“It is disappointing, but comes as no surprise,” Noa Landau wrote in the left-leaning newspaper Haaretz, to see how Eisenkot “framed the election results in the form of a ‘Zionist’ majority for a government led by him and fell precisely—and I mean, precisely––into the trap Netanyahu laid for him.”
Under the Israeli electoral system, the next step is for the country’s President, Isaac Herzog, to ask party leaders which candidate they recommend for Prime Minister. That candidate then has roughly a month to form a majority. As things stand, it is unclear whether that task will fall to Netanyahu, the leader of the largest party, or Eisenkot, who could become the leader of the largest bloc of parties. But Eisenkot would need support from Arab parties to form a coalition, and he spent his campaign equivocating on whether he would be willing to do so; some of his partners in the opposition have flatly rejected the idea.
That leaves Netanyahu. His campaign strategy in the days before the election seemed to rely on scaring the Israeli public into voting for him. In a series of interviews, Netanyahu acknowledged that the multi-billion-dollar annual defense package that the U.S. gives Israel “is over.” He added that crippling international sanctions were inevitable, so the country should be prepared to “circumvent” them by turning to cryptocurrency. (He seemed to regard his government’s policy of expanding Jewish settlements in the West Bank, which has already triggered sanctions from eleven European countries, as irreversible.) The comments rattled markets and scandalized experts. “All he has to offer the Israeli economy is a bizarre solution that is common among criminal organizations,” a scathing letter signed by more than a hundred Israeli economists concluded.
Netanyahu will now do everything in his power to peel lawmakers away from the opposition to cobble together a majority. It won’t be easy. Although some opposition leaders vowed not to sit in a coalition with Arab parties, all of them vowed not to join one headed by Netanyahu. This is the deadlock that many Israelis feared going into the election. It means that the country will now face weeks or months of coalition wrangling, of raw nerves and bitter infighting—only to risk ending up in the same impasse.
Once those negotiations are exhausted, there are two likely scenarios. There will be enormous pressure from within Israel and from abroad to form some sort of national-unity government, headed by both Netanyahu and Eisenkot. Trump indicated as much, when unnamed U.S. sources told Israeli media that he wants to “make sure” that the next government does not include Ben-Gvir. On Wednesday, the popular Israeli news site Ynet laid out a possible framework for such a government. It would include Netanyahu, Eisenkot, and Naftali Bennett—a former Prime Minister who is now in the opposition. The article suggested that the three would each take a turn serving as Prime Minister, in alignment with “Trump’s vision.”
For Netanyahu, though, breaking away from his longtime ultra-Orthodox partners could spell the beginning of his political end. (The last time he turned his back on them, in 2013, his coalition splintered after less than two years.) Eisenkot and Bennett also seem unlikely to agree to a unity government anytime soon. Not only did they promise voters that they would not join forces with Netanyahu—they also personally believe that he represents an active danger to democracy. “I know Netanyahu,” Eisenkot said on a recent campaign stop, in Tel Aviv. “He’ll stop at nothing” to remain in power. Bennett, for his part, has called Netanyahu’s aides’ alleged work as influence agents for Qatar the “most serious act of treason” in the country’s history. Yet they might reconsider if Israel seemed headed toward another imminent escalation with Iran. On Wednesday, the Wall Street Journal reported that the U.S. and Israel were preparing for a possible round of strikes on Iran after the American midterms.
The other scenario is that the results will be so inconclusive that, in a few months, Israelis will be sent to the ballot box again. It wouldn’t be the first time. Between 2019 and 2021, there were four rounds of elections in just two years, and the government that was ultimately sworn in dissolved within eighteen months.
