Opinion: Israel's election settled nothing, and that is the real result

Israelis turned out in numbers not seen since 1999 for the first national election since the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack, and the result they produced was almost perfectly split. With the count essentially complete on October 28, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's Likud-led bloc stood at roughly 53 seats and the opposition alliance led by former military chief Gadi Eisenkot at about 48, according to Al Jazeera's tally of the vote. Neither number comes close to the 61 seats needed to govern a 120-seat Knesset. The remaining 19 seats belong to Arab-led parties, the Joint List and Ra'am, whose combined strength nearly doubled from 2022.

Turnout reached 77.7 percent, up more than seven points from the previous election and the highest in a generation; more than 60,000 Israelis reportedly returned from abroad specifically to cast ballots, a detail that itself speaks to how much weight voters attached to this contest. Likud fell to 27 seats from 36, its worst showing in over a decade. Eisenkot's new centrist party, Yashar, took 21 seats in its first outing. Both figures are documented in Al Jazeera's coalition-arithmetic analysis, and official certification is due by November 4, eight days after polls closed, as set out by Israel's Government Press Office in its pre-election communication confirming the vote for the 26th Knesset on October 27.

A parliament split three ways

The deadlock is not simply Netanyahu versus Eisenkot. It is a three-way split in which neither of the two blocs built around them can reach a majority without either the other or the Arab-led parties, and both men have spent the campaign ruling out the latter. Netanyahu called a coalition involving Arab parties "shameful" on election night and insisted the right-wing bloc holds a "decisive majority" once all votes are properly counted, according to the Jerusalem Post's live coverage of the count. Eisenkot, for his part, has likewise resisted leaning on Arab-led support to govern, even as he claimed the result as a mandate for change.

That leaves President Isaac Herzog, whose formal role begins once the Central Elections Committee certifies the final tally. Under Basic Law: The Government, the president must consult every party and then hand the mandate to form a government to the lawmaker judged most likely to succeed; that person gets 28 days to build a coalition, extendable once by up to 14 more, a process documented in detail by the U.S. Library of Congress's legal analysis of Israel's coalition-formation statute. If 42 days pass without a government winning a confidence vote, the law points toward new elections — the same trapdoor that produced four Israeli elections between 2019 and 2022.

Israel "must do everything possible to avoid another round of elections," President Isaac Herzog said as the count wound down.

The exclusion neither man can afford

Herzog's appeal is not just a plea for calm; it is an acknowledgment of a mathematical fact that both leading candidates have treated as an inconvenience rather than a constraint. Arab-led parties now hold roughly one in six Knesset seats, their strongest position in decades, and they are not going anywhere between now and whatever government eventually gets sworn in. A Likud-led coalition that excludes them needs every other right-leaning and religious party to hold the line simultaneously — a seven-party arrangement with little room for defection. An Eisenkot-led coalition that excludes them faces the identical problem from the other direction. The 2021-2022 government led by Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid showed that an informal reliance on Arab-party abstention or support can function, but it also showed how fragile that arrangement is once any single faction decides the price of cooperation is too high.

The alternative Herzog is said to favor — some version of a unity arrangement between Netanyahu and Eisenkot, potentially with a rotation of the premiership — carries its own structural weakness. It asks two men who built entire campaigns on being the alternative to each other to now share power, with Netanyahu doing so while still standing trial on corruption charges he denies, as both Al Jazeera and the Jerusalem Post have reported. A rotation deal postpones the reckoning the voters seemed to be reaching for rather than resolving it, and it gives the party that eventually inherits the top job strong incentive to make the wait as uncomfortable as possible for the other side.

The case for taking the deadlock seriously

It is tempting to read a near-even split as evidence that the election simply didn't matter — that Israel will govern much as before regardless of who holds the mandate. That reading understates what changed. A sitting prime minister lost nine seats and nearly a quarter of his party's prior strength in the first electoral test since the war that defined his final term, and a 66-year-old former chief of staff with no national campaign experience built a 21-seat party from nothing specifically to challenge him. That is a verdict, even if the Knesset's arithmetic has not yet translated it into a new government. The honest counterargument is that Israeli voters have delivered inconclusive results before without triggering any fundamental re-ordering of how coalitions get built; the 2019-2022 stalemate ended, after all, with Netanyahu back in office. But each of those cycles also left the question of Arab-party inclusion more, not less, pressing, because the seats kept growing while the taboo against using them stayed fixed. At some point the gap between the Knesset Israelis elect and the government its leaders are willing to build from it becomes the central fact of the country's politics rather than a footnote to it.

What happens next

The sequence from here is set by statute rather than by either man's preference. Final certification is due by November 4, the new Knesset is expected to be sworn in around November 10, and Herzog's consultations with party factions begin once those results are official. He then names a candidate who gets up to 42 days, in total, to assemble 61 votes. If that candidate fails, Herzog can try again with someone else; if the process exhausts itself entirely, Israeli law points back to the ballot box. For a country that has now voted five times since 2019, a fifth failed attempt at stable government would be less a crisis than a pattern — one that the strength of Arab-led parties in this Knesset makes considerably harder to break without the exclusion both leading blocs have promised their base.