expected to launch a party of his own next week, after 30 years in Likud and four as Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations. Yuli Edelstein, who did more than any other legislator to block the haredi (ultra-Orthodox) exemption bill, is expected to be on the list.Ayelet Shaked, the former justice minister who spent a decade as the secular face of the settler Right, was being discussed as a third name a few weeks ago and has since gone over to Benny Gantz, the former army chief of staff who quit Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s war cabinet in 2024. That should tell you how firm any of this is.Erdan is not the only one launching. Yoaz Hendel and Chili Tropper, both ministers in the short-lived government that briefly removed Netanyahu from office in 2021, are building something further to the Left that will probably end up behind Gadi Eisenkot, another former chief of staff, who sat in that war cabinet, resigned from it, and buried a son and a nephew in Gaza. Ofer Winter, who commanded the Givati Brigade, is preparing a run on the other flank, along with two or three others. All of them are chasing the same voters and describing them in the same words: Israelis on the Right with nowhere to go.I think that claim is about half true, and the half that is true is not the half being sold.The selling part first: Sharren Haskel, a Knesset member promoting a list of her own, says the pool is worth nine to 12 seats; Shlomo Filber, who ran the Communications Ministry under Netanyahu and later became a pollster, says four to eight. Neither number arrived with a sample or a field date, and both people have an interest in the answer.Former IDF chief of staff Lt.-Gen. Gadi Eisenkot of the Yashar Party. (credit: YONATAN SINDEL/FLASH90)The part I believe has less to do with polling than with a couple I know here in Gush Etzion: They are married. Both are religious Zionists, meaning members of the modern Orthodox community that serves in combat units well past its share of the population and has buried a great many of its sons since October 7. Both vote Right, both live in a town that has done well under this government, and they have been fighting with each other since the winter.She likes Bezalel Smotrich, the finance minister, and will bring up the roads if you push her. What she cannot get past is the conscription bill this coalition keeps advancing, the one that would leave most haredi men out of the army. The ultra-Orthodox have been exempt since 1948 on the grounds of full-time Torah study; the Supreme Court threw that out in 2024, and the government has spent the time since trying to legislate it back.After this long a war, fought mostly by reservists on their third and fourth tours, no subject in Israeli life cuts deeper. Once she gets going, she moves from the draft to the taxes to the schools that skip mathematics, and then stops herself and says we couldn’t have drafted all of them at once anyway, which nobody asked her to say.Voters are influenced by party positions on the haredi draftHer husband wants the haredi sector treated the way Israel treats Iran. Sanctions for 20 years, he says, until they beg to serve.He is also thinking about voting for Hendel, or for whichever list ends up carrying Eisenkot.Understand what that means. This is a man well to the Right of his wife on everything touching Judea and Samaria, who has never voted for anything resembling the Center. He cannot drift further Right because the parties to his right are the ones protecting the exemption. So he is looking Left, at men he disagrees with on nearly every other question because they are with him on the one he can no longer let go of.She has not moved, and I do not think she will. He might. And I hear versions of this constantly now, in the national religious towns, among reservists, at kiddush.It helps to know what a bloc is, if you are reading this from New York. Israel elects 120 members of Knesset by proportional representation; nobody has ever won a majority, and 61 is the only number that counts. A party falling under the threshold of roughly four seats is wiped out and takes its voters’ ballots with it. After the count, the president asks each party who it recommends to form a government, and those recommendations settle it.For seven years that recommendation has come down to one question, whether Netanyahu is acceptable, and we have had five elections in four years that were largely a headcount on it.What the Tachlit Institute found, in data it shared with me, is that the headcount may be a worse description of the electorate than it used to be.Two findings. The first is bad news for everyone launching a party right now: the undecided pool is not growing. It peaked at 26% in December 2024 and has come down almost every month since, to 16.5% in May. Channel 12 had it at 10% this week.The second is the one worth arguing about. Among those voters, 51.7% say they want a broad coalition and 17.6% want a narrow ideological one, which is close to the reverse of how committed voters on either side answer.Key issues influencing Israeli votersAsked what they care about, they put cost of living first, then the war and personal security, and they rank draft equality and a state commission of inquiry into October 7 far higher than coalition voters do. Judicial reform, the fight that put hundreds of thousands of people in the streets for two years, finishes at the bottom of their list at 4.88%.These voters are not sorted by the question the political system is still organized around. They are sorted by who serves, who answers for October 7, and what things cost.That is the fracture. Whether it can be turned into seats is another matter.The published tests are brutal and contradict each other. The public broadcaster Kan gave an Erdan list five seats on July 12; Channel 12 tested the same names the next day and got 2.8%, under the threshold, with Hendel and Tropper at 2.1% and Gantz at 1%. Shaked’s departure means half those tests describe lists that no longer exist. And Channel 12 puts the share of Israelis prepared to cross from one bloc to the other at roughly 1.3%, which is the figure I would keep in front of me all campaign.Six or seven vehicles, one seam, and a system that destroys whoever finishes fourth.And not one of the people building these parties has said plainly whether he would recommend Netanyahu to the president, which in a system where that recommendation is the whole ballgame is conspicuous. You can read it two ways.Either they are hiding an answer that costs them votes whichever way it falls, or they are trying to get the country to stop organizing itself around the question, and I have spent seven years wishing somebody would.I lean toward the second reading more than I would have a year ago. But a broad government does not assemble itself out of a subject change, and if neither camp reaches 61 and none of these parties will complete either one, we vote again.They should say so now rather than in November.Which brings me back to my friend, who spent 20 minutes explaining why the haredim should be treated like a hostile state and then told me he is considering a party that would put Eisenkot in the Prime Minister’s Office. He probably will not do it. Most people vote the way they have always voted, and the 1.3% figure exists for a reason. But three years ago, nobody in my town said a sentence like that out loud, and now it gets said at the Shabbat table, and the table keeps eating.Follow us on Google