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JERUSALEM — For the first time in years, Israeli voters woke up the morning after election day without a clear answer.
With roughly 85% of ballots counted, Benjamin Netanyahu's Likud-led bloc sits at 53 seats. Gadi Eisenkot's opposition alliance, anchored by his Yashar party, holds 48. Neither comes close to the 61-seat threshold needed to form a government in the 120-seat Knesset . The Arab-led parties, surging to an unprecedented 19 seats, suddenly find themselves holding the mathematical key to power—even as almost every Jewish party in the room refuses to touch it.
The numbers tell a story of paralysis. The combined anti-Netanyahu total across all non-Likud factions reaches an effective 67-seat blocking majority. That sounds decisive. It isn't. A blocking majority can stop a government. It cannot build one.
Gadi Eisenkot is not a career politician. He is a former military chief of staff who entered parliament less than four years ago, a bereaved father whose son Gal was killed fighting in Gaza in December 2023 . His party, Yashar—Hebrew for "upright"—was built almost entirely on one promise: he is not Netanyahu.
That promise worked well enough to make him the most serious challenger Israel's longest-serving prime minister has faced in years. But it does not solve coalition arithmetic.
To cross 61, Eisenkot needs the Arab parties. Ra'am, projected at roughly 7 seats, has signaled openness to joining an opposition government. The Joint List, at 11 or 12 seats, has said it would support one from outside . The math works on paper. The politics is brutal.
Right-leaning opposition figures like Avigdor Liberman and Naftali Bennett campaigned explicitly to oust Netanyahu. They did not campaign to sit in a government propped up by Arab parties. For Liberman in particular, whose base is heavily secular and hawkish on security, formal cooperation with Ra'am or the Joint List crosses a line he has spent years reinforcing. Bennett faces a similar squeeze: he wants Netanyahu gone, but he also wants to lead a right-wing camp one day.
Even a minority government—Eisenkot as prime minister, with Arab parties supporting from outside on confidence votes—would be fragile by design. It would depend on ad-hoc agreements over national service, defense spending, and the ongoing regional war. One bad week in Gaza could collapse it.
Trump-affiliated figures have reportedly explored the idea in private conversations with Israeli officials, according to Washington Post reporting cited by Iranian state media . The logic is simple: if neither bloc can govern alone, and the Arab parties are radioactive to most Jewish parties, perhaps the two largest Jewish-led blocs could merge. Netanyahu has reportedly told American and European officials he would distance himself from his far-right partners, Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, if such a deal materialized.
Eisenkot has already rejected it. Publicly and categorically. He said he would not serve under Netanyahu even in a rotation arrangement, and threatened to resign if his party agreed to such a deal . His entire political identity is built on the opposite proposition.
Israel's Arab citizens, roughly one-fifth of the population, turned out in numbers that surprised pollsters, driven by a single motivation: ousting the most right-wing government in Israeli history . The result—a projected 19 seats across Ra'am and the Joint List—is historically significant.
But representation is not power in a coalition system that has treated Arab parties as untouchable for decades. Only one independent Arab party has ever formally joined a coalition, in 2021, and that arrangement collapsed quickly. The unified front of Jewish parties against Arab participation reflects a deeper reality: on the question of who counts as a legitimate governing partner, Israel's fractious political class remains remarkably united.
Some analysts believe Netanyahu would welcome that outcome. He has spent his career surviving political death sentences, and a caretaker period gives him room to maneuver, to wait for security developments that might reshape the board, or to watch his opponents tear each other apart over the Arab-party question.
The alternative is weeks of excruciating negotiations that most participants expect to fail. Eisenkot's window is narrow. Netanyahu's grip on his own bloc is tight. The Arab parties have leverage they have never had before, and almost no one willing to use it with them.
For now, Israel has no answer to the only question that matters: who can actually govern? The votes are counted. The math is clear. The politics is not.
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