On a warm afternoon last week, former deputy foreign minister Sharren Haskel sat in a circle with a small group of associates and advisers in the center of a fifth-floor office in the central Israeli city of Herzliya, discussing strategy.

Aside from Haskel and her colleagues, the space was empty and quiet — not what one would expect of a political campaign just over two months before a major national election.

Lacking the recognizability of leaders of other new parties and competing for votes in a jammed field of upstarts created by fellow disgruntled ex-Likud members and allies, Haskel’s Israel First party faces long odds in the upcoming election, with wide speculation that it will merge with another party rather than attempt an independent run.

Yet speaking to The Times of Israel, Haskel was insistent that her party was more than just a merger vehicle circling for a place to pull in, even if another faction’s parking lot is her most likely destination.

“I had to create a political home where I feel whole, a right-wing party that speaks about freedom, about unity, about recruiting the ultra-Orthodox [to the IDF] — and that will be able to create unity the day after the elections,” Haskel said, sitting in a small, glass-walled conference room on the side of the office.

First elected on the Likud slate in 2015, Haskel jumped ship for Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar’s hawkish New Hope faction in late 2020, complaining at the time that there was “a big gap” between the Revisionist Zionist ideology of Likud’s founders “and the values and norms that characterize Likud today.”

When the Likud Central Committee voted overwhelmingly to approve a merger with New Hope last year, Haskel told The Times of Israel that she and other Israeli security hawks and economic conservatives were left feeling “politically homeless” — although she declined to resign and continued to serve as both a coalition MK and deputy foreign minister.

It was only last month, with the election coming up in October, that Haskel, one of the coalition’s most outspoken opponents of legislation enshrining the broad of exemption of ultra-Orthodox males from IDF conscription, resigned as a deputy minister, citing the passage of a controversial law freezing the arrest and prosecution of Haredi draft dodgers.

Haskel, still an MK, said that after the law passed “something broke inside” of her and she felt the need to........

© The Times of Israel