Naftali Bennett

B'Yachad
Prime Minister candidate (B'Yachad) · Nationwide, Israel · 2026
PurposeNaftali Bennett is seeking to become Israel's prime minister at the head of B'Yachad, a joint Knesset list formed with Yair Lapid's Yesh Atid ahead of the October 27, 2026 election, running on security reform, a lower cost of living, and constitutional change.

Economy
Bennett's platform centers on lowering Israel's cost of living by increasing market competition rather than imposing price controls. He has pledged to break up monopolies, cut regulation, and open the domestic market to imports, and would let new businesses register in a single day. He points to his 2021-2022 government's record of moving the state budget "from a huge deficit to a surplus" as evidence the approach works. The platform also calls for doubling the population of Israel's peripheral regions within a decade through tax incentives and development grants, and for pushing Israel to the front of global artificial-intelligence development.

Agriculture/Food
To address high grocery prices, the platform commits to cutting food costs by roughly 30 percent within three years by breaking up large food-industry conglomerates and increasing competition in the retail sector. It also proposes replacing existing agricultural import tariffs with direct subsidies paid to farmers, aiming to lower consumer prices while still supporting domestic agriculture.

Security
The platform calls for universal military conscription applying to all citizens, ending the exemptions currently available to ultra-Orthodox men, and would redirect state benefits away from draft evaders toward those who serve, on the reasoning that "incentives work." It proposes adding 20,000 additional soldiers to the armed forces, giving the military freedom to operate throughout Gaza without outside restriction, and replacing Qatari and Turkish involvement in Gaza's governance with an Egyptian role instead. Reservists and IDF veterans would receive benefits under a proposed Servants Law benefits program, including housing grants of up to one million shekels, free university degrees, and fifty-percent discounts on utility bills. The plan also names rehabilitation of northern Israel, amid the continuing threat from Hezbollah, as a national priority.

Immigration
On foreign policy, Bennett has vowed to "immediately declare Qatar an enemy state" if elected, citing intelligence he says shows Qatar funded Hamas, Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps, and Syria's al-Nusra Front. He has also urged the sitting government to make the same declaration at the United Nations, describing Qatar's global media holdings and university funding as an organized influence operation against Israel.

Education
The education platform would require a fixed national curriculum, covering mathematics, Hebrew, English, civics, Zionist heritage, and Torah studies, to make up 60 percent of instructional time in every school, with individual schools choosing the remaining 40 percent from options such as Talmud, music, cyber studies, or entrepreneurship. School funding would be conditioned on teaching the full mandated curriculum, and the plan calls for bringing the Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) education system under state and municipal academic oversight within eight years.

Governance
Bennett's central governance pledge is that the first matter taken up by his cabinet would be a quasi-constitutional Basic Law limiting future prime ministers to two terms or eight years in office, whichever is longer, followed by an eight-year cooling-off period before a former premier could seek the office again. He has also pledged to establish a state commission of inquiry into the failures surrounding the October 7, 2023 attack, to draft a written constitution grounded in the principles of Israel's Declaration of Independence, and to require broad political consensus before any future changes to judicial review authority. On coalition-building, he has ruled out partnering with Prime Minister Netanyahu as well as with Arab and Haredi religious parties, saying he would govern only with Zionist opposition parties. The platform additionally proposes recognizing civil unions regardless of religion or sex, banning conversion therapy, ending the state-backed kosher-certification monopoly, and letting individual municipalities set their own Sabbath public-transportation rules.

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