Are the Palestinian parties willing to sit in a government with the Zionist parties?
Mansour Abbas of Ra’am has made very clear that he’s interested in joining a governing coalition, as he did in 2021; the party’s attitude, Iraqi told me, is: “We’re here to be in office.”
The situation with the Joint List is more complicated. They wouldn’t join a coalition government, and none of the Zionist parties would have them. Even so, Jabareen, the Joint List leader, has said he wants to support an anti-Netanyahu minority government. Noy told me that the party doesn’t want to see repeated rounds of elections that fail to produce a stable government, as happened in 2019 and 2020. “Every round just makes it more possible for Netanyahu to return,” Noy said. “He’s very good at exploiting political instability for his own purposes.”
Noy said that if Eisenkot is willing to negotiate, the Joint List wants to make a deal. “Our support is not promised automatically,” she said. “But we are very realistic in our reading of the political map, and we know that we do not want Netanyahu, and that there is a limit to what Eisenkot can give in exchange for our support from outside.” In other words, the Joint List’s negotiators won’t press for things they know that Eisenkot can’t deliver. Noy herself isn’t on the Joint List’s negotiating committee, and isn’t high enough on the candidate list to have any reasonable hope of winning a Knesset seat. But, she said, she expects the party will ask Eisenkot to “stop the daily terror” against West Bank Palestinians, as a baseline. “If Netanyahu’s policies were all about annihilating all hope for Palestinian liberation, for a future political agreement, then we will expect to see some shift from these policies,” she said.
This actually seems like something that could happen, then? The Joint List wants to make a deal, and the Eisenkot bloc might need them? Is this the path to minimizing the damage that we were talking about at the beginning of this conversation?
Well, maybe. But remember the wolf and the goat and the cabbage: Avigdor Lieberman has been very clear that he won’t bring Yisrael Beiteinu into a minority government, or into a coalition with Ra’am or the Joint List. That suggests an Eisenkot-led coalition backed by Ra’am on the inside and Joint List on the outside would actually have 49 votes, and would be outvoted by the Netanyahu bloc.
But the anti-Netanyahu bloc could win, if only Lieberman were willing to make a political compromise with the Palestinian parties?
It’s not just Lieberman: Eisenkot has said that he won’t, Yoaz Hendel of The Reservists has said he won’t, Bennett has said he won’t. The centrist parties don’t see the Palestinian parties—and the hundreds of thousands of largely non-Jewish citizens they represent—as legitimate participants in Israel’s “Jewish democracy.” They’d rather see the country back in the hands of Netanyahu and his pet Kahanists than share even a modicum of power with the Palestinians.
Okay, so that’s off the table. What else?
One plausible scenario, according to political analyst Dahlia Scheindlin, a senior columnist at Haaretz, is that someone defects from one bloc to the other. “It could be a party, or it could be part of a party,” Scheindlin said. “Whole parties could just break their promises. That happens all the time, and Israeli voters are completely aware of that possibility.”
The possibilities here are endless, and weird things might happen. Political gossip has focused on Eisenkot’s Yashar party, whose list is packed with political neophytes who might be ripe targets for Netanyahu to seduce as turncoats. Or perhaps Lieberman could get over his hatred of Netanyahu and shift into the Netanyahu camp.
Alternatively, the Haredi parties could split with Netanyahu—the Mizrahi party Shas, in particular, has suggested it could support Eisenkot, though Eisenkot has denied any interest. This question of the Haredi parties is one of the thorniest political issues for the Eisenkot bloc.
Won’t the Haredi parties just automatically join a Netanyahu coalition?
It’s not that straightforward these days. The Haredi draft exemption, which has caused political chaos in Israel for more than a decade, is now one of the biggest issues in Israeli politics, after the Gaza war pulled hundreds of thousands of non-Haredi Israelis into extended reserve duty. The government’s often half-hearted efforts to arrest Haredi draft dodgers have led to disruptive, sometimes violent rioting, and United Torah Judaism and Shas are both upset with Netanyahu, their longtime ally, for failing to deliver a new draft exemption. The centrist parties, and some on the right, meanwhile, have made ending the draft exemption central to their platforms. So United Torah Judaism and Shas may not find a home in any coalition government.
There’s so much internal friction within both of the blocs. What about a unity government?
There’s been some discussion of a coalition that involves parties from both factions; Netanyahu has talked about building a “broad national government,” whatever that means, and Lieberman has accused Eisenkot of planning to form a coalition with Netanyahu. This sort of thing has happened before: In 2020, the centrist former general Benny Gantz formed a unity government with Netanyahu in which each was meant to have a stint as prime minister. But Netanyahu went first and Gantz’s turn never came. (Though he was seen just a year or so ago as the likely successor to Netanyahu, Gantz’s political fortunes have imploded, and he pulled out of the election over the weekend.) Scheindlin thinks that a power-sharing agreement between Netanyahu and another leader is unlikely. “If it’s a unity government, Netanyahu will want to go first in a prime ministerial rotation, which none of the opposition parties would fall for,” she said.
So what if they can’t figure anything out?
After the vote, the president of Israel, Jewish Theological Seminary of America honorary degree recipient and alleged genocide inciter Isaac Herzog, will appoint the leader of one of the factions to try to form a government. That leader has 28 days, plus a potential two-week extension period, to negotiate a coalition; if he fails, Herzog can give two more faction leaders a shot before a new election is scheduled for early next year, with Netanyahu remaining in the saddle as caretaker prime minister.