In a Facebook post, Elderly Affairs Minister Uri Orbach said that his Jewish Home party had not sought elections at this time.

“Despite the polls that show us gaining strength, and despite the opportunity to grow even further, we did not seek elections. It was the ongoing rift between Prime Minister (Binyamin) Netanyahu and Finance Minister (Yair) Lapid that set this off,” he wrote.

Orbach stressed that the elections were not the “fault” of Jewish Home. “We acted responsibly throughout this whole thing,” he said. “We did not pull the government apart, and the relations between Netanyahu and Economics Minister (Naftali) Bennett are good.”

Despite his comments, Bennett, who also serves as Jerusalem Affairs Minister, recently said that in light of the state’s inability to stem the rising Arab terrorism in Jerusalem his own government “has no right to exist.”

Orbach said that if there are going to be elections, Jewish Home would seek to grow as much as possible, indicating the party’s recently stated controversial position of pursuing the secular and Druze vote more actively as opposed to its traditional religious Zionist base.

“We will ask the public to vote for us in order to build as big a showing in the Knesset as possible,” he wrote. “We are committed to our Judaism, our Zionism, our democracy. I am sure that, G-d willing, the public will repay us for the achievements we have made, both on the national and social level, during our short term in office.”

A poll Tuesday by Channel 2 showed that Jewish Home would gain from early elections, getting 17 seats in the Knesset, up from its current 14. However the Likud would stay the largest, the poll showed, getting 22 seats and making Jewish Home the second largest party.