So, Who Won the Knesset?
If there is no unity government, and no new governing coalition, that means we will be back to elections in six months
Anyone who claims to know what will happen next in Israeli politics is blowing smoke in your eyes. Even understanding what has already happened and why is difficult enough.
Amit Segal entitled his first piece after the election "Bibi Hasn't Won But the Opposition Has Lost." Haviv Rettig Gur wasn't even willing to go that far. As far as he is concerned, both sides lost, and the future will belong to whoever can better take advantage of the other side's failures. When it comes to a willingness to do whatever is necessary to secure victory, his money is on Prime Minister Netanyahu.
Most important in assessing Bibi's defeat, in Rettig Gur's eyes, was his failure to capitalize on numerous demographic advantages. Israel is perhaps the only country in the world in which the young tend to be more right-wing than their elders. And about 600,000 new voters reached voting age between the last elections in 2022 and last week. In addition, there has been an emigration of tens of thousands of overwhelmingly secular and left-wing Israelis over the past four years. And finally, approximately 200,000 voters have passed away since 2022. And older Israelis tend to be more secular and left.
In short, between the influx of young, right-wing voters and the passing of older, left-wing voters, the demographics favored Netanyahu improving on his performance from 2022. In addition, Shas cratered, losing five of the 11 seats and a quarter of the 400,000 voters it had in 2022, and that's not to mention the significant natural increase in young voters that would have been expected from religious or traditional supporters of Shas. In part, the implosion of Shas likely reflects the fact that it is 13 years since Rav Ovadiah Yosef passed away. And the magic of his name is no longer enough to cause Shas's traditional Sephardi voters to back the party.
Some of those missing Shas voters likely moved to Itamar Ben-Gvir's Otzma Yehudit party, but the majority almost certainly migrated to Likud. And nevertheless, with all these demographic advantages combined, Likud only added 52,000 voters since 2022 and lost five seats. The party's percentage of the Jewish vote declined almost five points, and the party garnered a lower percentage of the overall vote than in any other election since 1977 (barring only 2006, the election after Ariel Sharon split the newly created Kadima Party from Likud).
THE OPPOSITION PARTIES were not without issues with which to attack Netanyahu. The number of votes for the four Jewish-led opposition parties grew by 18 percent from 2022, and their percentage of the overall vote, after taking into account the unprecedented huge turnout for the two main Arab parties, dropped less than that of the Netanyahu-led bloc. Yet they still claimed five fewer seats than the Netanyahu bloc.
In the end, the opposition failed to convince a large enough number of voters that Netanyahu constitutes a mortal danger to Israel or that they have some magical solutions, particularly on security issues. The truth is that for all the demonization of Netanyahu in the West, there is little room between his position and that of the opposition parties on security issues. Neither he nor the opposition parties believe at present in the possibility of a Palestinian state.
Yes, October 7 took place on his watch. But no other party would have acted differently prior to October 7. Given the international outcry against Israel even after the Hamas attack, one can only imagine what the outcry would have been had Israel gone into Gaza prior to the mass slaughter. Even in Israel, Netanyahu would have been accused of being a warmonger recklessly risking Jewish lives.
Moreover, had the Shin Bet provided Bibi with all the information it had of Hamas's preparations prior to October 7, the tragedy might have been averted. But we now know that then Shin Bet director Ronen Bar did not do so, because he feared that Israeli preparations would have triggered a war with Hamas, which according to his conceptzia was not interested in a war with Israel. Had the prime minister been awakened and informed in the middle of the night on October 7, when Israeli intelligence received information of hundreds of Hamas terrorists switching to Israeli SIM cards for their mobile phones, there was still time to move enough air power into place to have prevented the worst of the slaughter.
True, Netanyahu has made grandiose claims about the imminent destruction of the enemies surrounding Israel, even though Hamas still controls the majority of the Gazan population, Hezbollah has not been completely destroyed, and despite all the punishment that the mullahs' regime in Iran has absorbed, its nuclear program still continues.
But each of the tentacles of the Iran-created and financed octopus surrounding Israel has been dramatically weakened. And the economic squeeze on Iran has been tightened to the point where the regime has nothing left with which to arm and finance its proxies.
Likud's final campaign ad, with Netanyahu at a chessboard, knocking off his opponent's pieces one by one, made the point clearly: He is the most experienced and brilliant wartime leader Israel has. President Trump's endorsement of Bibi made the same point. (Israel may be the only place in the world where Trump's endorsement can still sway votes.)
Hamas still controls a majority of Gazans, but its rockets no longer threaten Israel on a constant basis, and any move to more precision weaponry has been forestalled. Hezbollah has been pushed away from the Israeli border, beyond the Litani River, and its military capabilities are only a shadow of what they once were. The capture of the Syrian side of Mount Hermon and the Golan Heights buffer zone has greatly reduced the threat from Syria. And, most important, Iran's most advanced and seemingly impregnable nuclear sites were destroyed by massive American bunker-buster bombs, after Israel's air force had destroyed all of Iran's air defenses.
All this was achieved in the face of sustained pressure from the Biden administration at numerous crucial junctures — e.g., prior to entering Rafah to destroy Hamas tunnels there, and again while clearing a wide swath on the Lebanese border. Nor was the pressure only external. There were weekly demonstrations in Tel Aviv demanding that Israel enter into a ceasefire in order to bring the hostages home when Hamas was still far more threatening than it is today. In the end, Israeli military force brought back 168 of the 251 hostages alive without a ceasefire.
Rettig Gur also cites the "botched judicial reform," which so divided the country, as another powerful issue that could have been used against Netanyahu. But given the ever-larger power grabs by the attorney general and the High Court, it is doubtful that many, if any, on the right see judicial reform as less needed today than it was on the eve of October 7.
And for the same reason, the protestations about Bibi's failure to permit a state commission of inquiry fall on deaf ears with his supporters. A state commission would be headed by a present or former High Court justice, and the president of the High Court, Yitzchak Amit, who is rightly perceived as highly political and left-wing, would appoint its members.
Were there clear indications that Netanyahu is likely to be found guilty in any of his ongoing criminal trials — now running for nine years and counting — that might have provided the opposition with a potent issue. But that is not the case. The judges have already advised the prosecution to drop the bribery charges against him. And the testimony of Avishai Mandelblit, the attorney general at the time the indictments were issued, has been a disaster for the prosecution, as he has had to admit under oath that he cannot remember whether he signed off on certain investigatory methods or on the indictments themselves.
In the end, the only issue that genuinely unites most of the Jewish population of Israel is that of Netanyahu's alliance with the chareidi parties, whose public stance has been one of outright rejection of any compromise on the chareidi draft issue. And with respect to that issue, UTJ may have actually helped Netanyahu with vociferous complaints about his failure to secure a draft exemption for yeshivah students and threats to open negotiations with the opposition.
IS THERE ANY WAY OUT of the current stalemate? The ideal solution would be a national unity government. That is the resolution that President Herzog will push for and that a majority of the public says it wants. Israel faces a long list of long-term problems that require a stable government. Caretaker governments between elections, when no party can form a governing coalition, are greatly constricted in what they can do in the domestic sphere.
Amit Segal argues for a government formed from Gadi Eisenkot's Yashar (21 seats) and Bennett/Lapid's Yachad (12 seats), for a total of 33 seats on one side, and Likud (27 seats) and Smotrich's Religious Zionist Party (six seats), for a total of 33 on the other side.
Such a government, with Bibi remaining as prime minister, would give him the opportunity to work with President Trump to neuter Iran for two more years. And he would be happy to remove Ben-Gvir and his antics from the spotlight. Who knows, such a government might even come up with a chareidi draft bill that creates frameworks for those not learning full-time, while preserving the draft deferment for those who are. The chareidi parties could boo from the sidelines, while being quietly relieved. A law passed by a national unity government would be harder for the High Court to strike down.
But unity governments are difficult to create, even where there are large areas of agreement, as exists in Israel on security issues. The possibility of new elections hovering in the background, Rettig Gur observes, makes it difficult for parties to compromise or renege on earlier promises, as is required to form such governments, because they fear facing voters who feel betrayed by them.
As of this writing, the opposition parties are all sticking to their guns about not joining a unity government led by Bibi. Naftali Bennett and Avigdor Lieberman were both one-time top aides to Netanyahu and bear him a deep personal animus. Eisenkot served as chief of staff of the IDF under Netanyahu, and their relationship too was often tense, as Eisenkot sought to preserve the independence of the IDF from the political echelons. (As the polls closed, and early exit polls appeared to favor the opposition, Eisenkot addressed the IDF senior brass and told them that Netanyahu had no legitimacy to launch a large-scale military operation.)
In the meantime, the opposition seems likely to content itself with making life miserable for the government. Its initial step will be to vote in a new Speaker of the Knesset, with the support of the Arab parties, which will give them control of the legislative agenda. But forming a coalition with the newly ascendant Arab parties, with a combined 19 seats, remains a bridge too far for Lieberman and Bennett. Neither they nor their voters missed the fact that the largest Arab party sang the Palestinian national anthem at its victory celebrations. And even Mansour Abbas, the head of Ra'am, who accepts a Jewish state, strongly condemned Hamas's October 7 slaughter, and has been a member of an earlier Bennett/Lapid led government, recently refused to label Hamas a terror organization.
If there is no unity government, and no new governing coalition, that means we will be back to elections another six months down the line. And that may be Netanyahu's strongest trump card in negotiations with the opposition. He would appear to be situated to do better the next time around. It is doubtful that 60,000 Israelis living abroad will fly back again for a second round in order to oust him. And he will likely gain the 95,000 votes that went to General Ofir Vinter and were lost because his party did not cross the electoral threshold. And finally, it is extremely unlikely that Arab Israelis — whose voting participation went from the lowest level in 2022 to the highest in 2026 — will turn out in such high percentages again.
But if the Likud-led coalition still fails to achieve 61 seats in a second round, then Israel is headed for a series of caretaker governments between elections, at a time when the country faces a large number of serious challenges, not the least of which is preparing for the possibility of a hostile Democratic US administration cutting off arms shipments two years from now.