Yuli Edelstein said Friday that he would be leaving the Likud party to find a new political home. He saved the formal announcement for Saturday night, in a “Meet the Press” interview with Amit Segal and Ben Caspit.

The bookend was almost too neat: nearly five years ago, on that very same program, Edelstein announced that he would challenge Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for the leadership of Likud. In Israeli politics, it turns out, it’s easier to switch parties than to break old habits.

Back then, in the innocent days before the war, what consumed Edelstein and the Israeli public was Netanyahu’s inability to form a government through four straight election cycles. Edelstein’s argument was blunt: if Likud didn’t replace Netanyahu, the country would be stuck in an endless loop.

In that old world, where COVID and fractious politics were the biggest problems, Edelstein believed he was the solution. Once he realized Netanyahu would crush him in a leadership race, he backed down and fell in line. But it was too late. When the party held its primaries to determine its Knesset slate, Edelstein fell from the top to 17th place.

Though Netanyahu made him pay, shutting him out of the cabinet, he did hand his would-be rival the chairmanship of the powerful Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee — but then stripped that from him in the summer of 2025.

The removal of Edelstein, who had refused to accede to Haredi demands regarding a bill regulating military draft exemptions, was a signal to the ultra-Orthodox parties that Netanyahu was serious about doing good by them.

The instant Edelstein’s departure from Likud became public this weekend, Netanyahu’s senior adviser Topaz Luk fired off a mocking tweet implying his exit didn’t bother the party one bit, just as former minister Limor Livnat’s departure hadn’t bothered it back in 2014.

A well-worn exit ramp

Since the exit of Livnat, a former communications minister who was supplanted by Miri Regev as the party’s top-ranking woman, the list of senior Likud figures who’ve resigned or been pushed out has expanded. Every election cycle, Netanyahu has found a way to clear out whichever Likud heavyweights struck him as too moderate, too independent or simply too competent.

Gideon Sa’ar, Ze’ev Elkin, and Tzachi Hanegbi are remembered for defecting, then crawling back to become political........

© The Times of Israel