Where Israel stands this morning.
On 27 October nobody won. Netanyahu’s bloc took 53 seats, the Jewish opposition 48, the Arab parties 19. Sixty-one is a majority.
This week the party leaders made their recommendations to President Herzog. Eisenkot received 67. Netanyahu received 46. United Torah Judaism’s seven declined to name anybody.
Eisenkot’s 67: forty-eight seats from four Jewish-led parties — his own Yashar, Bennett and Lapid’s B’Yachad, Golan’s Democrats and Lieberman’s Yisrael Beitenu — plus eleven from the Joint List and eight from Ra’am.
The Arab parties endorsed him. Nobody made them. Yousef Jabareen said the opposition has to accept political reality and join forces to remove Netanyahu. Ra’am’s faction simply voted to back him.
Forty-eight is not a government. Sixty-seven is. The difference is nineteen Arab seats.
Herzog, the President, assigns the mandate on Sunday. Twenty-eight days, extendable by fourteen.
My prediction, in two parts
First: Eisenkot will not form a government that rests on those nineteen seats. He will spend the mandate pursuing the “national emergency government” he has already named — a Jewish coalition reaching toward Netanyahu’s bloc or the Haredim. If it fails, Israel goes to a fifth election rather than seat a government dependent on Arab votes.
Second, and this is the part that matters: if I am wrong about the first — if he does take their support — they will get no power. No senior ministry. No amendment to the Kaminitz Law, which governs demolition enforcement in Arab towns. No veto over anything. Budget lines for Arab municipalities, infrastructure, perhaps some village recognitions, and not one decision they can block.
I am naming those three in advance so that in five weeks anybody can check me.
Why I expect that
Because it already happened, and recently.
In June 2021 Mansour Abbas took Ra’am into the Bennett–Lapid coalition — the first Arab party ever to sit in an Israeli government. The coalition agreement committed more than 53 billion shekels to Arab society. That October the cabinet approved roughly $9.4 billion for employment, health, housing and infrastructure in Arab areas, plus a billion for crime. Three unrecognised Bedouin villages were legalised. Thousands of homes were connected to the electricity grid.
I will not pretend that was nothing. For a family in Rahat, electricity is not a symbol.
Here is what Ra’am did not get. The Kaminitz Law was not amended — the coalition agreed to discuss amending it, and extended a partial freeze. No senior ministry. No change to the Nation-State Law, whose first clause states that national self-determination in Israel is unique to the Jewish people. No change to anything in the territories.
They were paid in pipes and given no say over anything the Jewish parties cared about. That is the template, it is five years old, and it worked well enough that nobody has any reason to improve on it.
Why their votes are free
The usual way a small party gets leverage is the threat to walk. Bring down the government, force an election, make yourself expensive.
The Arab parties cannot make that threat. If they collapse an Eisenkot government the alternative is Netanyahu, who this week demanded a broad coalition without the Arab lists and accused them of having stolen the vote. There is nowhere for them to go.
So their nineteen seats cost nothing to keep. A party that cannot defect does not have to be paid.
And notice how that condition was produced. They have no exit because no Jewish bloc will take them. Netanyahu’s refusal is what guarantees Eisenkot can ignore them. The two blocs are not coordinating — they detest each other — but between them they have made nineteen seats’ worth of citizens politically worthless, and each benefits from what the other does.
That is the thing I have been trying to describe for a month, and this is the clearest view of it anyone is going to get.
What cuts against me
It has been done. 2021 proves the taboo is breakable. Eisenkot would be the second, not the first, and second is always easier.
He has not refused them. He could have stood up on Wednesday and declined the endorsement. He didn’t. Silence may be a man keeping options open rather than one about to close a door.
It may not be him. Lieberman holds seven of those 67 and has a long record of hostility to Arab parties and their voters. If this fails on Lieberman’s veto, blaming Eisenkot for it would be unfair. I would still hold him responsible for what he does when the veto comes, but the distinction is real.
And the money was real. $9.4 billion is not a gesture. If your standard is whether Arab citizens’ lives improved, 2021 was better than 2020, and a man who says otherwise from California should be careful.
And politicians take power when it is in front of them. That is the strongest argument against me. Sixty-seven is a majority, he wants the job, and principles have lost to offers before.
What would prove me wrong
On the first part: if Eisenkot forms a government that depends on the Joint List’s and Ra’am’s votes — in coalition or supporting from outside — within the mandate period and any extension.
On the second: if that government gives an Arab party a senior ministry, or amends the Kaminitz Law, or writes any veto into a coalition agreement.
Either one, and I write the post saying so. I would rather write that one than this one, and I am not being polite .
Why I don’t expect to
Because the question in front of Israel this week is not complicated. A man has been handed a majority by citizens of his own country, and the only reason not to use it is because they are not Jewish. And if he does use it, the second question is whether they get anything for it, and we already know the answer because we watched it five years ago.
I was born in Haifa in 1951. I was conscripted in 1969 and served three years in the IDF.
Sunday, and then twenty-eight days. We will know.
Sources
Arab-Israeli party endorses Eisenkot to form new government — RTÉ, 4 November 2026
Basic Law: Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People — Adalah