While still in university, Bennett, like so many other Israelis, decided to get into high tech. At first, he was a “Q.A. guy”—quality assurance—checking for bugs, “as low as it gets,” and then he got into software sales. In 1999, he and a few friends decided that it was time to start a business of their own. “We didn’t even have an idea!” They worked on a single-use credit card that would enable secure financial transactions, “so if someone hacks Amazon and steals your information you’re only out one purchase.”

Bennett and his wife lived for four months in the West Bank settlement of Beit Aryeh and then, in 2000, made their move to Manhattan to try to rouse interest in his software idea. “But it turned out we had an Indian and an Irish competitor and they kicked our ass.” Then the tech bubble burst. “We had, like, three years in the company of shit,” he recalled. “It was just survival. I went all over the country with my laptop.” Bennett and his friends went to work refining their ideas for privacy software. Gilat, meanwhile, was working as a pastry chef. She gradually became more religious after she joined a “beginner’s minyan,” or service, at Kehilath Jeshurun, on East Eighty-fifth Street.

Bennett’s strongest attraction for the secular bourgeois is his business success. Frequently, in both the Israeli and the foreign press, it is said simply that Bennett developed anti-fraud security software for financial institutions and sold his company, Cyota, for a hundred and forty-five million dollars. An impression is left of immense wealth. But the more I asked about it the clearer it became that, after splitting the proceeds of the sale of Cyota, in 2005, with three partners and various rounds of investors, he came away with three or four million dollars before taxes. More than enough not to work for a long while and to make some investments, he said, “but not enough so the kids don’t have to work.”

Bennett’s strategy as a politician has been to appeal to the generation of religious Zionists who, like him, have entered the ranks of business, the officer corps, the media, and other mainstream institutions. He drives from one yeshiva to another, one settlement to another, speaking. Even the battle with Netanyahu over settlement evacuation helped Bennett; it eliminated his name-recognition problem.

The way he sees the world, the “service ethos” of Labor Zionism “evaporated and dissolved,” leaving behind a “vacuum of values.” Herzl’s Zionism, which was based on creating security for an endangered people, dissipated. “It was so powerful that the first generation had this mission to re-create the state, and it worked,” he said. “But only so much. My generation didn’t feel an existential threat, and it was gone.” What he represents, he tells his audiences, “is a handover of the baton from security-based Zionism to a Jewish-based Zionism. If we don’t do that, it won’t work. I don’t want to show off, but, among the national-religious leaders, that stuff—corruption, et cetera—doesn’t happen. In the Army, in the settlements, whether you like it or not, there is idealism.”

Bennett’s idealism, however, is based on annexation. The settlement project has put four hundred thousand Israelis in the West Bank; under any version of a peace plan remotely acceptable to both sides, well over a hundred thousand settlers would have to be uprooted. “And that just is not going to happen,” he insisted, yet again.

I mentioned intelligence reports about growing Palestinian frustration, about the prospects of a third intifada. Bennett seemed unfazed. “Generally, Israelis care less about this issue than before,” he said. “A third intifada will come about only because of our setting unreasonable expectations.”

Very few Israelis are interested in taking moral instruction from the “goodies” of the Tel Aviv left or the visiting “niceys” from, say, the Upper West Side. Even the majority, who acknowledge the occupation and its cruelty, and favor a Palestinian state, ask: Why should we accept reprimand and diplomatic sanction from the authoritarian regimes in China and Russia? From Bashar al-Assad in Syria, who is killing his people by the tens of thousands, or from Mohamed Morsi, in Egypt, who, in a video posted on the Muslim Brotherhood’s YouTube Channel in 2010, referred to Israelis as “warmongers, the descendants of apes and pigs”? From Britain and France, with their histories of colonialism and slaughter, or the United States, whose drones have, well out of view of television crews, killed scores of civilians?

Meanwhile, Israeli politics continues its seemingly endless trek to the right. Every day, the Web carries the voice of another leader of the settler movement who insists that the settlers are the vanguard now, that the old verities are to be challenged, if not eliminated. Early last year, Benny Katzover, a leader in the settlement of Elon Moreh, told a Chabad paper, Beit Mashiach, “I would say that today Israeli democracy has one central mission, and that is to disappear. Israeli democracy has finished its historical role, and it must be dismantled and bow before Judaism.”

Despite the air of defeat that clings to the left, the center-left vote will still account for around fifty of a hundred and twenty seats. A political shift in its favor is always possible. Assaf Sharon, a leader of Molad, a think tank for the “renewal of Israeli democracy,” told me he believes that the national-religious position that the settlements are “irreversible” is “bullshit.” Sharon had been a member of Bnei Akiva, the Zionist youth movement. Unlike the majority of Israelis, he is intimately familiar with the settlements, most recently as a demonstrator against their expansion. One afternoon at Molad’s headquarters, in the German Colony, in Jerusalem, he said that the drama surrounding the evacuation of eight thousand settlers from Gaza seven years ago “hyped up things in our imagination, but it masked the fact that the settlement enterprise comes from the government breathing life into it. If the government were to remove the phones, the transportation, the energy, the subsidies, it would dry up. Most settlers are sensible bourgeois and will pack up their bags. There are a few thousand crazies who can make trouble, but we can deal with that.”

But in the world of Middle Eastern politics—a world that now includes Syria in flames, Egypt in chaos, and even Jordan in a state of instability—the prospects are dim for anything other than an increasingly volatile status quo. “It seems that the next Israeli government will be much more radical,” Mkhaimar Abusada, a political-science professor at Al Azhar University, in Gaza, told me. “We are going to witness more settlements, a greater encirclement of East Jerusalem, and more frustration and despair. Which means we’ll have one of two scenarios: either meaningless negotiations or, if the stalemate continues, a new round of violence. And, in the end, violence is not a possibility—it’s almost a certainty.” Tzipi Livni told me that after negotiating with the Palestinians she is convinced that they have given up their claims on Haifa and Jaffa, but she acknowledges that a deal requires risks that are outweighed only by the risks of not making a deal. “Making peace will be painful,” she said. “It means not just giving up land; it means you take real security risks. It’s going to be bloody. We would face terror at first. We all want to live happily ever after in peace, but that won’t happen at first. It will take time between the agreement and real peace, and whoever makes it will be criticized as a traitor. And, if you decide to do nothing, you can just manage the situation.” The security fence, she said, provides the temporary illusion of “we are here and they are there.”

In the meantime, Israel’s hard-liners harden further. The Palestinians grow more frustrated. Talk of a binational state increases. All parties wait for the White House, but why would an American President think that he could present his own initiative and muster enough support on all sides to succeed? Why, he asks himself, should he spend the political capital? Courage is discouraged. And so this is the moment of Naftali Bennett. I’ve rarely seen a novice politician so confident, and with such reason. Each day, he is climbing in the polls, skimming off votes from the Likud and Netanyahu.

“I’m pissing him off enormously,” Bennett said, smiling. “But what matters is the day after.” Bennett knows that he is very unlikely to be Prime Minister—this time, anyway—but he hopes for a spot in the leadership. “The best analogy is that Bibi is the bus driver with two hands on the wheel,” Bennett said. “I want to put a third hand on the wheel.” ♦