Naftali Bennett is a former prime minister of Israel and Binyamin Netanyahu's main challenger in Israel's upcoming general election, expected in October 2026. A right-winger, he has long been a bitter rival of Mr Netanyahu. Mr Bennett has warned that the threat of a brain drain from Israel is real and dangerous.
In April 2026 Mr Bennett and Yair Lapid, a committed centrist and former prime minister, announced they were merging their parties under Mr Bennett's leadership into a new party called "Together". The pair are rare political rivals who work well together. After the 2013 election they formed a tactical bloc in coalition negotiations with Mr Netanyahu, forcing him to appoint both to senior roles. In 2021 they built a coalition of right-wingers, centrists, leftists and Islamists that briefly kept Mr Netanyahu out of office, though their government lasted barely a year before collapsing.
Some point to Hungary, where opposition parties united behind a single centre-right candidate to defeat Viktor Orbán, and cast Mr Bennett as Israel's Péter Magyar. Mr Bennett ruled out including Arab parties, which represent a fifth of Israel's population, in any future coalition. At the launch he vowed to "guard our nation's land and not give a centimetre to the enemy". The new alliance needs at least one more partner, with Gadi Eisenkot, a popular former general whose party has been rising in the polls, the most likely candidate.
The dirty work at political conventions is almost always done in the grim hours between midnight and dawn. Hangmen and politicians work best when the human spirit is at its lowest ebb.