Naftali Bennett

Biography

Naftali Bennett was born in Haifa in 1972 to immigrants from the United States. He served in the Sayeret Matkal and Maglan special forces units of the Israel Defense Forces and then studied law at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In 1999 he co-founded the anti-fraud software company Cyota and ran it as chief executive until its sale to RSA Security in 2005; he later headed the cloud-services firm Soluto.

He entered politics as Benjamin Netanyahu's chief of staff from 2006 to 2008 and directed the Yesha Council of settlements from 2010 to 2012. Elected leader of The Jewish Home in 2012, he took it to 12 seats in the 2013 election and served in Netanyahu's governments as minister of economy and religious services, of diaspora affairs, of education from 2015 to 2019 and of defence from 2019 to 2020. In 2018 he and Ayelet Shaked founded the New Right.

After the March 2021 election, Bennett, then leading the Yamina alliance, agreed a rotation government with Yair Lapid that ended Netanyahu's long tenure, and he was sworn in as prime minister on 13 June 2021. When the coalition lost its majority in 2022 he moved to dissolve the Knesset, handed over to Lapid on 1 July and served as alternate prime minister until November. In 2025 he registered a new party, Bennett 2026.