Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich are set to hold a closed-door conference tomorrow (Thursday) with dozens of senior rabbis and institutional leaders, part of a joint effort to energize right-wing voters ahead of elections for the 26th Knesset. The conference, titled “Saving the Right,” aims to lay the groundwork for a field operation mobilizing thousands of activists to bring tens of thousands of supporters to the polls. The collaboration reflects an open channel and full coordination between the campaign chiefs of both leaders—a direct continuation of coordination maintained throughout the war.
The event itself will be held as a focused, supportive forum including several dozen senior rabbis and institutional leaders, not as a mass election rally, with the deliberate intent of building a field operation that will run at full capacity in the final weeks of the campaign. Through the rabbis and institutional leaders, the plan is to reach thousands of activists and yeshiva students from the Religious Zionist community who will mobilize for voter turnout missions and getting tens of thousands of votes out for the right.
One of the central focuses surrounding the conference is the absence of Otzma Yehudit chairman, Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, who was not invited to the event. However, those close to the organizers firmly rejected claims that this represents a deliberate boycott, explaining that the nature of the event relies specifically on field infrastructure composed of thousands of activists and yeshiva students identified with Religious Zionism, and therefore it’s being held in a format shared by Netanyahu and Smotrich alone.
This issue connects directly to political tensions that erupted this week, after Likud chose to sign a formal surplus vote-sharing agreement with Religious Zionism, which has already been submitted for approval to the Central Elections Committee, and not with Otzma Yehudit. Otzma Yehudit sharply attacked the decision and claimed it was a Likud move designed to weaken their party and leave Ben-Gvir out of a future government alongside Gadi Eisenkot—an interpretation rejected by Likud sources.
The question of who would be the surplus agreement partner occupied the system for long weeks, during which the possibility of examining an agreement with Ofer Winter’s “Amcha Yisrael” party was also considered if it crossed the electoral threshold, but in the end Likud stood by its commitment to Smotrich.
Now, the move crosses the boundaries of the surplus agreement and becomes a large-scale operational field collaboration, designed to harness the network of rabbis, institutional leaders, yeshiva students and activists into one organized operation whose goal is to increase turnout among right-wing constituencies until election day.