The second is Moshe Feiglin, one of the most bizarre men in Israeli politics, whose libertarian party Zehut is running on a joint ticket with Bezalel Smotrich’s Religious Zionist Party. Feiglin’s greatest hits include “Every baby in Gaza is an enemy,” “Kill everything that moves,” and, essentially, Hitler was right but about the wrong people. (Likud and the Religious Zionist Party–Zehut have signed a surplus-vote agreement, meaning votes for Netanyahu may end up strengthening Feiglin and Smotrich, and vice versa.)

The opposing bloc of anti-Netanyahu parties is led this time by former Israeli army chief Gadi Eisenkot, who heads the newcomer party Yashar. He is credited with developing the Dahiyeh Doctrine, a military strategy honed in Lebanon and premised on the wholesale destruction of civilian infrastructure in the hope of turning local residents against Hezbollah — foreshadowing the doctrine of annihilation unleashed in Gaza over the past three years.

Eisenkot was party to that, too: He served in Netanyahu’s war cabinet during the deadliest months of Israel’s onslaught, joining almost immediately after October 7 before resigning in June 2024 over the prime minister’s obstruction of a hostage deal.

So what is he offering? Eisenkot has repeatedly vowed that no Palestinian state will arise under his premiership, even attacking Netanyahu for having previously supported a two-state solution. He is in favor of building new Jewish settlements in Area C, the 60 percent of the West Bank under complete Israeli control, and does not rule out construction in the particularly controversial E1 zone. 

In Gaza, Lebanon, and Syria, he wants to keep at least some of the land that Israel has militarily occupied under the outgoing government. And he recently stated that National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir “probably did good things in prisons” — where over 100 Palestinians have died since October 7 as a result of systematic torture, medical neglect, and food deprivation.

The other leaders of Eisenkot’s would-be coalition include former settler council leader Naftali Bennett (head of Together), who wants to annex Area C of the West Bank; Avigdor Liberman (Yisrael Beitenu), Netanyahu’s former defense minister, who declared in November 2023 that “There are no innocents in Gaza”; and Yair Golan (the Democrats), a former deputy military chief, who advocated starving Gaza’s entire population until Hamas released the hostages. (The Reservists–New Economic Party, a new center-right alliance focused on enforcing the draft in Haredi communities and fixing the cost of living, would also likely join the anti-Netanyahu bloc if it manages to cross the electoral threshold.)

What sets these figures apart from the current government, however, is primarily their desire to dial down the volume of global outrage against Israel. 

To that end, Eisenkot has promised to crack down on “Jewish terrorism” in the West Bank (albeit because it is “harming the settlement enterprise”), and would likely seek to advance Trump’s 20-point plan for Gaza where Netanyahu has stalled it. Proposals to expel 2 million Palestinians from the Strip would no longer be on the table. Eisenkot would also halt the government’s assault on Israel’s judiciary, and may pour greater resources into tackling the mafia groups that have been allowed to run rampant within Palestinian communities inside Israel. 

There is just one problem: They do not have the votes.

The most favorable polls are giving the anti-Netanyahu bloc a seat count in the low-to-mid 50s (out of the Knesset’s 120), leaving it around 10 seats short of a majority. Luckily for them, there is an easy way to make up the difference. Unluckily for them, it involves sitting with — or at least relying on the votes of — Arab parties, which the bloc’s leaders have almost unanimously ruled out.

There will be two Arab parties in the next Knesset representing Israel’s Palestinian citizens: the Joint List (polling at around 7-9 seats) and Ra’am (around 5-6 seats). While the Joint List is in every sense a Palestinian political force, Ra’am leader Mansour Abbas has sought to downplay his party’s Palestinian identity, focusing on the fight against organized crime in Arab communities while speaking less about the West Bank and Gaza. He has brought in a Jewish lawmaker as his number two and distanced the party from its roots in the Islamic Movement, hoping to broaden his appeal among the anti-Netanyahu bloc. It has not worked.

In 2021, Ra’am became the first independent Arab party to join an Israeli government, led by Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid. But the move was fraught with tension, and the government imploded after just one year. Upon the government’s collapse, Netanyahu — who had courted Ra’am himself during the previous election campaign — proclaimed that “the experiment failed.” Four years on, with much of Israeli society gripped by a racist fervor that has reached new levels in the wake of October 7, the chances of a repeat appear extremely slim.

Ahead of Tuesday’s vote, Golan, the anti-Netanyahu bloc’s most left-wing leader, has said he would sit with Ra’am but not the Joint List (which would not join a governing coalition anyway). Liberman voted to disqualify both parties from the race altogether, and has repeatedly ruled out sitting with either. Bennett is refusing to sit with them too, while Eisenkot told a closed meeting of Bedouin leaders that he wants to include Ra’am in his government, then denied it, and has subsequently maintained that neither Arab party will be part of his coalition.

There is, however, another option here: a minority government propped up by the votes of Arab parties from outside the coalition, known in electoral parlance as a “safety net.” Such an arrangement would be highly unstable, but it is what enabled Yitzhak Rabin to sign the Oslo Accords into law in the 1990s. The Joint List is willing to play this role if it means toppling Netanyahu, and Eisenkot has hinted that he views this option favorably. But Liberman and Bennett have both dismissed it out of hand.

Barring any major shock in Tuesday’s results, then, neither bloc appears capable of forming a viable government in its current configuration — unless several of these leaders break their promises, which would certainly not be a first for Israeli politics. If they want to avoid triggering another election, both sides will need to get creative.

Election campaign posters featuring National Security Minister and Otzma Yehudit party chairman Itamar Ben Gvir are displayed on a wall in Jerusalem, ahead of Israel’s election, October 21, 2026. (Chaim Goldberg/Flash90)

The most straightforward option would be to try to poach defectors from the opposing bloc. Netanyahu is reportedly eyeing up Bennett’s faction in the event of a deadlock (though Bennett’s campaign centers on enforcing the draft in ultra-Orthodox communities, thus making a coalition with Haredi parties seem implausible), while Eisenkot hopes to lure deserters from Netanyahu’s Likud. But acquiring more than a handful of defectors would be a mammoth task. 

For his part, President Isaac Herzog, who has the unenviable job of overseeing the coalition-building process, is trying to engineer another possibility: a “national unity” government bringing together Netanyahu, Eisenkot, and whichever other parties would join them. A majority of the public favors this over going back to the polls a few months later.

Should Netanyahu conclude that a unity government is his only route to remaining prime minister, even under a rotation agreement with Eisenkot, it would surely appeal to him — especially if he gets the first turn as prime minister and can then collapse the government before having to relinquish power to Eisenkot. Yet while some members of Eisenkot’s party appear open to this scenario, Eisenkot himself has, at least for now, ruled it out unequivocally. Meanwhile, Liberman, who might seem a likely candidate to join a unity government, has declared that he won’t sit with Netanyahu “come hell or high water.”

In short, we’re in for a messy few weeks, or perhaps months, as these various scenarios are gamed out and written off. What remains, if nobody succeeds in assembling a new government, is another election early next year with Netanyahu remaining as caretaker prime minister in the interim.

Crucially, however, there is a lot that can be done with a Knesset majority even without forming a government. If the anti-Netanyahu bloc, the Joint List, and Ra’am together control more than 60 seats after Tuesday, they could vote to replace the Knesset speaker and immediately begin passing legislation independently of the government. 

They could repeal the outgoing government’s judicial overhaul laws; establish a state inquiry commission to investigate the security failings of October 7, which this government has strongly resisted; and even pass a law preventing someone under indictment from serving as prime minister, effectively ending Netanyahu’s political career. 

These plans are already being drawn up, although there are doubts as to whether the bloc can maintain its unity in the face of the inevitable onslaught of pressure from Netanyahu and his acolytes. And without forming a new government, the countdown to the next election will have already begun.