You are listening to an art media podcast.

It's Friday, May 1st.

This episode was recorded at 9 p.m. New York time on Thursday.

I'm Deborah Pardace, and this is Arc News Daily.

On Sunday, former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett stood on stage with opposition leader

Yair Lappeed to launch a new joint political party. They called it together.

It was meant to be a show of unity and strength against current Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

But according to an explosive leak published yesterday,

the new alliance may be neither.

Israel's Channel 12 reported that in the days before the announcement,

Bennett told associates that Lapid is, quote, toxic, toxic, toxic. In the same private conversations, Bennett reportedly said the

merger is, quote, a strategic mistake, and that Lapid doesn't bring votes from the right, he drives

them away to the right.

In response to the leak, the joint party said, the only thing that's toxic is Netanyahu's

coalition. Bennett himself didn't immediately comment on the report. The leak undercuts the central

premise of the merger. Bennett and Lapid sold it as a unified front that would be strong enough to take out Netanyahu, but the leak shows Bennett didn't even believe his own pitch. To understand why that matters, start with the central case against the merger that was already being made. Former defense minister Benny Gantz heads

another opposition party, and he argued this week that the alliance actually hurts the chances of

replacing Netanyahu's government. The idea is that Lapid pushes away the right-wing voters

who might otherwise consider voting for Bennett. Lapid is a secular centrist, whereas Bennett comes from the religious right.

The early polling backs that up, as ARC media contributor Amit Segal noted on the latest episode of Call Me Back,

the duo are attracting fewer votes together than they had separately.

You saw in the polls the day after that in each and every poll, the one plus one equals less than two.

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