The Fight to Succeed Bibi
Also, the problem in the opposition.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his wife Sara cast their vote during the elections for the Likud Central Committee, at the International Convention Center in Jerusalem, November 25, 2025. (Chaim Goldberg/Flash90)
It’s Friday, August 14, and a nice young aide was in charge of public inquiries at the Prime Minister’s Office during Benjamin Netanyahu’s first term—inquiries that back then still arrived by mail and fax. His name was Gilad Erdan, later Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations. A few years later, as Netanyahu was heading toward his second term, Erdan was elected and climbed the list all the way to first place in Likud. When he served as interior minister, he had a nice young aide named Ofir Katz, today the Likud coalition chairman. Another decade passed, and Katz too ran for the Knesset, and won. In this election he posts a rare achievement: the only Katz in Likud who didn’t need a reserved slot to be elected in a good spot. Who knows—maybe in his office, too, there are people planning a public career, political great-grandchildren of Netanyahu, with the great-grandfather still among us.
In the 2022 election Netanyahu moved heaven and earth so that Likud MK Tally Gotliv would squeak in, somehow, at the bottom of the list. In the 2026 election he’s moving heaven and earth so she doesn’t finish too high.
Likud’s primary—roughly half an election, thanks to the reserved slots—is nonetheless the real thing: it will most likely set in motion the Likud succession battle for Netanyahu’s seat, a battle that has been waiting patiently since the 1990s and was never once turned over. The first generation—former foreign minister David Levy, former justice minister Dan Meridor, and Benny Begin, son of prime minister Menachem Begin—left Likud slamming the door during the first term. The second—former foreign minister Silvan Shalom, former education minister Limor Livnat, former health minister Dani Naveh—thought it would beat Netanyahu at the turn of the millennium and was gradually spat out of politics. The third—Gideon Sa’ar, Erdan, and former finance minister Moshe Kahlon—believed it would inherit him in the natural course of things. When that didn’t pan out, they founded parties one after another. The only one who managed to come back is Sa’ar, whose faction kept the government from falling.
And so the fourth generation—Knesset Speaker Amir Ohana, Justice Minister Yariv Levin, and company—will compete this coming Monday for more than a spot on the list. This will be the starting gun for the role of Likud’s fourth-ever chairman. People say it every term, but it still seems that whether Netanyahu wins the premiership again or loses, Likud will have a new chairman heading into the elections for the 27th Knesset, when both the state and the man at its head enter the ninth decade of their lives.
In big tennis tournaments, some players have to fight through every match, while others, by virtue of their ranking, get a favorable draw and are spared the early rounds. So, with all due respect to the primary for the list—and to the question of which 20 sitting MKs get knocked out—the race for the Likud leadership will begin only once the list closes, in early September. Contending in it will be whoever makes it to the top, alongside Defense Minister Israel Katz and Foreign Minister Sa’ar (Laurel and Hardy, Ariel Sharon once called them, when they worked as a pair). And perhaps—chiefly—also the two figures Netanyahu has yet to reserve in the top ten. Israeli prime ministers in general, and Netanyahu in particular, never really think about a successor, for the simple reason that none of them ever planned to step down. But if a figure of real weight is slotted in near the top of the Likud list, that will still be the closest thing to a writ of succession.
This is an excerpt from my weekly column in Israel Hayom.
L-R: Gadi Eisenkot, Yair Lapid, Naftali Bennett. (Ayal Margolin/Oren Ben Hakoon/Michael Giladi/Flash90)
Elections held on the date fixed by law create an optical illusion, as if the campaign were already in full swing. It’s a dangerous illusion. In some ways, the elections haven’t started. Likud, for instance, has so far spent exactly zero shekels on advertising. Avigdor Lieberman not much more. There are no lists yet, the Arab parties haven’t sorted themselves out, and neither have the splinter parties in the center. What now looks like a law of nature—Gadi Eisenkot’s clear lead of the bloc—is a very fresh phenomenon, less than two months old.
A certain shift has taken place in the change bloc over the past two weeks. Naftali Bennett halted his slide in the polls and found his element: nonstop talk of work plans and on-the-ground conversations, eye to eye, hammering every hard charge about broken promises and signed documents. At the same time—and this, too, is new—Eisenkot’s climb has stalled, both in seats and in fitness for the premiership. Inside his party, they blame Lieberman and Bennett. For weeks those two have been explaining that Eisenkot lacks experience and isn’t right-wing—so is it any wonder their own supporters are starting to be convinced? In fairness, it’s not only them. The former chief of staff himself said, in a wide-ranging New Yorker profile, that “after October 7 the whole country moved right, but I stayed where I was.” Where he was is a bit to the left of the zone from which prime ministers are usually thought to be electable.
The bloc’s main problem was and remains Yair Golan. It’s hard to organize a camp whose leader has only just changed. Had it been clear months ago who the leader was, he would have gone to Golan and cut a quiet deal with him: you dial back the extreme statements and put your candidates into a monastery of silence; we won’t try to grab seats on your turf, and the day after the election you’ll get the portfolios of your choosing. But right now there’s no boss in the house, so Golan has to make sure his party stays big enough. His radicalization bankrolled the Likud campaign, which in turn forced Lieberman and Bennett to declare he’d be a marginal minister (”energy, maybe,” said Bennett; “no important portfolio,” Lieberman promised). Golan has to respond—and round and round it goes.
The change bloc still faces two big challenges: unification of the Arab parties and unification of the center bloc. If both happen, it will drift well clear of the coveted 61 seats. For the moment, to its temporary good fortune, it has no arena of infighting and splintering of the kind the rival bloc is going through as it pushes for broad unity right now.
English Editor: Ari Tatarka
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