Philippe Petit is a French tightrope walker remembered by every elderly Jerusalemite for walking on a thin rope over the Valley of Hinnom in 1987. About halfway across, while maintaining perfect balance, a pigeon landed on the rope, threatening to tip it and send the acrobat plunging into the ancient Jerusalem valley below. In the end, he made it.
Thirty-nine years later, on a tightrope leading to the Prime Minister’s Office, stands Naftali Bennett. It would be a mistake to attribute his drop in the polls to mistakes made in recent weeks. In fact, the pigeon—though he claims it’s a hawk—perched on his rope back in July of last year. Its name is Gadi Eisenkot.
For nearly two years, even before he had a political party, Bennett was the leading candidate in the polls for prime minister. This was thanks to two groups: the great majority of his supporters came from opposition voters. The smaller but electorally more significant group consisted of disappointed coalition voters. The potential right-wing supporters were the dowry that drew left-leaning voters to show up—they were the “bride price” he brought to the “change camp.” The cost was deliberate ambiguity—like Sharon in his time, like Barak, like Eisenkot today—about contentious issues. Bennett walked at a great height on this tightrope for a very long time—longer than any other candidate in the last generation. His plunge in the polls, therefore, seems premature, but in fact it came quite late.
Because when Eisenkot split from Gantz, everything began to go wrong. The few seats he gained immediately slashed support on the left flank of what was already being called “Bennett 2026.” He faced the danger that, like Gantz before him, like Gabay, Herzog, and Livni, he too would quickly lose those shifting sands. Therefore, Bennett gradually turned leftward: he emphasized a more clearly anti-Netanyahu tone, spoke in ways closer to those voters, ruled out Smotrich and Ben-Gvir, and at the height of this process hired Lior Horev and merged with Lapid. Philippe Petit turned his torso leftward to restore balance.
But the result was that equilibrium on the right was disturbed. That small but crucial segment of right-wing voters left. A poll commissioned last week sought to find where Bennett–Lapid’s bucket was leaking. It examined what would happen if the two split. The result: Bennett would receive 15 seats and Lapid wouldn’t cross the electoral threshold. The leak was mostly from the left.
Therefore, the conclusion is that there is no point in continuing the tightrope walk, nor in trying to shoo away the pigeon. This balancing act is over. Lapid—certainly the more gifted campaigner of the pair—suggested in this week’s meetings to stop addressing Eisenkot or attacking him, and simply offer something else. No voter will be convinced of one’s suitability to lead the country through factional quarrels. The delicate—and pointless—balance between right and left is also done.
The assets the two have over Eisenkot, which will be increasingly emphasized, are experience (since the days of Sharon and Netanyahu, two prime ministers haven’t run together on one list), detailed plans prepared from day one in office, and above all—the argument that in such times there is no room for experiments. They will not present a “cockpit” like in Blue and White, but a team. In the 1980s, those same years of Philippe Petit, Likud propaganda called it a “honeycomb.” After all, that also fits a party whose name is “Together.”