Editor's Notes: October 7 shattered Israel’s old political map, next election may redraw it

Let me get my own record out of the way first, because it’s relevant to everything that follows.

I still held some version of that in March 2024, when I wrote here that the way forward was to talk to haredi men directly rather than negotiate with their rabbis. Community forums, education, haredi soldiers telling their own stories. Persuasion.

By July 2025 I was writing that the state should cut yeshiva stipends, tie welfare benefits and tax discounts to service, and hold up travel abroad for men who haven’t settled their draft status.

The second position is the thing the first one said would fail, and I’d rather say so than call it growth. The war changed my mind about something I’d argued in print for years.

The reason the old column matters now has nothing to do with me.

I reached for Lapid in 2022 because haredi conscription was his. It had been the secular center-left’s issue for three decades. Shinui ran on it in 2003 and took 15 seats.

Politicians switch parties all the time, for reasons that are usually boring: a better slot, a grudge, or a calculation. Issues are different. An issue doesn’t wander from one camp to the other unless something has happened to the camps.

I won’t present what follows as reporting. It’s what I’ve been hearing for weeks at kiddush, the supermarket, and the park: people who’ve voted the same way for 20 years telling me they have no idea what they’ll do this time. None of them has drifted left. A few have gone further to the Right. They’ve simply stopped being sure.

A few weeks ago I wrote about a couple I know here, where the wife plans to vote the way she always has and the husband, who is no less right-wing than she is, can’t bring himself to vote for Smotrich again. When I wrote about them, he was looking at a former chief of staff. He’s now looking at Winter. He hasn’t landed anywhere. That’s the part I’d ask you to notice.

Israelis have been splitting and reforming parties since the 1970s, and if that were the whole story here it wouldn’t be worth your time.

For two years I’ve been writing about Jews who came loose from their institutions after October 7 and keep turning up in arrangements nobody planned. I’ve called it the reshuffle, and the people caught in it are hanodedim, the wanderers.

I treated it as a Diaspora story. That was too narrow, and this is where I stop pretending otherwise. The same thing is happening here, in Hebrew, and this year you can vote for it.

Take Laly Dery, who’s on Winter’s list. She buried her son in this war. She’s religious, she lives in a settlement, and in Israeli shorthand that tells you exactly where she stands on religion and state.

Except it doesn’t. She came from France and spent years advocating for French olim (immigrants to Israel), and French Jews arrive with an assumption that startles Israelis: religion and state are separate things, because in France they are. I’ve met plenty of French olim who look strictly observant by any Israeli measure and will tell you they see no reason the buses shouldn’t run on Shabbat.

I’ve known Dery for years, from long before any of this. She was a Likud member. She told me she couldn’t run for office again through Likud.

Fleur Hassan-Nahum arrived from Gibraltar 25 years ago and built a career on olim and public diplomacy. Natali Shem Tov left a news desk. Winter’s own family was expelled from Gush Katif, which is why, when people on the Right spent this week questioning his credentials, he told them nobody was going to teach him what the Right is.

Two weeks ago I asked in this column why so few immigrants from Western countries turn up on Israeli party lists, and used Michael Oren as the case. Voters never rejected him. Nobody asked them to consider him. Likud set aside slot 43 for a new immigrant while the party was polling at 23. What this week suggests is that waiting for that door to open was never the route.

Ofer Hadad’s breakdown at N12 on Thursday cuts against most of what I’ve written here, and it’s the most useful piece of analysis published all week.

Sixty percent of Winter’s support is coming from inside the existing Right: 30% from Likud, 15% from Smotrich, 15% from Itamar Ben Gvir. That’s not a realignment; it’s the same voters moving between rooms in the same house, and it means the argument Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made this week rests on something solid.

The other 40% is where it gets interesting. A quarter of Winter’s voters had already been telling pollsters they intended to vote for a party that didn’t exist yet. Another 15% were undecided. Four in 10 of them had let go of everything on offer before this party had a name.

I don’t know which of those numbers ends up mattering more, and I’d be careful of anyone who says they do.

The sharpest thing I saw this week wasn’t in a poll.

Benny Biton, the mayor of Dimona and a Likud man, said publicly that Winter had been slated for a reserved slot on Likud’s list and answered by cutting contact and screening calls from the Prime Minister’s Office. Netanyahu is holding five realistic slots, three of them high, to compensate candidates who give ground in mergers. People around Winter explain the refusal simply: they won’t join a party that was in charge on October 7.

Biton’s own interpretation is worth as much as what he revealed. He said Netanyahu isn’t worried, that this is what campaigns look like, and that the two of them will sit in a government together when the time comes. That’s the establishment’s answer to everything I’ve written here, and he might be right. Lists are filed Monday and Tuesday.

Two polls came out Wednesday, one by Lazar Research for Walla and one by Direct Polls for i24, and they disagree about almost everything. Likud at 21 or at 26. Naftali Bennett at 15 or at eight. Smotrich out of the Knesset, or comfortably in with four. Across the week’s polling, Winter himself ranges from zero to six seats.

The whole Israeli argument this week has turned on whether Winter pushes Smotrich under the threshold, and two competent houses sampling on the same day can’t agree on it.

I’d treat that instability as the real result. Pollsters find people when the categories are stable enough to ask about. Three days before lists close, in the middle of a campaign, they can’t.

Reading this in New York or London or Melbourne, the easy move is to file it under Israeli political dysfunction, which is a familiar genre and requires nothing of you.

I’d file it somewhere else. The categories that organized Jewish life outside Israel for 50 years – denomination, affiliation, where you stood on Israel – don’t predict much anymore either. Most of us have watched people walk out of communities that fit them perfectly on paper and turn up somewhere that makes no sense at all. Institutions have mostly settled on calling it polarization, which I think is wrong, since polarization assumes there are still poles.

Israel is going through the same thing with the lights on and pollsters in the room, failing to measure it.

I have no idea whether Winter will sit in the next Knesset. What I can tell you is that the people who built these categories keep assuring us they’ll hold; the categories aren’t behaving that way, and I’m not where mine says I should be either.