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This is a guest essay by Nachum Kaplan, a longtime journalist and commentator who writes the newsletter, “Moral Clarity.”
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.
Israel held an election, and its political leaders promptly mistook the absence of a winner for proof that each had won.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu proclaimed the Right’s strength. Opposition candidate Gadi Eisenkot declared that the public had rejected Netanyahu. Both statements contain an element of truth. Neither comes with the 61 Knesset (Israeli parliament) seats required to govern.
The preliminary count gives Netanyahu’s bloc approximately 53 seats, Eisenkot’s 48, and the Arab parties a remarkable 19, their largest representation ever. Although the count remains incomplete, the predicament is unmistakable: Israel has divided itself into rival Zionist camps while handing a substantial bloc of parliamentary seats to parties outside that consensus.
Turnout reached a record 77.7 percent, one of the highest ever for an Israeli national election, although Israeli national elections generally produce high voter turnouts. Voters spoke in several voices; politicians are insisting only their preferred one counts.
There are many ways through this impasse, apart from another election and the hope that arithmetic develops a more accommodating personality. However, two of them are particularly intriguing. Both require abandoning cheaply made promises, and their consequences would be profoundly different.
The first is an Eisenkot-led government with Arab party support. On the present figures, his bloc and theirs would command roughly 67 seats between them. That is a majority, although it is not yet a politically available one. Naftali Bennett and Avigdor Liberman, both of whom are in Eisenkot’s bloc, have opposed reliance on Arab parties, and Eisenkot himself has rejected such a coalition. A parliamentary sum does not become a government simply because somebody has mastered addition.
Still, this outcome deserves serious consideration. An Arab vote approaching 20 seats is extraordinary. Israel’s Arab citizens, roughly a fifth of its population, have every right to representation, influence, and a stake in their country’s future. A democracy that expects civic loyalty while treating an entire community’s political preferences as permanently irrelevant creates its own alienation.
The precedent is sometimes forgotten. In 2021, Mansour Abbas’ Ra’am party (one of the main Arab-led parties) joined the Bennett–Lapid coalition, becoming the first Arab party to participate formally in an Israeli governing coalition. It was an experiment in pragmatic citizenship: an Islamist party seeking budgets, policing, and infrastructure rather than making every political question a referendum on Palestinian nationalism.
That experiment deserves further consideration. Participation can sometimes moderate political incentives. Politicians who must deliver functioning schools, safer streets, and economic opportunities may discover that ideological purity is not a substitute for competent administration. Inclusion could make the state more responsive to Arab citizens and thus strengthen Israeli democracy.
But congratulating ourselves on democratic inclusivity cannot wish away the security dilemmas that come with such an arrangement. Ra’am and the Joint List (the other Arab party) are not interchangeable, and Arab citizens are no more politically homogeneous than Jewish ones.
Important Arab political currents do not accept Zionism, and some reject defining Israel as a Jewish state. These are legitimate differences, but they become more consequential when a government depends on parties whose conception of the state conflicts with the premises of its security policy.
What happens during a major confrontation with Hamas, Hezbollah, or Iran? Would an Eisenkot government possess the parliamentary freedom to take necessary military action, or would its survival depend on allies who might withdraw support precisely when resolve is required?
Outside support might soften the difficulty without abolishing it. A government can be held hostage by votes it needs even when their owners occupy no cabinet seats.
This is a risk, not a claim that Arab representatives are disloyal or should be excluded. The pertinent distinction concerns coalition dependence and security coherence. Israel has enough enemies without making its ability to respond to them contingent on recurring negotiations over the government’s survival.
There is, however, another possibility: a broad coalition between Netanyahu and Eisenkot, supplemented by other Zionist parties until it commands a durable parliamentary majority.
Likud (Netanyahu’s party) and Yashar (Eisenkot’s party) together would fall well short of 61 seats. A serious unity government would therefore need additional partners — perhaps from the Zionist Center and Center-Right — and an agreed program. That is difficult, but less dangerous than a coalition perpetually negotiating its own existence.
Such a government could free Netanyahu from dependence on Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, whose ultranationalist politics have frequently elevated provocation above prudence. Ironically, these two alone go some way toward explaining the huge Arab voter turnout and electoral success.
It could free the country from the disproportionate leverage of ultra-Orthodox parties, whose relationship with Zionism is often ambivalent or explicitly non-Zionist, and whose demands to exempt ultra-Othordox Israelis from conscription obstruct a fair distribution of national obligations. Equally, it could spare Eisenkot from dependence on Arab parties whose national agendas may diverge sharply from his own.
The result would be a government centered on a basic proposition: Israel is the nation-state of the Jewish People, its citizens are entitled to equal civic protection, and its security cannot be subcontracted to the vetoes of marginal factions of religious or ideological lunatics.
Within that framework, there is immense room for disagreement over settlements, diplomacy, economics, religion, and the government’s proper limits. Coalition partners need not love one another; they just need a sufficiently coherent understanding of what they are governing.
The obvious objection is that Netanyahu and Eisenkot have spent an election campaign explaining why the other is unfit to lead.
Eisenkot has explicitly rejected serving under Netanyahu. His objections concern more than bruised feelings and include accountability for October 7th, the independence of state institutions, including the judiciary, and the prime minister’s judgment. Netanyahu, for his part, would have to accommodate a rival who has built his appeal partly on replacing him. Dismissing these differences would reduce unity to public relations.
So a credible agreement would require an independent reckoning with the failures of October 7th, rules protecting institutional independence, a workable settlement over military service, and a clear allocation of responsibility for security decisions. A leadership arrangement would also have to be negotiated rather than left to the assumption that one man’s political longevity entitles him to perpetual first refusal. Such negotiation is why leadership is harder than campaign speechmaking.
There is a precedent for cooperation. Eisenkot served in the emergency wartime government established after October 7th, before leaving alongside Benny Gantz in June 2024. The arrangement collapsed, but demonstrated that national emergencies can compel cooperation. Israel remains in a national crisis even when the air-raid sirens are silent. Military threats, institutional distrust, domestic polarization, and the mounting strains of national service do not disappear between rounds of fighting.
Nor should the astonishing Arab vote be treated simply as a coalition bargaining chip. It is a warning about neglected obligations. Arab towns have endured an epidemic of organized crime, intimidation, and murder. Some 241 people were murdered in Arab society in 2025. That is a failure of the state’s most elementary responsibility to protect its citizens.
Better and more extensive policing, witness protection, education, infrastructure, housing, and economic opportunity are not concessions to an electoral bloc. They are duties owed to Israeli citizens. A broad Zionist coalition should be capable of addressing them without requiring Arab parties to threaten its survival before anybody pays attention. Indeed, taking Arab concerns seriously would strengthen the argument that political inclusion need not be confused with a veto over national security.
Of course, a unity coalition would disappoint the purists. Netanyahu loyalists would complain about giving Eisenkot influence. Eisenkot supporters would recoil at legitimizing Netanyahu. The ultranationalists would denounce betrayal. Some ultra-Orthodox leaders would resist losing their customary bargaining power. Each would insist its grievance outranks the national interest.
That is precisely the political culture a broad coalition could challenge. Israel has become adept at producing governments in which small parties exercise powers vastly exceeding their electoral weight. Coalition formation becomes an auction of vetoes, and governing becomes the continuous business of paying the winning bidders. A broader majority would not eliminate disagreement. It might finally make disagreement governable.
The public has done its democratic duty. Netanyahu and Eisenkot now face a choice between preserving their grievances and constructing a government with enough political breadth to survive them. The formidable obstacle is neither mathematics nor ideology. It is the familiar conviction, common among powerful men, that national necessity somehow always requires the other fellow to compromise first.
Israel needs a government strong enough to defend the country, broad enough to represent its Zionist majority, and serious enough to protect the rights and opportunities of all its citizens. Netanyahu and Eisenkot have the opportunity to help create one.
Mansour Abbas refuses to called Hamas terrorists. Nothing more to add.
I don't understand why every advocate of a responsible Zionist government feels impelled to slam Smotrich and Ben-Gvir, especially since Smotrich articulates the most straightforward and obvious way to deal with the never-ending and festering situation with the Palestinians, not to mention his stewardship of the expansion of Israeli settlements in Judea and Samaria which now constitute a definite bulwark against further Palestinian encroachment. There is nothing Zionist about Eisenkot other than the fact that he too is a former army general, which makes him a perfect candidate to blunder and sabotage Zionism as have so many of his predecessors who came to the premiership from the army. That Israelis have not yet learned that lesson only shows how entrenched the conceptzia still is in the minds of so many Jews. Instead of a commission of inquiry all these people should look in the mirror. Ben-Gvir may not be the most flattering political leader around, but he does have a solid backing in the population and for good reason.