Family members of a senior public official, who belong to the ultra-Orthodox Religious Zionist movement (Hardal), called him on the morning before the elections. They explained to him, in all seriousness, that U.S. President Donald Trump was apparently expected to speak within hours with Rabbi Tau, the spiritual leader of the Noam party, and ask him to withdraw from the race in favor of Netanyahu. “The rabbi, by the way, will refuse,” they confidently informed him.
In the end, Trump never called. Delusions of grandeur, complacency, and a loss of touch with reality—these characterized not only Noam or Winter; they were emblematic of an entire political camp that believed it was at the center of the universe and had lost touch with reality.
The election results within the right-wing bloc brought almost all its components back down to their actual size. The Noam party collapsed to just a few thousand votes, losing not only its seat in the Knesset but also the last remnants of its self-respect. Ofer Winter wasted approximately 100,000 votes, most of which were effectively wasted from the outset—most of those voters had already supported Ayelet Shaked in 2022.
Itamar Ben-Gvir dreamed of winning a double-digit number of Knesset seats, until he could no longer restrain himself and entered into a direct confrontation with Netanyahu. It was a grave mistake, born of arrogance and ending in failure. All that remained of his dreams of ten seats was Tally Gotliv. She will not become Minister of Justice, and he will not become Minister of Defense. Ofer Winter vanished into thin air, and Hendel can now turn his attention to founding yet another political party.
Amid this narcissistic, self-unaware chaos, the responsible adults of the Israeli right emerged: Likud voters, most of them traditional and Mizrahi Jews, who determined the outcome of the election. They came from Holon, Bat Yam, Rishon LeZion, and Israel’s peripheral regions. These are people whose children make up the majority of the Israel Defense Forces.
They are the people who were called “Bibi-ists,” a herd—people whom others tried to delegitimize under the guise of opposition to their party leader. Unlike the Religious Zionist camp, which was full of itself, they did not spend two years agonizing over a collection of splinter parties. They did not waste votes. Instead, they behaved with boring responsibility rather than hubris.
On Tuesday, they quietly went to the polls. So quietly, in fact, that the opinion polls missed them entirely (remember the predictions of 18 seats for Likud?), and even the election-night exit polls failed to detect them.
Presumably, this was also because the media, which is virtually devoid of people like them, has never understood what matters to them or what interests them.
In opinion polls, as in everyday life, they simply are not counted enough.
The media assumed they would vote for a rival candidate because of his ethnic background—as though Ashkenazi voters in Ramat HaSharon had supported Netanyahu because his family name was once Mileikowsky.
Continuing to ignore this enormous segment of the public will lead to nothing but another humiliating fall.
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https://www.israelhayom.co.il/magazine/hashavua/article/21740270#