With Israel moving steadily into election mode, two significant political developments played out this week – one loudly and on the front page, the other largely beneath the radar. Ironically, it is the latter that may prove to have the greater long-term significance.
The first was the report, later confirmed, that Gadi Eisenkot – who last year broke away from Benny Gantz’s party to form one of his own, Yashar – is in talks with Yesh Atid chairman Yair Lapid and former prime minister Naftali Bennett about running together on a joint list.
The overarching idea is to create a big-tent party – Eisenkot in the Center, Bennett on the soft Right, Lapid on the soft Left - that would outpace the Likud as the country’s largest party and then, together with Avigdor Liberman’s Yisrael Beytenu on the Right and Yair Golan’s Democrats on the hard Left, be able to form a governing coalition.
The assumption is that the excitement such a merger would generate would push the so-called change bloc – currently polling just below or right at the 60 seats needed to form a government – over the threshold.
There is something deeply familiar about this. It smacks of a time-honored practice in Israeli politics: mergers aimed at creating momentum in the best-case scenario, or at preventing smaller parties from falling below the 3.25% electoral threshold in the worst.
Sometimes mergers work, sometimes they don’t
Among the examples of mergers that worked is the Likud itself – the product of a 1973 merger orchestrated by Ariel Sharon that brought together three parties and the Greater Israel Movement, and enabled the Right to topple the Labor Party and the Left’s long-standing hegemony over Israeli politics in 1977.
Another successful merger took place in 2019, when Gantz’s Israel Resilience Party merged with Lapid’s Yesh Atid and Moshe Ya’alon’s Telem Party. The result was Blue and White’s 35 seats – significantly more than the sum of what each party would likely have won on its own – matching the Likud and briefly positioning the bloc as a viable alternative government. This, apparently, is the model Eisenkot hopes to replicate.
Unlike the Likud example, however, Blue and White did not remain intact after its electoral success. Lapid and Ya’alon eventually broke away, and the party unraveled.
And then there are the mergers that don’t work.
The most glaring example was the pairing of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud with Liberman’s Yisrael Beytenu ahead of the 2013 elections. Going in, the two parties held 42 seats between them – 27 for the Likud and 15 for Yisrael Beytenu. Coming out, they won only 31. Many right-wing voters defected to Bennett’s Bayit Yehudi Party, while secular voters migrated to Yesh Atid.
A similar fate awaited the merger of the Likud and Moshe Kahlon’s Kulanu Party in 2019. In the 2015 election, the Likud won 30 seats and Kulanu 10. In the first of 2019’s two elections, Likud won 35 and Kulanu four. After the parties combined for the September 2019 election, the joint list fell to 32 seats – a net loss of seven.
Eisenkot’s idea – dubbed by some a political “big bang” – is therefore far from revolutionary. According to the reports, the parties would run on a joint platform, but only decide a year after the election whether to remain together or go their separate ways. As for who would lead the party and become prime minister if a coalition were formed, that would be decided after an election date is set, based on polls and research at the time.
Essentially, what Eisenkot is proposing is to merge the parties now rather than after the election, in the framework of a coalition – in the hope that doing so will be enough to shake up the system and produce a decisive result.
Neither Lapid nor Bennett has publicly responded to the idea, but some analysts already predict that such a merger could cost the anything-but-Netanyahu bloc seats: left-wing voters may recoil at Bennett, Lapid may turn off right-wing voters, and both could look elsewhere, leaving the joint list with less than the sum of its parts.
Political forecasting is a perilous business. But one thing is clear: this represents yet another attempt to rearrange the political furniture – to make the salon look more inviting in the hope that more guests will come in. What it does not represent is the addition of a new, more comfortable sofa – something that might attract new guests entirely who have grown weary of the room as it currently stands.
But while the first political development of the week was about political arithmetic, the second was about something far rarer: the emergence of new political players.
That became evident in a Channel 12 interview with Yonatan Shamriz, who announced that he was entering politics, though he had yet to decide whether it would be within an existing party or through one he would establish himself.
Some will ask: Why is this significant?
Who is Shamriz?
It is significant because it offers an answer to a question that has lingered since October 7: Where are the new faces – the new leaders – who can change the national conversation and move Israel in a different direction? Where are the bereaved relatives, the reservists, the hostages, and their families who spoke so powerfully about unity and renewal in countless speeches and thousands of media interviews?
Shamriz’s answer was simple: Here I am.
Shamriz is an October 7 survivor. He and his pregnant wife sheltered with their two-year-old daughter in their safe room in Kibbutz Kfar Aza as terrorists rampaged through the community, murdering 63 people and taking 19 hostage, among them his younger brother, Alon.
Alon was accidentally killed in December 2023 when he and two other hostages attempted to escape. Since then, Shamriz has emerged as a prominent activist.
He founded a national grassroots movement called Kumu, which organized civilian October 7 memorial ceremonies in Tel Aviv in both 2024 and 2025 as an alternative to the government-organized events and also launched educational programs for tens of thousands of children evacuated from their homes in the North. Shamriz has become a leading voice calling for a state commission of inquiry into the failures of that day.
He had been mentioned as a possible No. 2 on Eisenkot’s list – before talk of a mega-party with Lapid and Bennett surfaced – and in the Channel 12 interview said that while his political options remain open, one thing is no longer in doubt: he is entering politics.
“My ability to influence from the civic arena is limited,” he said. “If you really want to inject a new spirit, you have to enter politics – there the decisions are made.”
At the October 2025 memorial ceremony, Shamriz recalled making a promise to himself while hiding in the safe room. “We will rise,” he said. “We emerged into a country where the only thing still functioning was the people. The people of Israel clothed us, fed us, and fought for us. They were there when no leader showed up.”
“Our generation,” he continued, “which inherited a country bleeding, isolated, fractured, and in pain, will be the one to fix it.”
Lofty rhetoric aside, skepticism has lingered since October 7 about whether this generation would ever translate newfound moral authority into political leadership, or whether its voices would remain confined to the civic sphere. Now, it appears, they may be emerging. A Migdam poll in November by Mano Geva found that an independent party led by Shamriz could comfortably pass the electoral threshold and win six seats.
Shamriz is not alone. A growing number of figures identified with the trauma of October 7 have begun exploring political paths – either within existing frameworks or by creating new ones.
Among them is former Fire and Rescue Services commissioner Dedi Simhi, who lost his son, Guy, a soldier in the Paratroopers Brigade, on October 7, and who, like Shamriz, is weighing whether to form a new party or join an existing list, including the Likud’s or Bennett’s.
Tzvika Mor, the father of the released hostage Eitan Mor and chairman of the Tikva Forum – an alternative hostage advocacy group that called for increased military pressure on Hamas – is also in talks with political parties, including the Religious Zionist Party.
Others, too, are poised to enter the political arena: Eyal Eshel, whose daughter Roni Eshel, a surveillance soldier, was murdered in the operations room at Nahal Oz; Sharon Sharabi, whose brothers Yossi and Eli were taken hostage; and Einav Zangauker, the mother of Matan Zangauker, and one of Netanyahu’s fiercest critics. Zangauker said in a recent interview that she is weighing her options and – strikingly, given the intensity and bitterness of her criticism of Netanyahu – did not rule out the Likud.
“We need to come and tell the State of Israel and its citizens that everything they’ve been sold for years is b*******. B*******. Pro-Bibi, anti-Bibi – it’s nonsense,” Shamriz said in his interview announcing his entrance into politics.
Asked whether he would serve in a Netanyahu-led government, he replied: “I don’t think the prime minister’s name is what matters. But a prime minister on whose watch Israeli communities were overrun, on whose watch 1,200 citizens were murdered, and more than 250 people abducted – his time is over. I don’t think there is room in politics for a leader under whose watch the greatest disaster to the Jewish people since the Holocaust occurred. The State of Israel needs renewal.”
And that, ultimately, is the contrast between the two political developments of the week. The first reflected yet another attempt to reshuffle familiar faces and known quantities, hoping that a different configuration would somehow yield a different result. The second signaled something more consequential – the slow emergence of a new political class shaped less by ambition or ideology alone, and more by personal trauma, loss, and a sense that the old categories no longer suffice.
Israel may yet decide that rearranging the furniture is enough. But the deeper question – and the one that will likely define this election cycle – is whether the country is finally ready to let new people into the room, and to see what kind of politics they might bring with them.