Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Fast Forward

Extremist Jewish Power Party Leaves Right-Wing Alliance Ahead Of Elections

JERUSALEM (JTA) — The extremist right-wing Jewish Power party, or Otzma Yehudit, said it will not run on the same list with the Jewish Home Party like it did in April.

Otzma Yehudit said that Jewish Home was not honoring the terms of the merger agreement, including not requiring its Knesset members appointed last week as government ministers to resign from Knesset under the Norwegian law, in order to allow the Otzma Yehudit candidate Itamar Ben Gvir to enter Knesset.

The union of the two smaller right-wing parties was brokered by Prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu ahead of the national elections in April in order to shore up votes to allow him to form a government with a solid bloc of right-wing parties. The parties won five seats in the short-lived 21st Knesset. New national elections are scheduled for September 17.

Otzma Yehudit said in a letter to Jewish Home Party head Rafi Peretz announcing the split that it is “trying to form other unions that will strengthen the right in the coming elections.”

The National Union Party, part of the Union of Right Wing Parties alliance with Jewish Home and Otzma Yehudit, called on the parties to stop “unnecessary wars within the right-wing camp.”

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.

If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.

Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism. 

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.