Leftists concentrate their efforts on the Avodah party, but conservatives are dispersed among many parties. That situation reflects differences in mindset. Leftists are oriented toward immediate goals, whhereas right-wingers look to high-flown ideals. Leftists join party lists and government coalitions based on the current common agenda; fringe conservatives refuse to join those with slightly different religious ideas. Thus Israel sports several ultra-conservative religious parties.

Feiglin wrongly decided to subvert Likud instead of forming his own party. Feiglin’s choice was dictated by circumstances: he needed to quickly join a party list in order to gain immunity from politically motivated prosecution. Likud offered only a dead end to Feiglin. Most of Likud’s voters are anti-Labor rather than right-wing, and few subscribe to Feiglin’s policy of holding on to Judea and Samaria. Likud also moderated Feiglin, particularly on the issue of transferring Israeli Arabs to Jordan; this moderation cost Feiglin a great number of right-wing votes. Feiglin has little chance to rise through Likud’s hierarchy; there are many ways to shut him up. For example, the proposed merger with Israel Beitenu would push Feiglin’s candidates to the bottom of Likud’s list. Even if Feiglin were to rise unexpectedly to Likud’s leadership and make the party right-wing, he would only cause Likud’s electorate to switch to other centrist parties. A party’s brand is a great asset in huge mature democracies like the US, where launching a new party is prohibitively expensive. Small, new democracies like Israel typically have a fluid party composition, with parties continuously entering and leaving the political scene. That trend is especially pronounced in a country of credulous, dreaming, messianic Jews who jump on every savior proclaimed to them by media ads. Hijacking Likud makes no sense for Feiglin.

Can the right wing form a winning coalition? Voter turnout is fairly high among Israel’s Arabs, who are 19 percent of the population; they vote Jewish left (which is Arab right). Slavs and Jews-by-grandfather form about 15 percent of the Israeli population. They often demand strong measures against Arabs, but rarely support truly conservative ideas like the annexation of Judea and Samaria, expulsion of the Arabs, or even a united Jerusalem; they are decent soldiers, but it’s just not their war. They fought with equal courage in Afghanistan and Chechnya. Close to 10 percent of Israeli Jewish citizens reside abroad and don’t vote. Not less than a third of Jews are hard-core leftists who embrace Arabs in the Jewish state and don’t consider Judea to be Jewish land. Israeli conservatives cannot hope for a majority. Even if they do form a majority in the Knesset, the leftist Supreme Court will quash their racist moves, and Israeli security establishment based on the MAPAI core will enforce the left’s law. The Murders of the Kahane family and Ze’evi showed that the Israeli establishment won’t risk ideological competitors. They will be bought like Lieberman, subverted into the political mainstream like Feiglin, or killed like Kahane. The Government propaganda machine hasn’t yet tried on Feiglin a fraction of the facilities it mobilized against Kahane or Sharon.

There is no alternative to revolution.