Nissim Louk never wanted to be a politician. A mechanical engineer by training, he spent decades staying out of the arena his father once inhabited. Then Hamas killed his daughter.
Shani Louk Hy’d, 22, was abducted from the Nova festival on October 7, 2023, her image — taken to Gaza in the back of a pickup truck — becoming one of the most widely circulated photographs of that day’s atrocities. She was later confirmed dead.

Now her father is channeling his grief into a new political party, Orot Hashachar – “Dawn Light,” evoking the moment before sunrise when the first light appears on the horizon. The party has been registered with Israel’s Interior Ministry in Jerusalem and positioning itself to the right of Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud on the central question of what to do with Gaza and its population.

“I’m not connected to politics,” Louk told Belaaz in an interview. “But after the seventh of October, I feel that the land of Israel needs a better future, a better destiny.”

The party’s platform, as Louk describes it, rests on a demand that most of Israel’s established political parties have declined to adopt as official policy: the full transfer of the Palestinian population out of Gaza, Yehuda and Shomron, permanently.

Louk drew a distinction between several Arab populations he believes must be addressed. The first are Palestinians in Gaza and Yehuda and Shomron, whom he described as stateless refugees without Israeli documentation, living there for decades. The second are Israeli Arabs and Bedouins in mixed cities like Jaffa, Akko, and Beersheva who he said have intermarried with Palestinians from Gaza and Yehuda and Shomron, whom he regards as a potential internal security threat. He said the party’s platform covers all of these groups.

“We must do a full immigration for all the people of Gaza,” Louk said. “This is the first thing.”

He acknowledged the legal obstacles directly. “Moving two million people from Gaza to other countries is an international crime — we know it,” he said. “There are legal problems, international problems. But we have to fight for it, and we will succeed.”

Louk said the plan also calls for not rebuilding Gaza after the war, envisioning the territory converted into “an international park.”

As for where the displaced population would go, he offered no specific destination, describing it as a diplomatic challenge to be resolved.
The second plank of the platform, he said, is preparing Israel to absorb a large wave of Jewish immigration from the diaspora – particularly from North America and Europe, where he sees growing Muslim political influence as a push factor. The party also calls for investment in education and what Louk described as national renewal.

Orot Hashachar’s most prominent figure alongside Louk is Jonathan Pollard, who in Israel is widely regarded as a hero; a patriot who sacrificed his freedom for the state.

Pollard, a former civilian intelligence analyst for the United States Navy, pleaded guilty in 1987 to passing classified information to Israel and received a life sentence that drew immediate and sustained criticism from across the American legal and political establishment.
Dozens of Americans convicted of the same offense had received sentences averaging twelve years and served an average of four.

Former Attorney General Michael Mukasey, in a letter to President Obama, wrote that in eighteen years on the bench he had imposed life sentences on only four defendants — two murderers and two terrorists — and that Pollard’s offense “does not nearly approach any of those.”

Pollard’s attorneys long argued that his life sentence was unfairly influenced by the anti-Israeli sentiments of then-Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger, whose sealed sentencing memorandum was never made available to the defense. A 2014 letter to President Obama signed by former CIA Director James Woolsey, former Assistant Defense Secretary Lawrence Korb, and former National Security Advisor Robert McFarlane called the sentence “grossly disproportionate” and the legal basis for keeping him imprisoned “patently false.”

Henry Kissinger, former Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Dennis DeConcini, and every Israeli prime minister from Yitzchak Rabin onward also called for his release.

Pollard himself maintained that he had provided only information vital to Israeli security that was being withheld by the Pentagon in violation of a 1983 intelligence-sharing memorandum between the two countries; including data on Soviet arms shipments to Syria, Iraqi and Syrian chemical weapons programs, the Pakistani nuclear project, and Libyan air defense systems. He was released in 2015 after serving thirty years and made aliyah to Israel in 2020.

Louk said the two men have spoken extensively by telephone but have not yet met in person, with an in-person meeting planned for this week.

“He heard me, and the story of Shani,” Louk said. “And when he heard that, he decided to join us. He is a very clever man. He really loves the people of Israel, and he’s part of us.”

Pollard, Louk said, brings credibility and intellectual depth to the party’s foreign policy thinking. “He knows so many things, and he’s so smart.”

A central argument of the party is that Israel’s governing right wing — including Netanyahu — has failed to act on its professed ideology. “There is no right party in Israel,” Louk said flatly. He pointed to the 1998 Wye River Memorandum, under which Netanyahu’s first government transferred additional territory to the Palestinian Authority, as evidence that the prime minister’s right-wing credentials are hollow. “If you give land to the Palestinians,” Louk said, “you cannot call yourself right wing in any aspect.”

He was sharply critical of what he described as a pattern of Israeli military advances in Gaza followed by withdrawals, which he said meant soldiers dying to retake the same ground repeatedly. “Each time that we conquer an area, soldiers are falling and dying, and the next month we are going back again, and we are conquering the same area for like 10 times,” he said. “Twenty soldiers are dying for nothing, because our government does not have a plan.”
Louk invoked President Trump favorably, noting that Trump had proposed relocating Gaza’s population to other Arab countries. “Instead of doing that, we waited and waited and waited,” he said, “and now America is deciding about what happens in Israel.”

One question facing any new party on Israel’s right is whether it can consolidate enough support to clear the electoral threshold and enter the Knesset – 3.25 percent of the national vote – rather than siphon votes from existing parties and leave the right weaker overall.

Asked about that risk, Louk said the party intends to serve as a unifying platform for several small right-wing factions and figures who currently cannot pass the threshold independently. He named Moshe Feiglin, the libertarian-nationalist politician who founded the Zehut party and several others. He described these as potential coalition partners within a broader slate, though he acknowledged that negotiations over details were ongoing and no unified list had been finalized.

There is a historical precedent that Louk was asked to address directly: the Kach party, founded by R. Meir Kahane, which advocated Arab expulsion and was banned from the Knesset in 1988 under anti-racism legislation, later designated a terrorist organization by both Israel and the United States. Louk argued that October 7 had fundamentally changed the political environment.

“Until the seventh of October, we were innocent – we were nice, and everything went well,” he said. “But on the seventh of October, all the people that saw that there was a chance of some kind of negotiation and peace with the Arabs woke up. Now most of the people understand that the peace they always wanted is not a real peace.”

He also met with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., now the United States Secretary of Health and Human Services, whose father was assassinated in 1968 by Sirhan Sirhan, a Palestinian. “We sat at the table for two hours,” Louk said. “I explained to him that there is no future in Gaza for any Palestinian – the kids in Gaza are going to be terrorists.”

Louk was careful to describe his political ambitions as time-limited and personal. He said he did not enjoy politics and did not seek a career in it.

“My aim is only one thing: to avenge the death of my daughter, and to avenge the death of 3,000 people, and to save and help the Jewish people, and to prepare the land for aliyah,” he said. “When I finish this – when the people of Gaza will not be there anymore – I’m going to leave politics.”

Orot Hashachar is formally registered as a political party with the Israeli Interior Ministry, Louk confirmed. Whether it can translate the raw intensity of post-October 7 grief into electoral power – and whether its platform survives contact with Israeli and international law – remains to be seen.

Louk’s daughter Shani’s name, the bereaved father notes, can be read in a way that translates to the word “change.”

“Shani will bring the change to the people of Israel,” he said. “I hope we will rebuild our country again, and the country will be safe.”