Less than three weeks ago, I set out five scenarios for Israel’s election and argued that the most likely outcome was a stalemate between the pro- and anti-Netanyahu blocs.

Well, it’s a stalemate all right, but one with a twist. With practically all of the ballots now counted, the pro-Bibi camp has 53 Knesset seats—down 15 seats from the current Netanyahu coalition government, and eight short of an outright majority—whereas the Jewish anti-Netanyahu “Change Bloc” managed only an anemic 48. The remaining 19 seats were swept up by the two majority-Arab parties—the Joint List, with 11, and Ra’am, with eight. A substantial third bloc, an Arab Israeli bloc, is perhaps the most significant development to have emerged from the election.

To the credit of Israeli democracy, Tuesday’s election went ahead without significant disruption—the fruit of months of careful planning by the country’s independent Central Elections Committee. Nationally, voter turnout was 78%, the highest in an Israeli election since 1999. The unprecedented surge of Arab-Israeli voter participation (a historic 80% turnout) is especially significant given pre-election fears of attempted voter suppression. This degree of democratic engagement on the part of Israel’s Arab minority represents an unequivocal desire for, and expectation of, inclusion in government that the rest of Israeli society would be wise to listen to and would ignore at its peril.

The election—the first after the four most traumatic years in the country’s modern history—was essentially a referendum on Israel’s core identity, foundational values, and basic functionality as a state. The robustness of its process notwithstanding, its results revealed a broadly troubling picture: The Jewish State is torn, divided against itself, and seemingly unable to come together even in the face of grievous threats to its very existence; threats that Israelis, cocooned in their respective echo chambers, can no longer collectively identify, let alone unite against.

The self-mutilation of Israel’s checks and balances; deteriorating governance; the worst security debacle in eight decades of independent statehood; the refusal to establish an independent commission of inquiry to investigate that debacle; unresolved wars on multiple fronts; suspicions that Netanyahu’s closest aides received thousands from Qatar; soaring cost of living and criminality; mounting international isolation; and the clear and present danger of crippling sanctions—nothing moved the needle. Each tribe voted its identity regardless of government performance.

Given the failure of the Change Bloc to win, it would be tempting to view its leader, the 66-year-old Gadi Eizenkot, as yet another hit-and-run victim twitching on the roadside of the Bibi Autobahn. This would be a mistake—or at least premature. Because it is Eizenkot and his partners’ conduct that will determine Israel’s political path over the coming weeks.

The press will spend the next few days doing what Netanyahu wants most right now, which is to shine the spotlight—adoringly or in seething hatred, it makes no real difference—on Netanyahu himself. Bibi is the most consequential Israeli politician of his generation, but he’s also, for now, the least interesting. The outcome of this election remains wide open and, unlike Eizenkot’s, Netanyahu’s options are crystal clear.

For Netanyahu, stalemate is as good an outcome as he could have realistically hoped for—a win on points in which he remains in the prime minister’s seat and controls the security (and therefore the political) agenda. Netanyahu’s plan is simple: to deny his opponents a functioning government until conditions are ripe to drag Israel to another election. Although he avoided losing Tuesday’s ballot and secured his party, Likud, as the largest single party, Netanyahu knows he will fall short next week, when Israel’s president, Isaac Herzog, summons the leaders of all the parties that made it into the Knesset and asks whom they recommend he should task with trying to form a new government.

Netanyahu will therefore focus on perpetuating the deadlock, preventing defections from his camp, and delegitimizing his opponents. He will try to make it impossible for Eizenkot to rely on Arab Israeli support, while seeking to poach any party or individual politician he can to his own camp. Concurrently, Netanyahu is actively seeking to generate another Trump-backed showdown with Iran that he believes will reshuffle the political deck in his favor by either toppling (or at least further destabilizing) the Iranian regime—or, if things get hairy, forcing one or more parties in Eizenkot’s camp to jump ship in the face of a security emergency and in the name of national unity.

So what will the anti-Netanyahu camp do next? Eizenkot could choose to get ahead of Netanyahu and set the agenda of the coalition negotiations that will now open in Jerusalem. He can do that by calling upon President Trump to bang heads together and compel Bibi to join a broad centrist government that would exclude hardline right-wingers from the ultra-Orthodox and ultranationalist parties.

The electoral arithmetic would support this pathway: national security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir’s party gained only seven Knesset seats, and finance minister Bezalel Smotrich’s gained only six. The two ultra-Orthodox parties, meanwhile, obtained only six and seven seats. President Trump wants a government without Ben-Gvir and Smotrich, whom his circle rightly sees as the drivers of the settler violence against Palestinians in the West Bank. Having actively solicited Trump’s involvement in the campaign, Netanyahu wouldn’t dare tell Trump not to interfere in Israel’s internal affairs if the U.S. president insists on excluding these figures.

Netanyahu’s Wars of Dismantlement

But a pathway to building a new Israeli center wouldn’t have to rely on Netanyahu at all. It is the one Netanyahu believes is unthinkable and has devoted his campaign to making impossible precisely because he fears it so much. The Eizenkot bloc is smaller than Netanyahu’s only if it insists on refusing to accept Arab Israelis as legitimate political interlocutors. Once that barrier is removed, the parties that oppose Netanyahu command 67 Knesset seats—a clear and substantial majority.

In line with the Alice in Wonderland ambience of contemporary Israeli politics, we are now in a reality in which Netanyahu’s bloc is larger but does not have the majority needed to command the legislature or form a government, while Eizenkot’s camp is smaller but can command the legislature and even form a minority government. How can that be? Because the unprecedented surge in Arab voter turnout in Tuesday’s election means that, with the Arab parties, the incoming Knesset has an anti-Netanyahu majority that can begin to legislate immediately, even before a government is formed.

The leaders of the country’s Arab-majority parties will do everything in their (now substantial) power to deny Netanyahu a majority. Mansour Abbas, who leads the Ra’am party, has declared his desire to join a Change Bloc government. The more intransigent Yousef Jabareen, leader of the Joint List alliance of three smaller parties, says he is only prepared to offer conditional outside support. One option for Eizenkot is to have Ra’am join the Change Bloc coalition government and the Joint List support it from outside. Such a minority government would be inherently fragile, and likely short-lived, but it would still be able to take critical steps to roll back Netanyahu’s agenda.

A minority government could, for example, replace the Speaker of the Knesset and the chairs of powerful Knesset committees, and legislate a number of crucial bills—including one to establish a State Commission of Inquiry into the October 7 debacle, one to impose term limits on future prime ministers, and one to prevent politicians under criminal indictment from serving in public office.

Arab Israelis constitute 21% of Israel’s population, their youth is increasingly demanding full membership in a shared Israeliness, and their level of engagement in this election means that, unless the Jews put aside their differences, neither bloc has the numbers to form a viable government without the Arabs.

Netanyahu has built his electoral strategy on convincing Jewish Israelis that their fellow Israeli Arab citizens are a permanent threat to be excluded from the polity they share and are integral to. He has tried to paint Arab Israelis as “anti-Zionists” while coddling ultra-Orthodox Jews who spurn military service and disavow the laws of the Knesset.

But building a shared society for all Israelis is a Zionist endeavor par excellence. On election night Eizenkot declared that “the era of us and them is over.” Over the next few weeks—in the face of tremendous political pressures and a possible war with Iran—Eizenkot will have to decide whether his message of unity was for Jews alone, or for all of Israel.

Amichai Magen is the founding director of the Jan Koum Israel Studies Program at Stanford University’s Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law.

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