From Likud to Yisrael Beytenu: The case for a change on the Right - opinion

I joined Likud on the day I received my teudat zehut (ID card). I had not signed a lease yet. I had no bank account, no Hebrew worth speaking, and a mattress on a yeshiva’s floor. But I had the card, and I had the membership form, and I filled out the form first.

If you made aliyah, you understand why. Nobody moves to Israel for the salary. You come because you believe something, and once you are here, you want your belief to have a vote. I came out of Zionism.

But the reason I walked into public life, and the reason I chose that party and not another, had four parts: a free economy that brings prices down instead of managing them; sovereignty in the Land of Israel; victory over our enemies – real victory, not a ceasefire with a countdown; and an army in which every mother’s son serves, because a Jewish state that excuses one community from its own defense has stopped being one people.

Those four things are what I went into politics for, and they are what kept me there through wars, funerals, and the price of cottage cheese. I gave up my seat in the Knesset over the fourth one.

And I have reached a conclusion that took me a long time and cost me most of my political friendships: the party I joined that morning still says all four things, and works, actively and deliberately, to make sure none of them happen.

If you believe in those values, the address has moved to Yisrael Beytenu. Let me show you why, one value at a time, with the record and not with adjectives.

I’ll start with victory, because it is the one that keeps me up at night.

In December 2016, Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman sent a memo to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the chief of staff, and the head of military intelligence.

'severe mistake with far-reaching consequences'

It said that Hamas “plans to move the next conflict into Israel’s territory, with significant, well-trained forces, such as the Nukhba force, into Israeli territory, while conquering an Israeli village, and perhaps several, in the Gaza envelope and taking hostages.”

It said that failing to act was “a severe mistake with far-reaching consequences,” possibly worse than “the results of the Yom Kippur War.”

Read that again. The Nukhba. The villages. The hostages. Seven years before October 7.

He was told the memo was not serious.

Two years later, in November 2018, after 500 rockets were fired on the south, the same cabinet accepted a ceasefire and let Qatari cash cross into Gaza in suitcases. Liberman called it “purely $15 million of terror funding.” He said the government was “feeding a monster” and “buying quiet for a heavy price with no long-term plan.”

Then he did something no one else in that room did: he resigned. He called the deal “a capitulation to terror,” and he walked out of the Defense Ministry rather than put his name on it.

One party wrote the warning and paid for it with a ministry. The other party received the warning, called it unserious, and paid for it with Be’eri and Nir Oz. That is the record. Everything else is noise.

Soverignty. For 15 years, the promise was made at every campaign stop in Efrat and every parlor meeting in Ra’anana. And for 15 years, one man stood between the promise and the vote. Netanyahu blocked the bills his own MKs brought. He took sovereignty off the table in 2020 and called it statesmanship.

Liberman lives in Nokdim. His party left Ariel Sharon’s government over the disengagement when most of the right found reasons to stay. On the land, one party has a slogan and one party has a home address.

The economy. As finance minister, Liberman opened the country to imports, broke the agricultural lobby that had beaten every minister before him, and left a smaller deficit than he found. The coalition that followed paid for its survival with billions in coalition funds for institutions that do not work and do not serve, taken from the families in Modi’in and Beit Shemesh who do both.

That same coalition caved to the lobbies and canceled the reforms that were supposed to lower your prices. Why? Because those lobbies had joined Likud in large numbers, and the party answered to its members before it answered to anyone else. Ze’ev Jabotinsky wrote about the dignity of the free citizen. He did not write about patronage with a Likud stamp.

And lastly, service. In 2019, Liberman refused to enter a government without the draft law passing as written. The country went to a second election over it, and he was mocked for stubbornness. Inside the Likud, I fought the exemption law, lost my seats in committees for it, and finally voted against the exemption laws rather than toe the party line.

On this one issue, there is exactly one party on the Right with a written red line and a record of losing power to keep it.

Some of you are thinking: the Russian party. Yes. We are led by a Russian-speaking oleh who made the most Zionist decision a Jew can make, the same one you made. Half of our top 10 are olim, including me, from Canada.

But we are not only a party for olim. We are a party of all Israelis: a bereaved father from Beit She’an at number two, a Druze veteran, the mayor of Metula, a third of the list religious-Zionist. Secular, religious, and traditional at one table, and everyone at that table serves.

I did not change. My values did not change. I went looking for the place where they are still fought for, and where people pay for them when it costs. I found it.

We did not make aliyah to watch the right say our words and bury our values. On October 27, vote for the values. They have an address.

The writer is a former member of Knesset and number 10 on the Yisrael Beytenu list.