probably not. Two of the Arab parties (with 10 seats) refuse to condemn Hamas as terrorists. The third one(Raam, with 7 seats) is a bit more pragmatic and willing to admit that Israel has a right to exist, as long as the government budgets money for the Arab communities.
But all of them( with their 17 seats in total) hate Bibi, and so are willing to help Eisenkot by abstaining when necessary. This is called supporting Eisenkot “from outside the coalition”.
So it is theoretically possible for Eisenkot to become prime minister without a majority of 61. But it is a very weak way to govern.
When Abbas worked with Bennet and Lapid he also made it clear that he’d be open to working with Bibi if needed and if Bibi was willing to give him the best deal.
But Bibi’s coalition includes the far right and the ultra Orthodox both of whom might make such a coalition difficult to build.
So if Bibi gets 50 votes, and Eisenkot gets 52, and all the Arab parties abstain, Eisenkot becomes prime minister, but has trouble getting anything done? Do I have that right?
Not more trouble than he’d have getting anything done anyways; even if they’re in a coalition with him and voted him in as Prime Minister, the Arab parties can go against him on any given vote.
It’s a more precarious position to be a minority PM because at any moment the Arab parties could join the Netanyahu block in a Vote of No Confidence and kick the other PM to the curb.
They could do that even if they did vote for him as PM, but then it’s a reversal of their prior position, so the bar is higher than if they never voted for him.
it’s an uphill climb, but it’s doable. Bibi will work on the opposition parties, and may succeed in convincing some them to switch sides. There are a LOT of contradictions on all sides.
For the anti-Bibi side:
Eisenkot will need to keep some of the Arab vote. But doing so may lose him one of his partners (Liberman, with 9 seats) who refuses to associate with Arab parties, due to their support for Hamas.
Also, the one Arab party which might join Eisenkot has only 7 seats, so it still doesn’t give him 61
For the pro-Bibi side:
Bibi needs to attract 11 defectors from Eisenkot or Liberman’s parties. But they have all sworn that they won’t join with the Haredi(ultra-Orthodox) parties. And Bibi gives the ultra-Orthodox full control of all their demands, in order to keep himself in power.
We are in for a very messy two-month long period of total chaos.
My prediction: Bibi wins.
Eisenkot will fail to build a coalition, so Bibi will get his opportunity in December.. Trump will re-start the war in Iran, whose missiles will do very serious damage to Israel.So due to the national emergency, Eisenkot will cave in and agree to support Bibi for prime minister..
It’s up to the specific motion. Usually you’d want to pass a motion to replace the PM with a different one, but that would require 61 Knesset members who support your new PM. Otherwise they’d be voting to hold a new election.
Channel 14’s exit polls somehow show Bibi’s coalition at 60, 10 reps higher than everyone else’s projection. Channel 14 is pretty much the Bibi channel.
He’s about to give a speech. I’m half expecting him to claim victory.
There are multiple reports that Netanyahu had made some kind of promise to the United States, potentially Trump himself, that the next government will not include Ben Gvir (and potentially Smotrich as well, but reporting is less clear on that). Of course, without those two, Netanyahu has no hope of forming the government.
For any other Prime Minister, a way to square that Circle would be to step down as leader of his party. If Netanyahu was gone, and Likud had real politicians other than him, he could give up leadership and let what remains of the Likud form a coalition with the moderate parties. There are plenty of parties that would be willing to do that if the Likud was led by literally anyone else. They could turn on the Orthodox pass a draft bill with overwhelming support, kick the religious Zionists to the curb, and avoid the political third rail that is working with anti-Zionist parties.
But Netanyahu isn’t any other Prime Minister and the Likud isn’t a real party anymore, as anyone competent enough to pose a threat to Bibi has been removed. So like the Arab parties denouncing Hamas, it will never happen.
And unless I missed it, there hasn’t been a speech yet
Much of Netanyahu’s coallition’s losses come from the Haredim. There were two new Haredi parties this year, something that’s a huge shakeup to the political status quo because in the past the Haredi leadership kept very close control of how their members voted.
One party ate at the Haredi right flank. It’s called Color Black, named after a hotline called by Haredim to warn their compatriots about arrests of draft dodgers. It’s basically an ICE hotline (that sounds like a hotline you call to report immigrants, I mean those community organized hotlines you see posters advertising sometimes) for Haredim. It wants a total draft exemption for Haredim.
The other party took a more moderate chunk out of the Haredim. Called Haredi Public, they’re basically the party for people who are Orthodox but are more moderate as far as participating in day to day Israeli society.
It looks nearly certain that neither one of these two parties met the minimum threshhold to sit Knesset members. But the big Haredi parties lost a significant chunk of the seats they had in the last election.
What’s ironic is that they made a big stink over the draft issue in order to force Netanyahu into a tough spot, but in the end, their gamble seems to have failed, and their own parties suffered the worst electoral consequences for their actions.
It seems to me that a fair compromise might be to allow the Haredi to continue to avoid the draft, but also to remove the right to vote from anyone not eligible for the draft. That’d allow them to maintain their separation from worldly matters (indeed, enhance that separation), while removing their corrupting influence from government.
Has anyone proposed that?
From my outsider’s perspective, that seems highly implausible, in the current climate.
It appears to be a considerable exaggeration to say that the Joint List has refused to denounce Hamas.
There are three parties in the Joint List. One is Hadash, which basically used to be the Israeli Communist Party. AFAIK they are the only party whose rules specify that their leadership must be equally divided between Jews and Arabs, which is cool. Almost all their votes come from Arabs these days, though.
Ta’al is a secularist Arab nationalist party. Both Hadash and Ta’al call for a two-State solution as per the Oslo accords, and both of them have denounced Hamas.
The other one is Balad, another Arab nationalist party which seems more problematic.,They call for a one-State solution, and their leader did in fact refuse to explicitly denounce Hamas, and was accordingly banned from the ballot by the Elections Committee. Presumably the candidates who are still on the ballot have made some sort of anti-Hamas statements, but a high level of suspicion seems warranted here.
The 18th guy on the JL list is Balad, so if they win the projected 18 seats there will be five Balad members in the Knesset. If they win only 17, there will be four, and if they somehow win 20 there will be six. So that leaves 13 or so Joint List MKs who seem like potentially acceptable coalition partners for the liberal Zionist parties.