Their combined slate of candidates will have a heavy military cast at the top: Mr. Gantz, who led the armed forces from 2011 to 2015, had already recruited another former chief of staff, Moshe Ya’alon, to run with him. And Gabi Ashkenazi, a popular former general who preceded Mr. Gantz as chief of staff, also agreed to join the unified ticket.
Polls had shown a Gantz-Lapid merger posing a credible threat to Mr. Netanyahu, who responded with a visceral online campaign aimed at depicting the former general as a liberal. “Gantz: Weak left,” Mr. Netanyahu’s videos warned. “Netanyahu: Strong right.”
And Mr. Netanyahu, whose governing coalition was already the most right-wing in Israel’s history, doubled down on that strategy, enticing one of his coalition partners, the Jewish Home party, to merge with an extremist party, Jewish Power, that includes followers of Meir Kahane, the anti-Arab rabbi who was assassinated in New York in 1990. Mr. Kahane’s party, which supported expelling Arabs from Israel and a ban on intermarriage, won a seat in Parliament in 1984 but was later banned from Israeli politics.
Though his Likud party remains a force in the polls, Mr. Netanyahu may be at his most vulnerable point: He is awaiting the attorney general’s decision on whether to indict him on corruption charges.
For Mr. Lapid, a former television personality whose party came in second place in its first legislative election, in 2013, the power-sharing agreement is a distinct comedown. He had built a strong party organization across the country and had vowed to run only in the top spot in any merger.
But Mr. Gantz’s military record provides security-minded Israeli voters reassurances that Mr. Lapid cannot. And with Mr. Gantz’s party, Israel Resilience, gaining support largely at Yesh Atid’s expense, Mr. Lapid apparently was left with no choice but to relent and join forces if he wanted a shot at defeating Mr. Netanyahu.
Source : Nytimes
