Two neighbors, four seats, and the one that decides Israel's next government - analysis

Jerusalem Post/Israel NewsChili Tropper and Yoaz Hendel, neighbors in a Judean Hills moshav, may hold the four seats that determine who becomes Israel’s next prime minister.Follow us on GoogleYoaz Hendel, head of the Reservists' Party and a former minister, holds a press conference outside Kibbutz Retamim in the central Negev Desert, southern Israel, in February, 2026.(photo credit: Tsafrir Abayov/Flash90, YOSSI ALONI/FLASH90)ByZVIKA KLEINJULY 28, 2026 00:11Updated: JULY 28, 2026 00:13On a ridge in the Judean Hills, twenty-odd kilometers from Jerusalem, there is a moshav called Ness Harim. A few hundred families. Peach and apple orchards, mostly gone now. It was founded in 1950 and filled with immigrants from Kurdistan, and for fifty years nothing happened there that anyone outside it needed to know about.Two men who live on that hill may decide who becomes Israel's next prime minister.The first, Chili Tropper, gave one of his kidneys to a man he had never met. He got the idea from a pamphlet somebody left at his synagogue.The second, Yoaz Hendel, was told by the navy on the morning of October 7 to stop calling and stay home with his 48 years. His wife told him the same thing. He got in the car and drove south.On Monday night, Channel 12 News reported that the party (Bayit Tzioni - HaMiluimnikim, roughly the Reservists' Zionist Home) these two neighbors have built together crossed Israel's electoral threshold for the first time. Four seats. Chili Tropper speaks at the 2022 ACUM Awards ceremony for Hebrew Song near Tel Aviv on September 7, 2022. (credit: TOMER NEUBERG/FLASH90)Why four seats is a lotIsrael's parliament has 120 seats, and you need 61 to govern. Seats go out proportionally, but only to parties that clear 3.25% of the vote. Miss it, and you get nothing at all. Not one seat, not a consolation prize. Every ballot cast for you is swept off the table, and the seats are divided among the parties that survived. Israeli elections are decided in that gap more often than they are decided by landslides, and Tropper and Hendel had been sitting just under it all month, at 2.7%, at 2.9%, alive and worthless. Monday they were over. Which changes the following.The parties trying to remove Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu now total 70 seats in this poll. That sounds decisive. It is not, because ten of those seats belong to the Arab parties, Hadash-Ta'al and Ra'am, and most of the Jewish opposition has spent the better part of a decade insisting it will never build a government that depends on them. This is a position, not a law of physics. Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid did exactly that in 2021, with Mansour Abbas inside the coalition, and the ceiling has been lower ever since because the parties that did it took such punishment for it. Netanyahu, for his part, campaigns on little else.Take the Arab parties out, and the opposition has 60.Sixty. One short. And it was 56 until Tropper and Hendel crossed the line.Elsewhere on Channel 12's map: Gadi Eisenkot's Yashar leads with 23, Likud is right behind at 22, Naftali Bennett's Beyahad has 14, Yair Golan's Democrats 10, Avigdor Liberman 9. Shas, United Torah Judaism, and Otzma Yehudit hold 8 each. Bezalel Smotrich's Religious Zionism has slid to 4 and is now sweating out the same threshold. Netanyahu's coalition adds up to 50, the worst it has polled.The neighborsTropper did not just move to Ness Harim. He built the half of it he lives in.He and a few other young couples wanted something that barely exists in Israel: a place where religious and secular families would raise their kids on the same street, in the same kindergarten, arguing about the same things. The moshav happened to be planning an expansion. They took the whole thing. A hundred plots sold in six weeks, entirely by word of mouth, no screening, no committee. Residents say you will not find anyone from the strict end of the religious world living there, which was rather the idea.Hendel is up the road. So when people ask how this party came together, the honest answer is that it did not come together in a hotel suite in Tel Aviv in June. These two have been having the same argument, about how religious and secular Israelis manage to share a country, on the same hillside, for twenty years.Tropper, 48Jerusalem-born, yeshiva high schools, religious Zionist through and through.Before politics, he ran the education and welfare department in Yeruham, a hard-luck town in the Negev that Israelis use as shorthand for the periphery. He was second-in-command at Acharai, a youth movement that works with kids nobody else wants. Then he took over the Branco Weiss school in Ramle, which exists for teenagers the school system has already written off. Ilana Dayan made a documentary about it. He has written four books and they are all, one way or another, about education. He was culture and sports minister, then science minister, under Bennett and Lapid.That is the resume. It is not what Israelis know him for.They know him for the kidney he gave in February 2020 to a stranger through a religious charity called Matnat Chaim, on the theory, as he put it at the time, that if there is a chance to save someone's life, why not. They know him for the girl: 15 years old, haredi, dropped out of everything, and Tropper already had four children of his own when he brought her home to Ness Harim. Eight years later he walked her to her wedding canopy. And when Russia invaded Ukraine, he took in a refugee family, a woman named Lena, her nine-year-old son Mark, and their dog Gosha, and wrote about it on Facebook without any of it sounding like a press release. Israeli political journalists are not a soft crowd. Ask enough of them who the most decent member of the outgoing Knesset was and Tropper's name comes up more than anyone's. People float him for president, the ceremonial office Israel hands to figures the country has run out of reasons to fight with. Hendel, 51Harder man. Harder story.He grew up in a settlement, in a religious-Zionist house, wearing a kipa. He took it off as a teenager and never put it back on, but his people are still the liberal religious right, the ones who want a Jewish state governed by a parliament rather than by rabbis. He has a doctorate in history. He spent years inside the security establishment. He was Netanyahu's spokesman, and then he was one of the men Netanyahu could least afford. He was communications minister under Bennett and Lapid. He is a lieutenant colonel in the reserves and came up through Shayetet 13, the naval commandos.Then October 7.Shayetet told him to stay out of it. Too old. His wife, a physician, told him he had done his share. "Those were exactly the words I needed to hear to do the opposite," he said later. He drove south. For the first 140 days he commanded roughly 200 reservists in an improvised outfit that people started calling Koach Yoaz, Yoaz Force, because nobody had given it a real name. Requests kept coming in from men who had aged out of combat and wanted back. He went to the army and offered to raise a scouting unit. The army told him to raise a battalion.They called it Magen Be'eri, for the kibbutz. It is manned by veterans of the special units, Shayetet, Maglan, Egoz, Shaldag, men in their forties and fifties who were legally finished with the army and volunteered back into Gaza, Lebanon, and the West Bank. Hendel has served more than 500 days since the massacre. He took off the uniform and launched a political party more or less the same week.In 2012, he published a children's book. It is called "Daddy Goes to Reserve Duty."The knock on him is real, and everyone makes it, including the interviewers who like him. He has been in something like six parties in a decade. Blue and White, Telem, Derech Eretz, New Hope, the Reservists, now this. He does not have a satisfying answer for it. What he has is that he was not in the last Knesset at all, and in Israel this year, that is not a hole in a resume. It is the resume.What they are actually sellingNeither of them is a new face. The claim is what is new: that two years of war produced an enormous constituency with no address. Hundreds of thousands of reservists, their spouses, the widows, the wounded, people who ran the country's war while its politicians ran their coalition. Several organizations have gestured at turning that into a party. Hendel is the first one who actually did it.Whether the arithmetic rewards him is a separate question, and here it gets complicated in a way the poll numbers do not show.Hendel has said publicly that he will sit only with Zionist parties, which rules out the haredim and the Arab parties both, and he has said flatly that Netanyahu's government is responsible for October 7. If those lines survived the merger with Tropper, then these four seats are not floating free between the two camps. They belong to one of them, and their power is the power to decide whether that camp can govern without the parties it refuses to govern with. That is narrower than kingmaking. It is also, at 60 seats, the only question that matters.And the poll is a poll. Midgam surveyed 509 people, sampling error 4.4%, which means a party sitting on 3.25% is statistically indistinguishable from a party sitting on nothing at all. Benny Gantz came in at 1.6% in this survey. Three years ago he was the alternative prime minister, and before that he was the man who nearly ended Netanyahu twice.But 9.8% of Israelis told Channel 12 they still have not decided, and most of them are wandering around inside the anti-Netanyahu bloc looking for somewhere to land.A party that did not exist in the spring, led by two men who have never run anything together, now sits between a bloc that cannot reach 61 and a bloc that will not. Both will spend the coming months trying to work out what Tropper and Hendel want.So, probably, will Tropper and Hendel.Follow us on Google