In January 2025, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich voted against the hostage deal, called the prisoners it released murderers with blood on their hands, and then did the one thing nobody in his camp expected. He stayed.
The demands that he resign came from the people who had elected him. National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir walked out and came back. Smotrich absorbed it, said little, and remained finance minister. Eighteen months later, at the Finance Ministry headquarters in Jerusalem on Wednesday, he explained why.
"I knew that we were going to a campaign to remove an existential threat, a nuclear Iran, an Iran that was tripling the pace of its ballistic missile production," he told The Jerusalem Post this week at the Finance Ministry headquarters in Jerusalem. Bringing down the government meant elections, and elections meant no campaign. So he stayed, and told nobody.
"I could not tell anyone about it. Not even my wife. Because it was a secret."
Operation Rising Lion began five months later, on June 13.
It is the cleanest illustration of the argument Smotrich has been making for three years and is now asking voters to buy one more time: that influence is worth more than exit, that the price of staying is paid in public and the return arrives in private, and that a man who has never resigned from this government has shaped it more than anyone who has. Ten weeks before the October 27 election, with Religious Zionism polling at or barely above the 3.25% threshold, that argument is on the ballot.
Where he says the method worked
The most recent test came this month, over the Board of Peace's 15-point roadmap for Gaza, and Smotrich claims the outcome as his.
His account of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is not flattering. The prime minister, he says, did not initially grasp what he had been handed. "He thought he could keep juggling it. And I think I managed to put a very serious brake on him."
First came the public letter he and Settlements and National Missions Minister Orit Strock sent demanding the security cabinet reconvene and revoke its approval. Then came the private conversation. "I sat with him in the room and he understood the event."
The record does not contradict him. On August 9 Netanyahu told the cabinet flatly that Israel rejects the 15-point document and that the IDF will not withdraw until Hamas is genuinely disarmed.
What bothers Smotrich most is the international force. The ISF was supposed to enter Gaza and disarm Hamas, except that no country would send troops to fight it. "Suddenly it turns out the ISF is not supposed to fight Hamas at all. It is supposed to supervise us."
His fear has a name, and it is not Gaza. "The great fear is that there will be a kind of Lebanonization of Gaza": a governing body on the surface, an armed faction underneath holding the weapons, the money, and the population. He never accepted the original 20-point plan either, because of the pathway to Palestinian statehood he reads into it, though he credits US President Donald Trump for keeping the destruction of Hamas as the stated aim.
He wanted something else entirely, and did not get it: take the Strip, install a military government, encourage emigration. The cabinet chose not Hamas, not the Palestinian Authority, and not Israel, which left a vacuum nobody has filled. "Nobody will do the work for us. Nobody will come and shed their blood and disarm Hamas."
Where it broke
Then there is the vote that cost him two members of his own faction, and possibly the election.
Smotrich asked for several minutes before answering, and started with his family. Two sons in combat units, one of them seriously wounded in Givati and still in rehabilitation, the other finishing nearly three years in the Paratroopers. A cousin he grew up with like a brother, a father of five, who left everything on Simchat Torah and was killed five months later. Brothers, brothers-in-law, and nephews on extended reserve duty. A neighborhood where for long stretches of the war there were not enough men left to make a minyan (prayer quorum) on Friday night.
"I do not think anyone needs to convince me of the importance of the draft."
His anger at the haredi (ultra-Orthodox) leadership is not in doubt and predates the legislation. Almost three years of war, he says, and they still have not found a way to say the one sentence that mattered: we are with you in this trouble. He describes pressing Shas leader Arye Deri on it repeatedly. "I told him, I do not need to prove that I am part of this war. I am there. My children are there. My family is there. You are not there." Where was the mass prayer rally? Why were the rabbis not in the rehabilitation wards every day?
And yet he voted with them, and he will not accept that this makes him their instrument. What distresses him equally, he says, is what the issue has become: "a kind of hate campaign against the haredi public." They are not evading out of laziness. They are idealistic, modest in their needs, and wrong about the state in a way he calls ingratitude. "The State of Israel is the place with the greatest flourishing of Torah that has ever existed in the Jewish people. Who, if not the State of Israel?"
His defense rests on a framework that does not exist. The bill he describes, the one he says justified everything, required haredi leadership to actively vote in favor rather than abstain, set a 50% enlistment target within five years, and imposed sanctions on daycare, housing, and transportation subsidies for failure. Its value was declarative: once the leadership votes yes and the rabbis assent, enlistment becomes legitimate, and legitimacy is the only thing he says a law can actually deliver.
That bill never passed. Maximalists in his own camp, he says, refused anything short of 100%. "I said, friends, this is a process. Let us go with 80%. Not perfect, but 80%." Two years earlier, he argues, it would already have put thousands of haredim in uniform.
What passed instead, in the Knesset's final days, was narrower and carried no sanctions at all. Basic Law: Torah Study cleared its final readings on July 13 by 63 to 52. The freeze on arrests of draft evaders passed the next day, 58 to 54, over the Knesset legal adviser's objection that it suspended enforcement while demanding nothing in return. Smotrich separates them. The Basic Law he defends outright, as protection for hesder yeshivas, which combine Torah study with military service, against a High Court petition he says is already written. The arrests measure he defends more narrowly: the arrests accomplish nothing except Jews fighting Jews on the roads.
On that he turns on the attorney-general directly. "If she really wanted to draft haredim, she would send buses to the kiosks and to working haredim. She sent them to the yeshivas because she does not want to draft haredim. She wants to break up the national camp." Gali Baharav-Miara remains in office after the High Court unanimously annulled her dismissal in December.
The cost arrived within days. Immigration and Absorption Minister Ofir Sofer, among the coalition figures who fought the legislation, announced he would not stand again. MK Moshe Solomon, who voted against the Basic Law and lost his committee seats for it, followed. Deputy Foreign Minister Sharren Haskel resigned her post.
Smotrich will not say a bad word about Sofer, calling him an excellent minister with the largest soul in the government, and saying he tried to talk him out of it.
What he wants instead of coercion is an operation: dedicated hesder yeshivas and pre-military academies for haredi recruits, funded by the state, youth movements, soldiers' houses built for men who cannot sleep in the existing ones. He told the General Staff on the first day of the war that anything haredi enlistment costs comes out of his budget. Three years on, he says, roughly 6,000 haredim registered for Shlav Bet, the track for older recruits, and the army took about 150.
Quoting MK Simcha Rothman (RZP), he offers a definition of populism: "Deal now, hostages now, peace now, messiah now, draft now." Everything real is a process.
The bill comes due
Whether any of this survives contact with voters is now the question, and the arithmetic is unforgiving.
He will not run with Ben-Gvir. "I really do not want it. I do not think it is good." Ben-Gvir has ruled it out from his side too, telling 103FM the parties draw on different electorates and that one plus one does not always make two. Netanyahu has pushed for a merger for months, and Likud has not ruled out reserving a slot for Smotrich on its own list.
He does not regret 2022. Fourteen seats produced the 64 that made him finance minister. But he concedes a cost that has nothing to do with Israeli politics: abroad, the two names are spoken in one breath, with no distinction drawn. "There is a price."
Meanwhile, the ground he needs is being contested. Unity, launched on August 6 by Gilad Erdan and Yuli Edelstein, is running explicitly on universal conscription, aimed squarely at coalition voters who cannot stomach the exemptions. Yoaz Hendel and Chili Tropper have Zionist Home-The Reservists. A Kan poll on August 9 put both below the threshold, and neither bloc was at 61.
Smotrich's answer is the oldest one in Israeli politics: do not throw your vote away. "Too much is at stake." He is preparing reserved slots on his list for groups he considers under-represented and promises new faces.
The alternative, as he frames it, is Gadi Eisenkot, whom he treats with unusual care and unmistakable intent. "He is a dear man with many merits, a former chief of staff. And he is a man of the left. That is not an insult." Eisenkot left the government mid-war over Rafah, and had that view prevailed, Smotrich argues, Hamas would be back on the fences today. He also claims, with what he called responsibility, that European governments and figures in the US Democratic Party are already talking to Lapid, Bennett, and Eisenkot about reversing this term's settlement decisions. He offered nothing to support it.
Where the record disagrees
On his own portfolio he is confident to the point of immovability, and this is where the interview strains hardest against the evidence.
He grades himself highly on the war economy and points to the shekel, the stock exchange, foreign investment, employment, falling inflation, and the interest rate cut, against more than NIS 300 billion in war spending. Cost of living has one answer, repeated three times: competition. Break up the dairy producers, break up the importers. He blames what he calls the communists in Likud for killing the dairy reform.
The personal import exemption is his favorite example and his clearest defeat. He raised it from $75 to $150; the Knesset struck the order down on February 24 by 59 to 25, with Likud members leading the revolt. He signed a replacement at $130, and the Knesset struck that down too, on June 1.
On housing he says prices are falling faster than the state is willing to admit, putting the real decline near 15%. The Central Bureau of Statistics does not agree: its May release recorded an annual drop of about 1.2%, an average price around NIS 2.33 million, and new-build prices down about 3.8% over the year.
And on Army Radio he insists nobody wants to close the station, only to privatize it, because an army broadcaster exists in Israel and North Korea and nowhere else. The government he sits in voted unanimously in December to shut it down by March 1, on Israel Katz's proposal and over the attorney-general's objections, with Netanyahu making the North Korea comparison himself. The petitions are still at the High Court.
'I only have seven seats'
For all the influence he claims, Smotrich is candid about the limit of it. Asked what he got wrong, he does not reach for the war.
"During the war there were many things that I thought at some point I should have done differently. And that's fine; in the end, I only have seven seats. I have enormous influence, but I'm not prime minister."
On October 7 he takes a share and assigns the rest to the doctrine. "We also bear responsibility, along with many other actors, but mainly the conception of 20 or 30 years. This did not start on that morning." He offers his record as proof of consistency: fighting Oslo as a schoolboy, fighting the disengagement, three weeks in Shin Bet (Israeli Security Agency) detention, a 2017 article arguing Israel would have to retake Gaza, warnings in the 10 months before the attack that Hamas was not deterred.
Pressed on where the fight over the courts ends, he draws one line without hesitation. "Since the Altalena we have shown responsibility and said that Jews do not raise a hand against Jews. We will always fight against that."
Everything else, he insists, is a process. He has 10 weeks to persuade roughly 150,000 voters that they can afford to wait for it.