I went into Tuesday night assuming the math would eventually do its job. It usually does. Israel’s coalition system is ugly and slow, but it grinds out a government in the end, and I’ve spent years telling people abroad that the drama looks worse from outside than it really is. I’m less sure of that this morning.
With nearly all the votes counted, Netanyahu’s camp sits at 53 seats. Likud is the largest party with 26, and Shas, United Torah Judaism, Otzma Yehudit and the Religious Zionists bring in the rest. The bloc that ran to replace him (Eisenkot’s Yashar, the joint Bennett and Lapid list B’Yachad, Golan’s Democrats and Liberman’s Yisrael Beytenu) has 48. The two Arab lists hold 19 between them, far more than anyone planned for. Nobody has 61. The double-envelope ballots could still move a seat. They won’t move twelve.
So here’s my claim, narrowed as far as I can narrow it. Every government that can be built out of this Knesset is built to fall.
Not likely to struggle. Not fragile at the margins. Built to fall.
Count the Vetoes, Not the Seats
The useful question after an Israeli election isn’t who reached 61. It’s who can walk out and bring the house down behind them. Ask it of each option on the table and you get the same answer every time.
Start with Netanyahu staying put. He needs eight more seats. Liberman has seven and has spent years fighting the Haredi draft exemption that Shas and UTJ treat as non-negotiable, so even if he crossed over the numbers wouldn’t close. Bennett and Lapid ran on ending Netanyahu’s tenure. Eisenkot has ruled out serving under him in any form, rotation included. Meanwhile Washington is reportedly telling Netanyahu it doesn’t want Ben-Gvir in the next cabinet, and probably not Smotrich either. Drop those two parties and his camp shrinks to about 40. At that point the only partner big enough to matter is the man who already said no.
Now look the other way. On paper the anti-Netanyahu parties plus the Arab lists clear 61 with room to spare, and Golan said so within hours: Netanyahu lost, go count to 120. Mansour Abbas of Ra’am is offering to come in again, as he did in 2021. But every party in that bloc except the Democrats promised its voters it wouldn’t govern with Arab parties, and Liberman has rejected even outside support from them. The Joint List won’t lend twelve seats for free. Who inside Yashar, a list built on former generals and the moderate right, stands up and votes for its price? I can’t name the person. And the last government built on Ra’am had a genuine 61 and still lasted about a year.
The Rotation Lesson Nobody Wants to Relearn
The respectable answer, the one the think tanks like, is a unity government. Likud plus Yashar plus whoever tags along, with the far right or one of the Haredi parties left outside. Even the Israel Democracy Institute rates this as the more likely path and thinks the public could live with it. Maybe the public could. The politicians have already tried it.
In 2020 Netanyahu and Benny Gantz signed a rotation deal to break a run of deadlocked elections. Gantz was supposed to take over halfway through. The government fell apart over a budget before his turn came, and the country went back to the polls. Eisenkot later spent years in politics at Gantz’s side. He knows exactly how that story ended, which is why he says no rotation. He isn’t posturing. He’s remembering.
And the draft law sits underneath every version of unity. Keep Shas and UTJ inside and Yashar’s voters revolt over conscription. Push them out and Netanyahu depends on Eisenkot’s patience every single week. Either way somebody can end the government on any given Tuesday, and everybody at the table knows it.
Why Another Election Is the Safe Bet
Which leaves another round. Eisenkot said on election night it would be a mistake to send people back after a turnout like this, and he has a point. 77.7% is the highest since 1999, and that’s a demand for someone to govern. But a new election costs Netanyahu almost nothing. He stays on as caretaker prime minister until a new government is sworn in, and between 2019 and 2022 Israel ran five elections while he held the office for long stretches of that limbo. The incentive points one way.
There is one wrinkle worth watching. A Knesset majority opposed to Netanyahu doesn’t need a government to act. It can elect a speaker and push a state commission of inquiry into October 7 without ever agreeing on a prime minister. That isn’t stability. It’s a parliament governing against a cabinet it can’t replace, which is its own kind of mess.
What I Still Won’t Accept
Here’s where I part ways with the people already writing Israel off as ungovernable. A deadlock isn’t a failure of the voters. Nearly four in five of them showed up. Arab turnout surged. Soldiers voted at a higher rate than last time. People told the parties exactly what they think, and what they think is that no camp has earned the whole country.
The failure belongs to leaders who made promises they knew the numbers might not let them keep, and who now have to break one of them to build anything at all. Someone’s red line is going to go. The only real question is whose, and whether voters punish it or reward it next time.
My guess is there will be a next time.