Jewish Home’s Tekuma faction is not planning to reinvent the struggling Jewish Home from within, MK Bezalel Smotrich (Jewish Home) stated in a special Arutz Sheva interview Friday.
Channel 2 reported late Thursday that Tekuma faction members are planning to force outgoing Housing Minister and number two on the joint list Uri Ariel – the Tekuma faction leader – into a senior position in the party after Jewish Home’s multi-seat loss in the 20th Knesset elections, in which it garnered eight seats as opposed to 12 in the last elections.
NRG also reports Friday that “party sources” say that Bennett is specifically looking to exclude Ariel as much as possible, after the haredi-national-religious population largely skipped voting for Jewish Home and instead opted to vote for Yachad – Ha’am Itanu, which barely missed the newly-raised Knesset threshold.
As such, these sources claim, Bennett sees no reason to keep a tumultuous agreement with Tekuma – with which he clashed numerous times over the past several months, as Tekuma members demanded more representation within the party and spoke of an ideological divide.
The sources pitted Bennett, along with MKs Ayelet Shaked, Yinon Magal, and Rabbi Eli Ben-Dahan against Tekuma’s Ariel and Smotrich, Nissan Slomiansky, and Motti Yogev, saying there was a balance of power.
But Smotrich denied these allegations.
Smotrich blamed “the same media that showed [Labor leader Yitzhak] Herzog winning by a huge margin, and hurt Jewish Home in the process [as voters flocked to save the right by voting for Likud – ed.]” for the reports, and opined that the leftist media is now taking aim specifically at Jewish Home.
He also emphasized that he supports Jewish Home chairman Naftali Bennett despite the loss. “The coalition negotiations will certainly be difficult in the coming weeks,” he noted, adding that the public should not buy into the media’s “fantasies.”