On September 8, Israel’s Central Elections Committee closes the rolls for the October 27 vote, and any party that misses that deadline misses the election entirely. Nothing concentrates a fractious political family like a hard date, and nowhere is that more visible than inside the bloc Bezalel Smotrich has spent a decade building.

Smotrich’s Religious Zionism has spent this campaign doing something Israeli parties rarely admit to doing in public: flirting with irrelevance. Polling has put the party above the 3.25% threshold in some surveys and beneath it in others, a volatility that has less to do with Smotrich’s ministry than with who now sits behind him. Only 130 members of the party’s Central Committee selected this cycle’s list, and what they produced tilts hard toward the “Hardal” current, the fusion of ultra-Orthodox religiosity and settlement nationalism that reliably energizes a base and just as reliably caps a ceiling. Ofir Sofer and Moshe Solomon, the ministers most associated with a broader religious-Zionist appeal beyond the settlements, declined to run again rather than carry that........

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