Netanyahu has lost his majority, Eisenkot has not won power, and the key to the next government has ended up with the parties both sides swore never to let through the door.
On the evening of October 27, at the Tel Aviv headquarters of the Yashar party, Gadi Eisenkot demanded that Benjamin Netanyahu announce that same night his retirement from political life. The former chief of the General Staff spoke to the applause of his supporters. The first exit polls gave his camp the edge, turnout had reached 77.7 percent, the highest since 1999, and it seemed the country had finally passed a vote of no confidence in the prime minister. Within a few hours, the numbers began to creep in the opposite direction. By Thursday evening, October 29, the Central Elections Committee had finished the count, and Israel found itself in a position in which everyone had lost.
Netanyahu's right-wing bloc won 53 of the 120 seats. Eisenkot's opposition bloc won 48. The Arab parties won a record 19. Forming a government requires 61 votes, and neither camp can muster them without breaking its own campaign pledges.
The most mobilized electorate in a quarter century has produced the most paralyzed parliament in the same span.
The Night the Exit Polls Changed Their Minds
The scale of the mobilization is worth keeping in mind, because it is exactly what explains the deadlock. About 5.7 million of the 7.3 million eligible voters came to the polls. They chose among 36 lists at more than 12,000 polling stations. Israelis voted as if everything depended on that day, and they got a Knesset in which almost nothing depends on their choice.
Likud once again became the largest faction, with 27 seats. The figure looks like a victory only against the backdrop of its rivals: in 2022 Netanyahu's party took 32 seats and his entire coalition 64. Today the bloc has 53, a loss of eleven seats in four years. The remaining 26 seats of the right-wing camp are divided among the ultra-Orthodox Shas and United Torah Judaism, Itamar Ben-Gvir's Otzma Yehudit, and Bezalel Smotrich's Religious Zionism, which for the first time ran separately from Ben-Gvir, in tandem with Moshe Feiglin's Zehut.
Eisenkot's Yashar won 21 seats. The Beyachad alliance of Naftali Bennett, who joined forces with Yair Lapid, took 12. Yair Golan's Democrats won 8 and Avigdor Liberman's Yisrael Beytenu 7.
Here lies the first unpleasant truth for the opposition. Since July, Yashar had consistently led Likud in the polls. A survey on August 25 showed that 44 percent of Israelis considered Eisenkot better suited to be prime minister, against 34 percent for Netanyahu. The final polls before the preelection blackout put Yashar in first place. In reality, Likud beat it by six seats. Pollsters once again underestimated the silent right-wing voter, who dislikes answering calls from polling firms but reliably shows up at the ballot box.
Israel has a textbook precedent for such a miss. In May 1996, the country went to bed with Prime Minister Shimon Peres, as the exit polls had predicted, and woke up with Netanyahu, who had won the direct election by less than one percent. Thirty years later, the same man once again lived through a night when the numbers changed their minds in his favor.
The count did not end there. On Thursday, the committee opened the so-called double envelopes, between 430,000 and 480,000 ballots from soldiers, diplomats, hospital patients and other voters who cast ballots away from their home polling stations. They shifted the balance: the Arab parties rose from 17 to 19 seats, Eisenkot's bloc lost one seat, and Netanyahu's bloc lost one as well. Official certification of the results is expected by November 4. After that, President Isaac Herzog will begin consultations with the factions.
Nineteen Seats No One Wants to Touch
The main event of the election was not the Netanyahu-Eisenkot duel but the Arab street. Arab citizens of Israel, about 21 percent of the population, many of whom call themselves Palestinian citizens of the country, boycotted elections for years, considering voting a legitimation of a system in which they remain second-class people. In 2022, Arab turnout barely exceeded half; in 2021 it fell to about 45 percent.
This time, by early estimates, about 80 percent came to the polls. In Sakhnin, 86.8 percent of voters cast ballots, in Kafr Qasim 84.9 percent, in the Bedouin city of Rahat 82 percent, and in Kuseife 81.2 percent. The previous record for Arab representation, 15 seats, was set in March 2020, when all the Arab parties ran together as the Joint List. Now two separate forces have won more than the single list once did.
The engine of this mobilization was built by Netanyahu himself. His campaign was based on fear of the Arab vote. In October, Likud billboards in East Jerusalem carried a slogan that framed the voter's choice as one between the right and Palestine. The prime minister publicly frightened his supporters with the specter of a government of Mansour Abbas and Ahmad Tibi. On election day, he, Smotrich and Ben-Gvir vied with one another in warning that Arabs were heading to the polls in droves. The tactic is not new: in March 2015, Netanyahu won the election largely thanks to a video message saying that Arab voters were going to the polls in droves. Eleven years later, the same lever worked in both directions. Right-wing voters mobilized, but Arab voters mobilized more.
After the vote, Likud went further. The party claimed that the Arab parties had stolen the election through bribery, intimidation and ballot forgery, and said it had handed hundreds of pieces of evidence to the police, the Shin Bet and the elections committee. The committee replied that it saw no signs of systematic fraud and was reviewing individual complaints. Acting director general of the committee Din Livne clarified that those detained on suspicion of bribery had been caught near their homes before they reached the polling stations.
The difference between these two versions of events matters more than any legal procedure. The stolen-election narrative prepares right-wing voters for a repeat election and at the same time makes any coalition with the Arab parties politically toxic before negotiations even begin.
The Arab parties themselves are offering their support on different terms. Mansour Abbas's Islamist United Arab List, Ra'am, is ready to join an opposition government. The Joint List, which includes the Hadash party led by Yousef Jabareen, is ready to support such a cabinet from outside, without taking portfolios. By some counts, Ra'am won 8 seats and the Joint List 11; according to figures based on the committee's final numbers, the split is 7 and 12. In either case the total is unchanged: 19.
Abbas has experience that no Arab politician in the country's history has had. In 2021, Ra'am became the first independent Arab party to formally join a governing coalition, the government of Bennett and Lapid. In return, Abbas secured a government development program for Arab communities worth about 30 billion shekels. The coalition collapsed a year later, in June 2022, but the precedent remained.
Yet the Abbas of 2026 speaks differently from the Abbas of 2021. In one campaign speech, he declared that the State of Palestine exists and called for an end to the occupation. He drew sharp rebukes from Netanyahu and Eisenkot alike. The partner without whom the opposition cannot come to power is publicly cutting the ground from under the man who must rely on him.
The Jewish parties responded with a united front. All of them, except Golan's Democrats, ruled out a coalition with the Arab lists. Yashar candidate Lian Polak-David explained on election night that no ultra-Orthodox or Arab party shares her party's four core principles. Golan went against the current: he declared that Netanyahu had lost, since the anti-Netanyahu camp together with the Arab parties commands a majority. Formally, he is right. Politically, he is alone.
Liberman's Arithmetic: Who Really Has the Opposition by the Throat
Let us count what opposition leaders prefer not to count aloud. Eisenkot's bloc (48) plus the Arab parties (19) make 67 seats. An impressive majority, until Liberman is subtracted from it. Without Yisrael Beytenu's seven seats, exactly 60 remain. And if Bennett's Beyachad walks away as well, 55 remain.
The irony of the situation is that the fate of a "government of change" rests in the hands of a secular hawk who built much of his career on harsh rhetoric against Arab lawmakers. Liberman, however, already sat in a cabinet with Ra'am in 2021. Bennett headed that cabinet. Both know the price of such an alliance: right-wing voters never forgave Bennett for his coalition with Abbas, his Yamina party fell apart, and he himself left politics for four years in 2022. The memory of that experience is stronger than any arithmetic.
There is, however, a path that Eisenkot's headquarters is reportedly considering seriously. An Israeli government does not need 61 votes to be approved; a simple majority of those present is enough. Eisenkot's bloc (48) plus Ra'am (7 to 8) yields 55 to 56 seats against Netanyahu's 53. If the Joint List abstains or votes in favor, a minority government passes. The precedent is recent: on June 13, 2021, the Bennett-Lapid cabinet won the Knesset's confidence by 60 to 59, with one abstention.
Such a government would live on a ventilator. Any vote on the West Bank, on settlements or on the security budget would turn into blackmail from either the right flank or the Arab one. A cabinet that cannot pass a single decision on the territories through the Knesset, in a country where those decisions set the agenda, will not last long.
The Embrace No One Walks Away From
The second scenario looks the most logical on paper and the most improbable in real life. Likud (27) plus Yashar (21) make 48 seats. Together with Bennett's Beyachad that comes to 60, and with Liberman 67. A national unity government without the ultra-Orthodox and without the far right has a stable majority.
Two presidents are pushing for this option. Two weeks before the election, there were reports in Jerusalem that Herzog was laying the groundwork for a unity government in the event of a deadlock, fearing the economic consequences, a failure to pass the budget and a deepening of the rift in society. The President's Office categorically denied this at the time. After the election, the talk returned.
The second president sits in Washington. Donald Trump openly intervened in the campaign: on October 18 he endorsed Netanyahu, calling him a "great wartime prime minister" and crediting him with the joint strikes on Iran in February. According to the Israeli press, Trump wants to see Netanyahu as prime minister, but with one significant caveat: he cannot stand Ben-Gvir and harbors a strong dislike for Smotrich. A combination in which Washington pushes out the far right while Jerusalem pulls in the centrists theoretically completes the puzzle.
In practice, the puzzle does not fit together, for two reasons. The first is Eisenkot. Less than a week before the election, he vowed never to serve in a government led by Netanyahu under any circumstances, including a rotation. His entire campaign rested on the claim that he was the only real alternative to a prime minister who had overstayed his time. Breaking that promise would mean repeating the fate of the man with whom Eisenkot once shared a list.
Israel has known two rotations. In 1984, when the Alignment won 44 seats and Likud 41, Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Shamir agreed to alternate as prime minister, and the agreement was honored: Peres governed until 1986, Shamir until 1988. Thirty-six years later, in 2020, Benny Gantz signed a rotation agreement with Netanyahu under which he was to become prime minister in November 2021. The government fell over the budget in December 2020, and Gantz never took the chair. Eisenkot entered politics in 2022 in Gantz's party, and in October 2023 he joined the war cabinet alongside him. Before that alliance ended, in December 2023, Eisenkot's son Gal was killed in Gaza. In June 2024, their alliance left the government. To expect this man to trust Netanyahu's word of honor is to misunderstand his biography.
The second reason is Netanyahu himself. On Wednesday evening at Likud headquarters, he thanked his "loyal partners" and called for the formation of a strong right-wing government. Yet according to Israeli journalists, he did not even call those partners until the middle of the following day. The prime minister is keeping both doors ajar and walking through neither.
The Iran Button: War as a Tool of Coalition Diplomacy
The only force capable of breaking both sides' vows is an external threat. Israeli politics knows this mechanism in its purest form: on October 11, 2023, four days after the Hamas attack, Gantz and Eisenkot joined the emergency government of Netanyahu, whom they had previously called a threat to democracy. A new war with Iran could reproduce the same logic.
The context here matters more than any statement. In June 2025, Israel conducted a twelve-day air campaign against Iranian nuclear facilities. Eight months later, in February 2026, the United States and Israel carried out joint strikes on Iran; in March, during the Iran war, even the prime minister's criminal trial was suspended. In the fall, according to Israeli and American media, Netanyahu pressed Trump to resume the strikes before October 27. Trump refused: on October 9 he said that Washington would not attack Iran before the U.S. midterm elections on November 3, and White House press secretary Anna Kelly subsequently reiterated that position. The Prime Minister's Office denied reports of pressure on the White House. Less than two days before the vote, Israeli television reported an unprecedented clash between Netanyahu and Chief of the General Staff Eyal Zamir.
The closing argument of Netanyahu's campaign went like this: Trump is ready to act against Iran again, but only together with him. Voters heard the argument, but they did not give the prime minister a majority.
The timeline suggests what to watch. The American veto on strikes was tied to November 3. A few days after that date, Washington will be freed from its domestic constraint exactly when Herzog begins consultations. An acting prime minister retains full control over military decisions. If Israel finds itself at war with Iran again in November or December, the pressure on Eisenkot to "set differences aside" will be enormous, and a refusal will look like desertion.
Netanyahu's critics will, of course, call such an operation an attempt to save a career at the cost of a regional conflagration. Eisenkot himself declared on election night that Netanyahu is a caretaker prime minister without a mandate and that the army must serve the state, not the head of government. Defense Minister Israel Katz responded with a sharp rebuke. The exchange revealed the main point: the question of whom the army answers to during a power vacuum has already become a subject of political struggle.
The Defectors Who Won't Come
The third scenario assumes that Netanyahu lures right-wingers away from Eisenkot's bloc. The natural candidates are Bennett and Liberman. Both are hawks, both historically close to Likud; Bennett once ran Netanyahu's office, and Liberman was director general of the Prime Minister's Office during Netanyahu's first term.
But both campaigned on removing Netanyahu and drafting the ultra-Orthodox into the army. That last point makes them incompatible with Shas and United Torah Judaism. It was over the draft bill that United Torah Judaism left the government in July 2025, and Shas quit the cabinet a few days later while formally remaining in the coalition.
That leaves the substitution option: Bennett and Liberman in place of the ultra-Orthodox. The math buries it. Likud (27) plus Otzma Yehudit and Religious Zionism, which according to the preliminary breakdown have about 12 to 13 seats between them, plus the 19 seats of Bennett and Liberman add up to roughly 58 to 59. Short of 61. There is no one else to add.
There is also a mirror-image scenario that is hardly discussed: the ultra-Orthodox cross over to Eisenkot. The Yashar bloc (48) plus Shas and United Torah Judaism, which by various counts hold 12 to 14 seats, yields 60 to 62. During the campaign there were reports that Eisenkot had not entirely ruled out cooperation with Shas. Shas leader Aryeh Deri answered briefly: his party supports Netanyahu, period. Even if Deri changed his mind, Bennett and Liberman would not sit in a cabinet that abandons the drafting of yeshiva students.
Both mirror-image scenarios die of the same disease. The hidden axis of Israel's deadlock runs not between right and left, nor even between Jews and Arabs. It runs through the question of whether tens of thousands of young ultra-Orthodox men are obliged to serve in the army of a country at war. Until that question is settled, any coalition without the Arab parties requires an alliance of people who cannot be in the same room on this issue.
A Seventh Election in Eight Years: Why Deadlock Suits the Prime Minister
If no scenario works, new elections will follow by default. Since April 2019, Israelis have voted six times: April and September 2019, March 2020, March 2021, November 2022 and October 2026. A seventh vote would be a verdict on the very model of Israeli parliamentary democracy, in which no camp can win and the loser is not obliged to leave.
The procedure is drawn out, and every day of it works in the incumbent's favor. After the results are certified, Herzog has a week to task one of the lawmakers with forming a cabinet. The candidate gets 28 days and may receive up to 14 more. The president may then pass the mandate to another candidate or return the matter to the Knesset, which will have 21 days, and only then is parliament dissolved and new elections called roughly 90 days later, and Netanyahu travels this entire path as acting prime minister with every lever of executive power.
The prime minister's bet on a repeat election rests on three calculations that are easy to check against history.
The first calculation concerns Arab turnout. After the record 15 seats of March 2020, Arab voters, disappointed that their votes had not translated into influence, turned out at about 45 percent in March 2021. If the 19 seats of 2026 again change nothing, the disappointment may return. That is precisely what the Jewish parties' formula implies: your vote will be counted, but you will not be let into the government.
The second calculation relates to the diaspora. According to the Central Bureau of Statistics, about 810,000 Israelis eligible to vote live abroad. Israel does not allow voting from overseas, and the Fly&Vote initiative, which grew out of the 2023 protests against the judicial overhaul, organized mass flights; by its estimate, about 67,000 people came back, roughly a seat and a half, and most of them apparently voted against Netanyahu. Tickets from London before the election reached as much as 6,000 pounds. Few will be able to repeat such a feat six months from now. Tellingly, Likud tried to challenge the initiative in court as improper interference and withdrew its suit only as part of a compromise.
The third calculation is the scattered right-wing vote. Several right-wing lists failed to clear the 3.25 percent threshold. In a repeat election, they will either not run or win less, and their voters will flow to Likud and its allies. For a bloc eight seats short, every wasted percentage point matters.
This bet has a price as well. A caretaker government lives on the previous year's extended budget, cannot launch major programs and risks facing a question of legitimacy that Eisenkot has already begun to raise. The Israeli economy, which has just come through two wars with Iran in a year, will pay for the uncertainty.
The figure of the president deserves separate attention. Herzog holds two keys at once. The first is the right to decide whom to task with forming a government. The second is the pardon request Netanyahu submitted in late November 2025, in the middle of his own criminal trial on charges of bribery, fraud and breach of trust. Trump has repeatedly and publicly urged Herzog to pardon his ally. On April 26, 2026, the president said that before considering the request itself, attempts by the parties to reach an agreement outside the courtroom should be exhausted. The man on whom Netanyahu's political future depends is at the same time deciding his legal fate. There has never been such a coincidence in Israeli history.
The View From Baku: How Israel's Power Vacuum Will Echo on the Caspian
For Azerbaijan, Israel's deadlock is far from an academic question. On October 14, two weeks before the election, Herzog was in Baku, where on the sidelines of an Asian regional forum he met with President of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev and the foreign minister of Bahrain to discuss expanding the Abraham Accords. Azerbaijani oil remains a pillar of Israel's energy security: by some estimates it accounts for about 40 percent of Israel's oil imports, by others as much as 65 percent in certain years. SOCAR holds a 10 percent stake in the Tamar gas field. The partnership between Baku and Jerusalem has outlived every Israeli government since the early 1990s: left, right, centrist and the coalition with Ra'am.
The durability of these relations is determined not by who sits in the prime minister's office but by what happens south of Azerbaijan's border. A scenario in which a caretaker prime minister without a mandate keeps his hand on the Iran button and views war as a way to break the coalition stalemate directly concerns a country that shares hundreds of kilometers of border with Iran. A unity government or a cabinet led by Eisenkot, a former military man known more for caution than for adventurism, would mean less volatility for the region. A protracted power vacuum in Jerusalem means the opposite.
Another conclusion follows from this. Against the backdrop of Israeli instability, the American preelection fever and the turbulence around Iran, Azerbaijan remains one of the few partners for Israel whose policy is predictable years ahead. In a region where allies change course from one election to the next, predictability has itself become a strategic asset.
Stalemate as a Political Technique
My forecast is as follows. The final figures the committee announces by November 4 will not shift the balance between the blocs by more than one seat. If the Arab parties recommend Eisenkot, his recommendations will outnumber Netanyahu's 53, but Herzog weighs not the number of signatures but the chances of success, and it is Netanyahu who will receive the first mandate to form a government before November 15. By the end of December 2026, he will fail to assemble a coalition of 61 lawmakers. The 26th Knesset will not approve any government before the end of February 2027, and the next election will be held between April and June 2027. If this forecast proves wrong, the most likely reason will be a war with Iran that drives Eisenkot into a unity government despite all his vows.
One question remains to which I have no answer: what will the 19 Arab lawmakers do when they realize that record turnout bought them only the right to watch the Jewish parties negotiate a repeat election?
The October 27 election was conceived as a referendum on Netanyahu after October 7, 2023. Israelis answered "no" to his coalition and "not sure" to his opponent. The country's most experienced politician, who has held power for a total of 19 years, knows how to turn such an answer into an extension of his own mandate better than any politician alive.
On the night of October 28, Eisenkot demanded that Netanyahu leave politics by morning. On the morning of October 30, Netanyahu still heads the government of Israel, with the right to convene the cabinet, approve military operations and decide when to send planes into the air once again in the direction of Iran.