The Israeli Right and the Pre-Election Reshuffle

With Israeli elections less than two months away, the usual scramble is taking place to form new parties and to merge or unmerge smaller parties before the September 8 deadline. The key consideration in this process is the electoral threshold: a party must receive at least 3.25 percent of the national vote to get seats in the Knesset. As a result, small parties have an incentive to unite to ensure representation. Thus the fateful merger of Bezalel Smotrich’s Religious Zionism with Itamar Ben-Gvir’s more extreme Jewish Power that allowed the latter, smaller party into the Knesset. The alliance was kept together by the intervention of Benjamin Netanyahu in 2014. Amit Segal asks whether it will make it to the next election: