Naftali Bennett

Naftali Bennett (born March 25, 1972, Haifa, Israel) is an Israeli high-tech entrepreneur and politician who served as Israel’s prime minister (2021–22). Although he is occasionally described as far-right because of his religious political orientation, his devoted activism in favor of Israeli settlements and his controversial 2012 proposal that would restrict West Bank Palestinians to enclaves, he forged a historic unity government in 2021 consisting of left- and right-wing parties as well as a party that represents some Palestinian citizens of Israel. His fragile coalition collapsed a year later when right-wing members withdrew to bring about a right-wing government instead. He then left politics, but during the Israel-Hamas War he again emerged as a major contender for the prime ministership.

While performing draft duty in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) in the 1990s, Bennett served in Sayeret Matkal and Maglan, elite commando units that operate behind enemy lines. He then pursued a degree in law at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The son of American immigrants to Israel, Bennett left Israel for New York and cofounded an anti-fraud software company in 1999. In 2005 he sold the company for $145 million and returned to Israel.

Political rise

Bennett’s political career began in 2006 when he was hired as the chief of staff of Benjamin Netanyahu, then leader of the opposition in the Knesset (parliament). In 2009, the same year Netanyahu was elected prime minister, Bennett took a break from the political sphere to lead an Israel-based company. But after the United States pressured Israel to freeze construction of Israeli settlements in the West Bank in late 2009, Bennett was appointed in 2010 as director general of the Yesha Council, an organization representing those settlements and their populations. He led a pressure campaign against the freeze, which ended in September 2010, and continued in this role until 2012.

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In late 2012, as Israel prepared for polls set for early 2013, Bennett was elected to lead the religious right-wing Jewish Home party. His relatively young age and fresh ideas helped steer the minor party to a historic victory: winning 12 seats, it became the fourth largest party in the Knesset, just behind the Labour Party, with 15 seats. His campaign had touted his so-called Stability Initiative, a proposed solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that centered on Israeli annexation of Area C (areas of the West Bank under interim Israeli civil and security control; see Oslo Accords). The controversial plan, which drew attention to Bennett but never gained steam, rejected a two-state solution outright and would restrict most Palestinians in the West Bank to urban enclaves. Upon joining the Knesset, Bennett entered Netanyahu’s coalition and received several cabinet portfolios over the years that followed.

As Israel prepared for elections set for April 2019, Bennett formed the New Right party, a right-wing party intended to appeal to both secular and religious Jews. The new party failed to win seats in the Knesset, but the inability of the new Knesset to form a government led to its dissolution only months later. He reentered the Knesset later that year after forming Yamina (“Toward the Right”), an electoral list that included small religious right-wing parties, including Jewish Home.

Prime ministership

In March 2021 the fourth general election in two years left Bennett in the position of kingmaker. After Yair Lapid, leader of the centrist party Yesh Atid, received the mandate to form a government in May, Bennett joined a coalition with him that included a broad spectrum of left- and right-wing parties seeking to unseat Netanyahu, who had been indicted on criminal corruption charges. The coalition agreement, reached in June with a bare majority in the Knesset, allowed Bennett to become Israel’s prime minister in a two-year rotation with Lapid.

As prime minister, Bennett faced the challenge of maneuvering amid the delicate and heterogeneous coalition. Among his first tests was the erection of a new settlement outpost in the West Bank: the coalition was starkly divided over whether the state should authorize or dismantle it. Bennett reached an agreement with the settlers to vacate the outpost voluntarily and return at a later date under state sanction, thus avoiding a decision that would immediately cause the coalition to collapse. He later pushed through legislation that would invest more than $9 billion in Arab communities, appeasing a key demand of a party in the coalition that represented the interests of Palestinian citizens of Israel. In November 2021 the government passed its first budget since 2018, a crucial hurdle that indicated the coalition’s ability to cooperate. Still, sudden political tensions, such as those that followed a fatal shooting in Jerusalem by a member of Hamas that same month, underscored the potential of unexpected crises to derail the coalition.

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It was ultimately from Bennett’s own party that the coalition faced defection in April 2022. The coalition’s chairwoman, Idit Silman, joined the opposition after the left-wing health minister upheld a court ruling that permitted the entrance of leavened foodstuffs (chametz) into hospitals during Passover, a Jewish holiday in which leaven is prohibited. Her statement cited frustration with the unity government and her desire for a right-wing government that would preserve a “Jewish identity” in public institutions.

Now deprived of a majority in the Knesset, Bennett’s government found it difficult to pass legislation when the parliamentary body reconvened in May from its Passover recess. In June it was unable to muster enough votes to renew an emergency regulation, in place since the Six-Day War (1967), which provided for Israeli settlements in the West Bank to be governed under civil rather than military administration. With chaos in the legal system imminent if the regulation were allowed to lapse, Bennett moved to dissolve the Knesset and call early elections, yielding the prime minister’s office to Lapid per the conditions of the coalition agreement. The dissolution, which rendered the Knesset unable to respond to emergency situations, allowed the automatic extension of emergency regulations until elections could lead to the formation of a new government. Bennett, meanwhile, announced that he would not run in the next set of elections.

Return to politics

After more than a year of absence from Israel’s political scene, Bennett publicly proposed strategies to confront Hamas and Iran, a major source of support for Hamas, after the brutal Hamas-led attack on Israel on October 7, 2023. In opinion pieces, he emphasized the importance of targeting Iran, writing in The Economist that Hamas is “just one tentacle spreading from a Tehran-based octopus of terrorism.” In 2024, after he expressed interest in retaking the helm as prime minister, polls in August and September showed him as a front-runner for the position.