Where is this Knesset election heading?
Yossi Alpher — September 28, 2026
Views and positions expressed here are those of the writer, and do not necessarily represent NJN's views and policy positions.
Q. The five Knesset opposition party leaders from the left, center, and center-right met last Saturday night, one month before October 27 elections, and pledged not to campaign against one another in a cooperative effort to depose Netanyahu. What are their chances?
A. As matters stand, their chances are no better than even. Neither this “Change Bloc” nor the Netanyahu camp is likely to end up with a workable majority.
Conceivably, though, a workable plurality, meaning that the election outcome may enable Mssrs Eizenkot, Bennett, Lapid, Liberman, and Golan to form a minority coalition. Then too, they may be able to force a repeat election. On the other hand Netanyahu, without an electoral Knesset majority, may succeed in buying off a few of the rightists in the anti-Netanyahu coalition in order to reach a majority. He may hope to lead a transition government pending repeat elections. He has been there before and come out on top.
The latest polls consistently show the anti-Netanyahu camp with around 54 mandates. This is nowhere near the Knesset majority of 61 they could aspire to a month ago. But only a miracle will raise their fortunes to 61 mandates.
One thing is certain. If the five Change Bloc parties ignore their own Saturday pledge and campaign against one another, they will all lose.
Q. Can’t the anti-Netanyahu camp depend on the Arab parties to reach a Knesset majority?
A. The Arab parties, all or most, can probably be depended on to vote with the anti-Netanyahu camp. They should end up with between 12 and 15 mandates. But a move to coopt their vote against Netanyahu will almost certainly spark defections from newly-elected right-wingers in the anti-Netanyahu coalition, thereby robbing it of a majority. Avigdor Liberman’s Yisrael Beteinu party may abandon the new coalition altogether.
Q. Hold on. Why are there right-wingers in the anti-Netanyahu parties? Isn’t their place with Netanyahu?
A. This is where we confront the radically changing Israeli political landscape. The few Israeli Jews who still identify as left of center are in the Democrats Party (former Labor and Meretz) led by Yair Golan, which is projected to garner 9 or 10 mandates. All the rest of the anti-Netanyahu camp can be defined as center, center-right, and right.
The latter, the right, refers to disaffected Netanyahu supporters who would possibly accept the Likud platform but are fed-up with Bibi and all that he represents. To ensure their support, they are well represented in Eizenkot’s Yashar list, currently projected to reach 23 or 24 mandates, the Bennett-Lapid B’yahad list (13), and Liberman’s Yisrael Beteinu (9).
Q. Eizenkot’s list is comfortably larger in the polls than any of his anti-Netanyahu partners and even larger than the Likud, which currently polls 20 mandates. Yet Bennett, Lapid, and Liberman refuse to declare Eizenkot their choice to form a government. Why?
A. They are afraid that if they do so now, they will lose votes to Eizenkot and possibly even to Netanyahu. After all, these are all right-wingers competing more or less for the same votes. Distinguishing themselves one from another is their dilemma. Until Saturday night’s meeting they were attacking one-another, not Netanyahu, and consequently losing votes to him.
Q. And among the pro-Netanyahu bloc, the distinctions are not blurred?
A. Netanyahu, who knows how to read elections better than anyone, is careful to present his coalition – the Likud, the Kahanist Itamar Ben-Gvir’s Jewish Power, Bezalel Smotrich’s Religious Zionism, and the two ultra-Orthodox lists Torah Judaism and Shas – as a harmonious bloc. They currently garner only 50 mandates. But they lose votes to Amcha Yisrael, a militant messianic party led by the charismatic Ofer Winter, a former brigadier general who currently polls at four mandates.
Q. Winter reminds us that there are fringe party lists on the right and the center. If they fall short of the threshold of four mandates, they waste votes and their very candidacy can seriously alter the outcome…
A. This is where the elections get interesting. Where the final vote count may go down to the wire.
And where the dilemmas are fascinating. Should Netanyahu try to steamroller Winter and persuade him to pull out of the election rather than waste something short of four right-messianic mandates? But if Winter withdraws, will his votes go to Netanyahu or to opposition parties like Eizenkot’s? And if Winter exceeds the four-mandate threshold, will he opt for a Netanyahu-led coalition or join the highest bidder, meaning whoever offers him the choicest ministerial portfolio?
Will Eizenkot, son of Moroccan Jews and a former IDF chief-of-staff, try to poach votes from Shas, an ultra-Orthodox Sephardic party heavy with Moroccans? Or should he look for ways to poach Shas en-bloc away from the Netanyahu coalition? This is the first election that could be decided by Israel’s hundreds of thousands of voters of Moroccan descent.
And how about Benny Gantz’s Blue-White party and the “Reservist” list, both of which poll consistently around four mandates. If both persist in running, they could waste several mandates-worth of security-minded voters who might otherwise opt for Eizenkot and ensure his victory. (Of Gantz, briefly a defense minister and deputy prime minister under Netanyahu some years ago, it can only be remarked, “How the mighty have fallen…”)
Q. There is one Arab party, Raam, with a Jewish former police general, Yoav Segalovitch, in the number two slot. This looks revolutionary...
A. It is. Segalovitch served in the Knesset under Lapid and was highly successful in reducing the crime rate in the Arab sector – an achievement dismally reversed by the Kahanist Ben Gvir under Netanyahu. Now Segalovitch is sending the message that the only possible political future for Arabs and Jews in Israel is together. The head of Raam, Mansour Abbas, is leading the party away from its Muslim Brotherhood origins toward pragmatic political integration in collaboration with Jewish Israel. Until now, only the communists featured a Jew on their list, and he was not a vote-getter among most fellow Jews.
Currently Raam polls five mandates. What will happen if Eizenkot needs them to form a stable government that can stand up to his own hardliners as well as to Netanyahu’s efforts to buy off right-wingers?
(Full disclosure: I am seriously considering voting for Abbas, Segalovich, and Raam. In my eyes they represent the only conceivable future for Israel that is not right-religious.)
Q. If Netanyahu prevails in these elections, what will another Likud-led government look like?
A. More of the same. Netanyahu knows how to make this work. Heavily messianic-Kahanistic-Haredi in religious orientation. Hawkish and anti-Arab at the strategic level.
Q. And an Eizenkot-led government?
A. Eizenkot, lacking in ministerial experience, will be heavily dependent at least initially on Bennett, Lapid and Liberman, all of whom (especially Liberman) have ministerial experience and even prime-ministerial experience. This could generate friction and test Eizenkot’s considerable managerial skills and unflappable nature. There will also be built-in tension between these center-rightists and the left-wing Golan, without whom there can be no coalition.
The extremist rhetoric and behavior toward Palestinians that were characteristic of the deposed Netanyahu government will stop. The government will work with Trump in Gaza and muzzle settler extremists in the West Bank. But a genuine thaw with Palestinians, which Golan will advocate? Not with Bennett and Liberman in the coalition.
Q. Bottom line: So what are these elections about?
A. In the broadest sense, they are about a country badly fragmented internally and isolated externally. An increasingly right-religious polity that has no answers. The only consensus concerns the Iranian threat.
Yossi Alpher is an independent security analyst. He is the former director of the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University, a former senior official with the Mossad, and a former IDF intelligence officer.
Photos: Netanyahu by Avi Ohayon, Government Press Office of Israel, CC BY-SA 3.0. Eisenkot by Yahav Studio, CC BY-SA 3.0
