The first two names on Naftali Bennett’s party list are former government directors-general most Israelis have never heard of. That is the point.
When Yair Lapid founded Yesh Atid in 2012, he was among the most famous people in the country. He used that fame as a launchpad, then week by week, unveiled his handpicked candidates. Each reveal was designed to generate a headline.
Political reporters competed to break the next name. I was one of them, a young journalist at Makor Rishon assigned to cover Yesh Atid because Israeli politics generates so many simultaneous storylines that outlets parceled out parties to individual reporters.
The names were rarely leaked. The announcement of Rabbi Shai Piron as number two came as a real surprise, indicating that Lapid’s party would be more than just a secular protest vehicle focused on a single issue.
The model works because Israeli parties are built differently from American ones. There are no primaries in most cases. The leader picks the list. The reveal becomes the campaign.
Bennett is running the same playbook with the cast reversed. While Lapid recruits for fame, Bennett recruits for function.
Liran Avisar Ben-Horin served as director-general of the Communications Ministry. Keren Turner served as director-general of both the Finance and Transportation ministries. Bennett introduced them on Sunday as the first members of “Israel’s repair team.” The language tells you everything: repair, professionals, team. Bennett is selling competence, and he wants voters to know it.
The scar tissue
From conversations I’ve had over the past year, it appears that Bennett is looking for candidates with domain expertise who will execute quietly, people unlikely to overshadow him or break ranks. This impulse comes from experience.
His coalition government, formed in June 2021, survived the ideological tensions between its eight diverse partners. What killed it was betrayal from within his own Yamina faction. Idit Silman, his coalition whip, defected in April 2022.
Amichai Chikli refused to support the coalition from its first day and was formally declared a defector. Both ended up on the Likud’s Knesset list. An analysis by The Jerusalem Post at the time observed that there was nothing connecting Yamina’s members to each other. Bennett had handpicked them, but he had failed to build a team.
He has now internalized the lesson. Ben-Horin has been leading Bennett’s “Repairing Israel” project for 18 months, building a comprehensive reform plan that involves experts from Israel and abroad, former senior public servants, and academics. On Sunday, she said, the team was “ready to get to work on day one.” People who have spent a year and a half constructing policy documents are unlikely to walk away.
The polling reinforces Bennett’s logic. In the most recent Lazar Research survey, conducted on April 9, Bennett 2026 polled at 24 seats, just one behind Likud’s 25, with the opposition bloc holding a 61-seat majority.
In Channel 12’s head-to-head matchup, Bennett and Netanyahu tied at 40 percent each. Bennett leads every other opposition figure by wide margins: 42% to Eisenkot’s 19%, with Lapid and Liberman in the low 20s. The numbers are already there. What he needs is a list that will hold together under pressure.
The Lapid contrast, revisited
The 2013 election is worth revisiting because Bennett ran in that same race with Bayit Yehudi. He watched Lapid’s model up close. Yesh Atid won 19 seats, far beyond the 8-11 that polls had predicted. Within a year, 75% of Israelis polled said that they were disappointed with Lapid’s performance. The party lost eight seats in 2015.
Lapid’s model generated attention but proved thin on governing capacity. Bennett is betting that in 2026, after October 7, after the wars in Gaza and against Iran, after the pervasive sense that the state apparatus failed, voters want competence more than celebrity.
“Israel is stuck and poorly managed, and we don’t have time,” he said on Sunday.
I covered Lapid when he launched his approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict at Ariel University. The venue was more interesting than the content. By choosing a university in the West Bank, or Judea and Samaria, as he calls it, Lapid was telling voters he occupied the Center.
Bennett is sending a similar signal with his first two picks, though the medium is a professional profile rather than geography or sociology: Two women who led economic and infrastructure ministries. The lane is governance reform. The implicit argument: The state is broken because it is badly managed, and these are the people who know how to manage it.
The choice of Ben-Horin carries a second layer of significance that will resonate outside Israel more than inside it.
Before her career in government, Ben-Horin spent four years in the United States, two as a Jewish Agency emissary and two as the Reform movement’s aliyah emissary, a role unprecedented for the movement at the time. She went on to run Masa, the umbrella organization for long-term Israel programs for young Diaspora Jews, overseeing more than 120,000 participants from over 60 countries.
In a 2018 interview, she told me that Jewish continuity was a strategic national security issue. “The real crisis is the loss of interest among young Jews in Judaism and in Israel,” she said.
Ben-Horin grew up in Migdal HaEmek, discovered the existence of Diaspora Jewry at 17, during a scouts trip to a Jewish summer camp in Texas, and built her career around the conviction that the relationship between Israel and world Jewry demands the same seriousness as defense policy.
Bennett served as the Diaspora affairs minister for six years. Placing Ben-Horin on his list signals that the Israel-Diaspora relationship will be treated as a governing priority.
Repair manual
Her background adds another dimension. She grew up with parents who immigrated from Morocco and Tunisia. She served as an emissary for the Reform movement. She ran programs for Jews across every denomination.
When I asked her in that same 2018 interview about right-wing criticism that the Reform and Conservative movements drive assimilation and intermarriage, her response was blunt. Only 10% of American Jews are Orthodox, she noted. “So do we give up on the other 90%? We can’t afford to, and we don’t want to. Jewish continuity is one of the most strategic national security issues we face.”
In a political environment where the question of “Who is a Jew?” and Israel’s relationship with non-Orthodox movements remain a live wire, this is a candidate who has spent her career inside that complexity rather than avoiding it.
Lapid’s stars gave voters someone to project onto. Bennett’s operators give voters a work plan. Thirteen years ago, the social protest movement was fresh, and voters wanted representation for the middle class. Lapid’s famous face was the vehicle. In 2026, the dominant sentiment is that the state is broken and needs to be rebuilt. Bennett is betting voters will choose the person with the repair manual over the person with the television credits.
Whether this works will depend on something polls can’t capture. Israelis have always voted for leaders, for faces they trust in a crisis. Bennett’s party, so far, offers two directors-general and a promise to deliver “the fastest turnaround Israel has ever seen.” The next names on the list will tell us whether Bennett is building a government-in-waiting or a consulting firm that happens to be running for office.