Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party announced on Thursday that firebrand MK Tally Gotliv would run with National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir’s far-right Otzma Yehudit party in the October 27 election.

The announcement came after Gotliv’s disappointing result in last month’s Likud primary, which she has blamed on Netanyahu and said could put her “in Shin Bet detention facilities” if she is voted out and loses parliamentary immunity.

Under an agreement between the Likud and Otzma Yehudit, Gotliv will be bound by Likud faction discipline until the election and will not be declared a departing lawmaker.

Such a declaration would have barred Gotliv from running with any Knesset faction and deprived her of the roughly NIS 1.85 million ($614,700) in funding that parties get from the Knesset for every seat they control in parliament. It was unclear from Likud’s announcement if Gotliv’s funding would go to Otzma Yehudit or Likud.

Following the announcement, Ben Gvir welcomed Gotliv to Otzma Yehudit, saying she was “joining a family of fighters.”

He called her a “fighter against the deep state” and “the fact that our dear prime minister has been persecuted.”

Hebrew media had reported Wednesday that Ben Gvir told Likud officials the “window of opportunity is closing” on Gotliv’s proposed move to Otzma Yehudit.

Gotliv entered the Knesset in the last election, in November 2022, when she was number 25 on the Likud electoral slate and the party won 32 of the Knesset’s 120 seats.

As a lawmaker, Gotliv gained popularity among many rank-and-file Likud members with her attacks on anti-government protesters and her regular interruptions at the prime minister’s graft trial as well as other high-profile court and Knesset committee hearings.

Gotliv has also portrayed herself as a martyr of the judiciary, which seeks to prosecute her for revealing the identity of a Shin Bet agent as part of a conspiracy theory that anti-government activists colluded with Hamas ahead of the terror group’s onslaught of October 7, 2023. The Knesset voted in June to grant her immunity from........

© The Times of Israel