How Israel’s Coalition Wrangling Could Play Out

Israel’s elections on Tuesday have delivered a parliament with no clear path to a new government. Incumbent Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party has won 27 out of 120 available seats in the Knesset, leaving his right-wing coalition short of the seats needed for a majority, and opposition candidate Gadi Eisenkot’s Yashar party has won 21 seats, also leaving it unable to form a government unless it joins forces with the surging Arab parties that his allies have previously refused to join forces with. What happens next, and what will coalition bargaining reveal about where Israeli society stands, three years on from the devastating Hamas attacks on Oct. 7, 2023, and the deadly regional wars that followed? On the latest episode of FP Live, I spoke with Dahlia Scheindlin, an Israeli pollster and political scientist who is a columnist for Haaretz. The full interview is available on the video box atop this page, or on the FP Live podcast on Spotify, YouTube, or Apple. What follows here is a lightly edited transcript. Israel’s elections on Tuesday have delivered a parliament with no clear path to a new government. Incumbent Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party has won 27 out of 120 available seats in the Knesset, leaving his right-wing coalition short of the seats needed for a majority, and opposition candidate Gadi Eisenkot’s Yashar party has won 21 seats, also leaving it unable to form a government unless it joins forces with the surging Arab parties that his allies have previously refused to join forces with. What happens next, and what will coalition bargaining reveal about where Israeli society stands, three years on from the devastating Hamas attacks on Oct. 7, 2023, and the deadly regional wars that followed? On the latest episode of FP Live, I spoke with Dahlia Scheindlin, an Israeli pollster and political scientist who is a columnist for Haaretz. The full interview is available on the video box atop this page, or on the FP Live podcast on Spotify, YouTube, or Apple. What follows here is a lightly edited transcript. Ravi Agrawal: Dahlia, you’ve covered so many elections in Israel. Why was this particular election seen as so important for the country’s future? Dahlia Scheindlin: We definitely had record turnout, which means that the vast majority of the voters saw it that way. I don’t think I’ve ever seen two major blocs of voters as polarized. The opposition parties won a clear majority of 67 out of 120 parliamentary seats. This is getting a bit lost in international coverage. The opposition parties have a majority, and they share the sense that the country is heading for a disaster. They believe that Netanyahu was deeply committed to his alliance with his ultranationalist, extremist, religious fundamentalist political partners, and that they had sacrificed the best interests of the country for an attack on the Israeli judiciary that was unpopular among the majority from the start of 2023. It sparked such a social backlash that it left Israel open to attack—the worst attack in Israel’s history, obviously—and then the government refused to take responsibility for it. And the issue of the government refusing to establish an independent commission of inquiry into what happened on Oct. 7, 2023, was among the most animating issues for the opposition voters. Those who support Netanyahu see Israel as having been attacked on numerous fronts. They believe that only Netanyahu has the kind of political savvy and international clout to be able to resist pressure to end the wars that they believe are a matter of survival. When they think about Oct. 7, they think of how close Israel was to existential destruction. In their minds, Netanyahu is the prime minister who managed to marshal Israel’s closest ally, the United States, to join Israel in its war against Iran. They believe that Israel must continue on that path. They also believe Israel must never give up any control over the West Bank or Gaza, or leave its positions in Lebanon and Syria, and that these are a matter of survival. RA: You suggested the international media is missing the headline here. But isn’t it true that Netanyahu is better placed than we expected? DS: First of all, I’m looking at the data. Mr. Netanyahu and the parties that are loyal to him did not achieve a majority of the votes. Netanyahu’s loyalist parties won 44 percent of the vote; 56 percent wanted Netanyahu out. The problem is that the opposition is composed of many fragmented political parties. If the opposition can’t form an alternative, then it doesn’t really matter. The biggest elephant in the room here is that the Zionist parties of the opposition—parties representing mostly Jewish citizens of Israel—have stated time and again that they do not want to build a coalition with parties representing mostly Arab or Palestinian Israeli citizens. But ultimately, it is a completely self-imposed constraint—and, frankly, it’s racist. RA: So Israel has a parliamentary system with many parties, and we’re now going to enter a period of coalition wrangling. But it’s also interesting to me that this election had at least some element of the personality contest that comes with a presidential system. So you’ve mentioned Netanyahu; the other figure everyone was talking about was Gadi Eisenkot, the leader of the Yashar party. DS: The fact that he’s a former IDF (Israel Defense Forces) chief of staff puts him in the highest level of esteem among most Jewish Israelis. There is a constituency of people who are in the center but lean right, who prioritize security issues and believe that Israel needs to be militarily strong and a Jewish state. But beyond that, they’re not extremists; they want a liberal society that separates religion from the state and ensures the separation of powers. They’re not happy with Netanyahu’s leadership, which has tried to consolidate power in the executive. And that group has supported somebody like Eisenkot time and again. RA: Give us some insight into how the coalition wrangling works out. Now that we know a couple of the main characters, could Eisenkot cobble together some of these other opposition parties, plus the Arab parties, and maybe try to form a government, or is Netanyahu the one who has the best shot at trying to do so? How does this all work? DS: The various scenarios for how to reach a government are manifold, and they are all uncertain. One scenario is that nobody can build a government, and Israel goes into another election, which is the precedent we had from 2019 through 2022, when we held five election cycles for this very reason. Another scenario is that there is a minority government, which is legal as long as it’s sworn in with more votes than those against it. It is inherently unstable, because there is a majority of parliamentary seats who could vote to disband the Knesset and call new elections. There is also a possibility—and not an unlikely one—that, for example, Netanyahu is asked to form the government by the president, and somebody from the Zionist opposition parties defects to his side. Most Israeli parties are amalgamated factions of smaller parties. There’s a lot of speculation about a unity government between Likud and the mainstream Zionist parties, with bargaining over who would be prime minister when. That is very complex, legally and politically. Netanyahu would want to be first in any rotation; the opposition parties would not want to accept that. If he goes second in a rotation, he’s in trouble because he is legally not supposed to be serving as a regular minister since he is under indictment for three counts of corruption and has been standing trial for the last six years. But you can see how many options are on the table. None of them are great ones. RA: It does seem like Israel is generally becoming more right-wing, more focused on its security at the cost of soft power. Netanyahu has frequently said he’s happy to turn Israel into Sparta. And it seems like what is so striking from everything you’ve said so far is that Netanyahu won a fair number of seats, and despite the opposition’s performance, he is still somewhat popular. Clearly, the differences between him and the potential opposition are not that great on some key issues on security. So what does this mean for Israel’s overall trajectory, no matter who actually forms a government after this? DS: It’s a good observation about hard power versus soft power. Israel is a militarist society and has placed so much emphasis on the image of the omnipotent army, but of course, it was no less invested in its global image over the decades and prided itself on being part of the family of democratic nations in the West. But in recent years, the country has unapologetically moved away from its liberal trajectory. Across the board, Israelis increasingly think that the entire world is against them, that the whole world is inherently anti-Israel and antisemitic no matter what Israel does. That goes beyond the right wing. The backlash against Israel in the immediate days after Oct. 7 was proof of concept to those who already felt that way and also really scared a lot of Israelis who didn’t necessarily think that way. RA: But Dahlia, since you speak to so many voters and have your pulse on how Israelis think, can you play out that school of thought of feeling like everyone’s against you, of feeling that much of the region and the world is antisemitic? Where does that lead? What is the logical conclusion of that feeling? DS: Netanyahu told us where that will lead just a day or two before the election. He said that in light of the possibility that Israel will be facing more sweeping sanctions—even more than it already is—it would have to build a separate economy that is free of the global system, and that Israel can just do that based on cryptocurrency. Nobody took it very well. But again, he maximized his vote. Netanyahu’s supporters are not deterred; they think that Israel has always been a resilient country, so they’re not as worried, whereas the Israelis who didn’t vote for the government are terrified at the idea of being shut out of the world that they want to be part of. They see themselves with a more globalist orientation. RA: How much do regular Israelis reckon with the change in attitude toward Israel in the United States, as more and more Americans seem to be openly discussing a changing U.S.-Israeli relationship, in part because of Israel’s politics over the last few years, and in particular over Gaza and U.S. military support for Israel in that war. It doesn’t seem like this has been a change election on that front. DS: The majority of Israelis believed it was a change election, just not in the ways the international community was looking for. I’ve never seen a bigger gap between how outsiders view Israel and how Israelis are talking about their country since Oct. 7. It’s natural that from the outside, people don’t always see the inside of any country, but I do think the gap has gotten so much bigger. For Israelis, American attitudes are a background issue. It occasionally makes a headline when a new Pew or Gallup survey comes out showing the erosion of Israel’s position. But again, that’s when the majority of Israeli Jews return to the idea that people were probably always against Israel, and that certainly in America, they have that “woke disease” that has poisoned the public mind toward Israel and has nothing to do with Israel’s policies—even those who are critical of Israel’s policy at home. When they hear that kind of criticism from abroad, they get defensive. People who are already opposed to the government will say that this is another thing they think is problematic or that they’re worried about. But it’s not the number one most urgent issue for them. There is an awareness of the possibility of a change in America following the midterms and an awareness of where the Democratic Party is going. But I think the presidential election and the possibility of a change of administration is too abstract for Israelis right now. It was always a profound and frankly incomprehensible mistake to think that you could just hold people under a hostile and violent military occupation. The day-to-day reality of Palestinians is so bad that there would always be some sort of escalation. I know of no national movement seeking self-determination that has ever given up on their self-determination, no matter how good their quality of life. Palestinians have neither. That’s the delusion in every unresolved ethno-nationalist territorial conflict, especially when the gap is so huge and one side enjoys full sovereignty—complete international integration and great economic indicators—while the other side has none of those things, nor national self-determination. There’s no reality in which that would ever go away or fail to escalate. The longer it goes on, the more extreme the escalations become. So it’s not just bad for Israel’s foreign relations or image. Primarily, it’s bad for the Palestinians who continue living under this hostile and very violent regime, and of course for Gaza, the vast destruction of which is incomprehensible at this point. But it’s bad for Israel, too. Israel’s democracy cannot really ever be fulfilled. These are the same state institutions who are ultimately implicated in that regime, and this is what ultimately fed into the chaos that we saw in 2023. It is also the source of the deepest divisions within Israel over the very nature of its regime, which is what was at stake in 2023 and what so many Israelis thought was at stake in this election, even if they didn’t make the connection that it’s fundamentally connected with occupation and Palestinians.