The morning after his Tel Aviv rally on Tuesday, Naftali Bennett went to the Western Wall. He had spent the night before on the Expo stage telling the country he meant to remake it: one constitution, one school system, one nation.
Hours later, Bennett was standing in front of the Kotel stones in Jerusalem, surrounded by an entourage of a size befitting an incumbent prime minister. Young religious women came up for selfies and got the easy warmth of his Bayit Yehudi days, when he led the religious-Zionist party, and they had grown up watching him at their high schools and seminaries.
Bennett wrote a note in his own hand and pressed it into the wall. The prayer was for our soldiers to come home safely. Our photographer Marc Israel Sellem caught all of it.
Both moments were sincere. That is the story. I have watched Bennett for 15 years. Two things about him have stayed constant the whole time, and the religious-Zionist world has never forgiven him for either.
The first is that he wears the kippah, the small skullcap that signals an observant Jew, as a personal biography. He does not wear it as a political program.
The second is that every party he has built has been a vehicle, designed to win one election and ship a small list of reforms. He has never built a movement.
These sound like two separate things. They are the same move.
Take the kippah first. Before Bennett, every religious-Zionist leader who reached the cabinet wore the kippah as a declaration.
Zevulun Hammer, the long-serving education minister of the 1980s, used his to keep the religious school system separate and growing. Effi Eitam, the ex-general turned politician of the early 2000s, wore his to argue for holding every inch of biblical land.
The world they came from, organized for decades around a party called the Mafdal, or National Religious Party, was built on a quiet contract. A religious minister sat at the cabinet table carrying his sector’s commitments. The sector kept its schools, its rabbinate, its settlement enterprise. The kippah on the minister’s head was the receipt.
Bennett showed up wearing the kippah and refused the contract. He once said, with what some at the time heard as arrogance, that he wanted to be the first prime minister of Israel to wear one.
The line turned out to be honest. He meant the symbol. The receipt never interested him. Inside every party he led, he was always more flexible on religion and state than the people around him. He quietly favored a softer draft law for haredi (ultra-Orthodox) men years before saying so publicly.
The old guard of the Mafdal sensed it early. Ordinary religious-Zionist voters figured it out more slowly and then began to feel betrayed. The line you still hear from his old base, that Bennett drifted to the left, was always wrong. He never drifted. He just never belonged to them the way they thought he did.
Now the second move. Israeli political parties are usually homes for particular tribes. Likud is the home of the nationalist Right and the working-class families Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has held for two decades. Shas is the home of traditional Sephardic Jewry. The old Mafdal was the home of religious-Zionist families. Even Yesh Atid, which began as a one-man brand around former television anchor Yair Lapid, eventually became a home for a particular kind of secular, middle-class Israeli voter.
Bennett has never built a home. Bayit Yehudi was a vehicle. Yamina was a vehicle. Bennett 2026 was a vehicle. Together, his new merger with Lapid, is a vehicle.
He builds parties the way American tech founders build companies. A founder. A small team of competent operators. A list of two or three big reforms. An expectation that the whole thing ships and then gets replaced. Brands change. The product is always the same. The product is Bennett.
This is why Bennett’s last government collapsed. In 2021, he formed a coalition that stretched from his own right flank to Ra’am (United Arab List), the Islamist party on his left. It lasted a year before two of his own MKs walked out and brought it down.
His old base read those defections as the body’s antibodies kicking in against a vehicle that had no tribe behind it.
The Bennett 2026 response to that collapse told you everything about him. He did not go looking for a tribe. He went looking for better hiring. He brought in Human Resources consultants to vet every applicant for his party list.
His first two recruits were chosen for what they had done in their previous jobs. Keren Terner had served as director-general of the Finance Ministry. Liran Avisar Ben Horin came from corporate leadership. Bennett was building a team. A movement leader who had lost comrades would have done something else entirely.
October 7 disrupts Bennett bet on competence winning out
So, the kippah and the vehicle are one move. If your religion is biography, you owe nothing to any movement. Movements need shared commitments held over years. Vehicles only need shared goals for the cycle. Bennett’s whole political career is one long bet that Israeli politics can run on competence and contract rather than tribe and identity.
Until the October 7 massacre, the bet had a real chance. The country was tired of crisis. Bennett’s pitch of a quieter government and a few large reforms appealed to voters on the soft Right who had stopped trusting Netanyahu.
October 7 changed the ground under him. Israel did not soften into a republic. It hardened into its tribes. Religious-Zionism moved further toward the hard Right of Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir, the two ministers most identified with the government’s settler agenda.
The haredim dug in around their draft exemptions. The secular center cracked into rival camps led by Lapid, by the former IDF chief of staff Gadi Eisenkot, and by the veteran politician Avigdor Liberman.
A Maariv poll published Friday put a hypothetical Bennett-Eisenkot-Liberman list at 47 Knesset seats, three fewer than the parties earn separately. The anti-Netanyahu bloc holds at 61 either way. The “untribed” Israeli voter Bennett needs is rarer now than at any point in his career.
His answer this week was to raise the stakes. On the Expo stage he asked Israel to live as one nation under one constitution and one school system. That is the kippah-as-biography move applied at national scale. Religion stays private. The state becomes the common rulebook. It is the most ambitious version of his project he has ever offered.
The Kotel stop the next morning was a reminder of what he is still good at. The young women want the selfie. The handwritten note speaks for every soldier’s family. The entourage already moves like a prime minister’s. He looks ready for the job.
Whether the country is ready for the kind of leader he insists on being is the entire 2026 election.