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 Netanyahu. He has warned that the threat of a brain drain from Israel is real and dangerous.
On April 26th 2026 Bennett and Yair Lapid, a committed centrist and former prime minister, announced they were merging their parties under 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 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 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 Bennett as Israel's Péter Magyar. 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.
Hope that the day after you die is a nice day.