Israel’s media is reporting astonishing news this week: in the polls, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s bloc has overtaken that of Gadi Eisenkot.
After all the failures, disasters, scandals, and debacles of recent years, could Netanyahu really be heading for another victory? According to the reports, apparently so. In reality, not so much. We are seeing a misreading of the polls.
According to recent surveys, Netanyahu’s bloc has about 53 seats in the 120-member Knesset, while Eisenkot’s bloc stands at 51 or 52 – but only because of artificial exclusions.
When all the parties opposed to Netanyahu’s continued rule, meaning the right-wing and haredi (ultra-Orthodox) bloc, are counted together, the total reaches about 67 seats. That is a solid parliamentary majority, six seats above the threshold required, and virtually unprecedented in Israel’s modern political era.
For at least the past half-century, since the end of Mapai’s one-party dominance era, a prime minister whose opponents held 67 seats two weeks before an election would have been described as heading toward defeat.
Instead, the public is being told that Netanyahu is leading.
How does this happen? Quite simply, the political blocs are being counted in a way that serves Netanyahu.
Parties opposed to him are excluded from the change bloc because they are not considered natural coalition partners, prefer a national unity government, or because they have ideological disagreements with other opposition parties.
The result is the false appearance of a close race, or even a right-wing advantage, when the numbers themselves tell a very different story.
Herein lies the fundamental mistake: a solid political bloc and a governing coalition are not the same thing. Elections first determine the balance of power in the Knesset. Only afterward do negotiations over forming a government begin.
A party can oppose Netanyahu without committing to join an Eisenkot government, and it can support a government from outside the coalition without becoming part of it. A recommendation to the president is another matter entirely.
The conflation of these concepts has become a powerful political tool in Netanyahu’s hands.
Three factors illustrate just how misleading the conventional arithmetic has become: the Reservists party, the Arab parties, and Ofer Winter’s party.
Start with the Reservists party. This new outfit, which receives four seats in some polls, is excluded from the change bloc because its leaders favor a national unity government. Fine.
But a preference regarding the composition of a government is hardly equivalent to supporting Netanyahu’s continued rule.
The Reservists’ positions on the judicial overhaul, equality in military service, the political system, and even the Palestinian issue are considerably closer to those of the camp seeking to replace Netanyahu than to his alliance with Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, and the haredi parties.
Even if they are unwilling to commit in advance to an Eisenkot-led coalition, there is no political logic in portraying them as an entirely neutral force.
At the very least, they should be regarded as potential members of the change bloc, even if they would be reluctant partners who set conditions. Their preference for unity does nothing to change the fact that the current government is a long way from the political vision they present.
Arab parties and Ofer Winter
The second distortion is much larger and more consequential: the Arab parties.
This may be Netanyahu’s most impressive political achievement.
For years, he has managed to persuade large sections of the public, including his political opponents, that the votes of Israel’s Arab citizens somehow count for less when determining who has won an election.
The Right is allowed to count all its natural allies, while the Center-Left is expected to behave as though a substantial portion of its potential majority simply does not exist.
There are, of course, profound ideological differences between the Arab parties and the Zionist parties of the Center and Left. Israel’s Jewish character creates discomfort, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and national security present genuine difficulties.
It is also clear that Eisenkot, Avigdor Liberman, and Naftali Bennett are reluctant to form a government dependent on Arab parties, or even to be seen as willing to do so.
But this is where the confusion Netanyahu has so successfully cultivated begins: whether a particular party will join a coalition is a different question from whether its seats can prevent Netanyahu from forming a government.
Israeli history has already provided examples. In 1992, Labor and Meretz won 56 seats, while the five seats held by Hadash and the Arab Democratic Party gave Yitzhak Rabin’s camp a parliamentary majority of 61. Nobody doubted Rabin had won.
Rabin formed a government with Shas, but after its departure he relied on outside support from the Arab parties.
In 2021, Yair Lapid succeeded in assembling the coalition that removed Netanyahu from power, with the four seats of the Islamist Ra’am party forming an essential part of its majority: 61, to which Bennett, much like Shas in Rabin’s day, simply added his seats.
Netanyahu, by contrast, is never required to explain why the haredi parties, which oppose drafting their young men into the military and demand budgets and privileges that provoke widespread public resentment, are legitimate partners in his bloc. Their seats are counted automatically.
But when it comes to Arab parties, ideological disagreements suddenly become grounds for excluding them from the calculation. Suddenly, unlike in years past, they have disappeared from the opposition bloc in the media’s pie charts.
Netanyahu has managed to turn this double standard into a political convention.
The third factor, and perhaps the most intriguing of all, is a new party led by firebrand Brig.-Gen. (res.) Ofer Winter.
Winter has declared that he will recommend to the president that Netanyahu be tasked with forming the next government, so it is natural to count him initially with the Right.
Although Winter is an unmistakably right-wing figure, he also supports drafting haredi men into the military, a position that puts him on a collision course with Netanyahu’s haredi partners.
How can he sit in a government dependent on parties that oppose one of the central reforms he wants to advance?
Suppose Winter recommends Netanyahu, as promised. Even with Winter, however, Netanyahu reaches only 53 seats, according to the numbers under discussion. He is eight short.
A presidential recommendation cannot manufacture parliamentary seats that do not exist, and if Netanyahu cannot recruit additional partners, he cannot form a government.
At that point, another possibility could open up for Winter: joining a government of change focused on rebuilding the country.
There is no guarantee he would choose that path. But there is also no reason to assume that a declaration of loyalty to Netanyahu during an election campaign necessarily determines his behavior under every possible post-election scenario.
Urgent national tasks
The next government of change would face an enormous agenda, much of which would not require agreement on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
It would need to repair Israel’s foreign relations, address the military draft crisis and relations with the haredim, restore basic standards of good governance, combat rampant crime, and establish an independent state commission of inquiry into the failures of October 7.
These are urgent national tasks on which broad agreement could emerge, even among people with radically different views about the future of the territories.
Winter would not be a natural partner for a major diplomatic initiative with the Palestinians. But such an initiative is unlikely to get underway in the first year or two of the next government anyway.
During that period, simply preventing further damage would be an important achievement: curbing Jewish terrorism in the West Bank, halting the establishment of illegal outposts, and avoiding measures that would deepen Israel’s international isolation.
Agreement with Winter on some of these issues would be difficult, but there is no reason to assume in advance that every compromise is impossible.
Eisenkot, Bennett, and Lapid are projecting growing confidence that they can form a government based on a Jewish parliamentary majority, without relying on the Arab parties. Clearly, that confidence rests on precisely the scenarios described above.
And with the addition of outside support from the Arab factions, something they have already promised free of charge, such a government could conceivably enjoy an enormous parliamentary majority.
The coming election could therefore very well bring Netanyahu’s rule to an end.
That possibility may be considerably closer than the public realizes, simply because the media continues to present the political landscape according to rules that Netanyahu himself has managed to establish.
Caution is necessary, of course, because polls are not votes cast at the ballot box. But it is equally important to read the polls correctly. That matters if the change bloc is to find the fighting spirit needed to bring masses of voters to the polls.
And there is room for hope. As Theodor Herzl famously put it, “If you will it, it is no dream.”
Especially when the alternative is failure and Netanyahu somehow remaining in power, which would be a catastrophe threatening the very future of the state.
The writer is a former Cairo-based Middle East editor and London-based Europe/Africa editor of the Associated Press. He served as chairman of the Foreign Press Association in Jerusalem and authored two books about Israel.