Recently I wrote about the religious-Zionist right consolidating out of necessity as Israel’s October 27 election approached — Smotrich merging with Feiglin’s Zehut to avoid falling beneath the threshold, Ben-Gvir refusing to join them, Ofer Winter’s new party siphoning nationalist voters from all of them. The assumption embedded in that piece was that the other side of the map was doing the opposite: consolidating out of strength. On September 6, Naftali Bennett unveiled the final B’Yachad slate — his party merged with Yair Lapid’s Yesh Atid — and called it “the most talented” list running. A day earlier, Bennett and Gadi Eisenkot had quietly held merger talks of their own, and quietly decided against them. That reversal is worth taking seriously, because it says the fragmentation isn’t a right-wing phenomenon. It’s an Israeli one.

The numbers explain why Eisenkot said no. When Bennett and Lapid first merged in the spring, the combined list polled at 26 seats — enough, on paper, to anchor an opposition government. By this week’s slate unveiling, B’Yachad was being projected at 12 to 15. Eisenkot’s Yashar, over the same........

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