Free Republic

According to the near final results of the votes of soldiers, diplomats, and prisoners that were being tallied Thursday morning, Jewish Home will be awarded a 12th Knesset seat, making it the fourth largest faction in the Israeli parliament. The seat will come at the expense of Arab party Ra'am-Ta'al, which goes down to four seats. With the twelfth seat, Bayit Yehudi, the representative party of the National Religious sector, matches the sector's historic record number of Knesset seats, achieved in 1977, when the National Religious Party received 12 Knesset seats.

Once soldiers’ votes are counted and the distribution of Knesset seats recalculated, the Bayit Yehudi (Jewish Home) party may be back up to 12 seats. The extra seat would likely come at the expense of Ra’am Ta’al, which currently stands at five seats, up from its current three. Party head Ahmed Tibi expressed hope Wednesday morning that soldiers’ votes would not hurt the party’s new standing.

The leader of the right-wing national religious Jewish Home party said settler outposts set up on private Palestinian land are illegal and should be removed. Naftali Bennett made the statement in an interview with Channel 2′s Nissim Mishal broadcast on Thursday evening, seemingly breaking with the hard-line views of much of the party’s base. >>SNIP<< A statement issued by Jewish Home after the show appeared to backtrack on the party leader’s words, reading: “Thankfully, there are no outposts that fit the description presented by the interviewer and therefore no outposts will be evacuated. Instead, we will act to make the...

Tzipi Livni, who chairs the Hatnua party, slammed on Wednesday what she termed "the extremists" in her former party, the Likud. Livni, who visited a bar in Tel Aviv, warned that a coalition between these Likud extremists and the Jewish Home would be a threat to Israel. "Extremists are taking over our lives and if we do not stop them today - we'll end up in a situation that is dangerous for Israel," Livni said. "These extremists are now in the Likud in the form of (Moshe) Feiglin, (Tzipi) Hotovely, (Yariv) Levin and others - they are in the same...

Jewish Home chairman Naftali Bennett responded Monday night to the uproar created by comments he made last week regarding the expulsion of Jews from their homes. Referring to Netanyahu's campaign, Bennett told Channel 2 that "a national camp does not attack a national camp. It is completely unnecessary to play in the internal field. We have to take votes away from Livni." "This policy debate is fine," said Bennett, "but to get up in the morning and see a flood of anonymous personal negative ads is not right." "Netanyahu prefers to surround himself with weak parties who have no influence...

Members of the Jewish Home Party met on Wednesday with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and told him that if any houses in Migron are forcibly evicted and demolished, they will pull out of the government coalition. They met with PM Netanyahu to discuss a new bill which would lead to the legalization of new development communities in Judea and Samaria such as Migron. Prime Minister Netanyahu informing them that he opposed legislation...