Naftali Bennett, the former Israeli prime minister who registered a new party on March 31 under the name “Bennett 2026,” said during an event at Yeshiva University on Tuesday night that he is throwing his hat in the ring against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
“I am running for prime minister right now,” Bennett told the audience of about 350.
The politician and businessman, who served as the Israeli prime minister for a bit over a year in 2021 and 2022, has previously hinted that he is running against Netanyahu. At Yeshiva, he used that language directly several times.
Ari Berman, the president of Yeshiva, told Bennett on stage that students in the room likely want to be prime ministers of Israel, but “I’m sure we have more students in the room who aspire to make the same kind of exit that the prime minister made in his business life.”
“What business advice would you give to these young entrepreneurs, who are sitting in front of you?” the Yeshiva president asked.
“Select your programs. Be very, very—the single biggest decision you make when you found a new company is who are your partners? Who are the cofounders?” Bennett said. “If you screw up on it, you’re done. If you succeed, you have a slim chance.”
“That’s by far the most important thing,” he said. “You want to find a cofounder that’s energetic, optimistic, all in. Not doing this half time. Not focused on their own ego but on making it succeed. You want a smart partner.”
The second thing Bennett advised was not too pontificate too long. “Think, but do” in “very short iterations,” he advised. “Once there’s real friction with a market, with reality, then you can fix things really quickly on the fly. You’re going to make mistakes. That’s OK.”
Bennett added that he makes mistakes “every week.”
“I’m running for prime minister right now, and yesterday, I think it was, I did a live Facebook and a live Instagram from my hotel. I didn’t tell my staff. I just suddenly was live,” he said. “It turned out that the frame was really lousy, was amateurish, and my whole staff was all over me.”
“I screwed up, to be fair,” he said.
Later in the event, Bennett said that “I think we have a really lousy government right now in Israel.”
“That’s why I’m running to hopefully replace that government,” he said.
In 2021, Bennett’s coalition as prime minister “projected a very optimistic and positive image of what we are,” he told the audience.
“When a particular Israeli minister does stupid things, the stupidity reverberates across the world, and I think sometimes that ministers and politicians in Israel have a very myopic view, a very narrow view, and don’t understand the ramifications of what they say,” he said.
Bennett also addressed local politics in New York City, which had recently elected Zohran Mamdani, an anti-Israel socialist, as the Big Apple’s next mayor.
“You’re here in Manhattan, and we’re in for a few tough years now,” he said. “We are fighting the same battle.”
The former prime minister told the audience that a journalist told him that Mamdani is an anti-Zionist but not a Jew-hater.
“Anti-Zionism is antisemitism,” Bennett said. “You attack the Jewish state, you’re attacking the Jewish people.”
Back home, Israel has made progress in areas like water infrastructure, integrating Arab minorities and asymmetric warfare, according to Bennett.
When Israel’s enemies shoot rockets from within schools and kindergartens, “what’s the moral way to do to it? The short answer is, fight back,” he said. “We are paving the way with all these really difficult things, and Hashem,” God, “wants to see us as a nation and be a good nation notwithstanding all these problems.”
Bennett told the Yeshiva audience that he knows that he’s facing a challenging path to the prime ministership.
“The margin of error,” he said, “is very different than if you were the prime minister of Belgium or Sweden, where if you’re a lousy prime minister, maybe the economy will grow slower.”
“In Israel, the margin of error does not exist,” he said.
At the flagship Modern Orthodox Jewish university, Bennett also spoke about Israel and Judaism in religious terms.
“Be proud to be Jewish and understand that being Jewish doesn’t mean we’re better. It means we need to serve,” he said. “There’s nowhere that says we have an insurance policy, that everything will just be fine. That’s not part of the deal, and my faith does not relieve one gram of responsibility.”
“Israel is not a cause,” he added. “Israel is your home. You have a home there.”
