Israel's Opposition Races to Seize the Speaker's Chair Before Netanyahu Can Break Their Coalition

The 67-seat opposition bloc has the numbers to replace Netanyahu's speaker ally, but not the political cohesion to form a government. Tuesday's swearing-in is a chokepoint — control the agenda or lose the window.

Israel's new 120-seat Knesset is sworn in Tuesday, and the opposition's first target is not the prime minister's office but the speaker's chair. Amir Ohana, a Netanyahu loyalist, currently controls the legislative agenda — meaning he can stall, delay, and sequence votes to protect the incumbent. Replacing him is the precondition for everything else.

Gadi Eisenkot, the former military chief of staff who received the presidential mandate to form a government, may take the speaker role himself. If not, opposition parties have agreed the nominee will come from his Yashar party. The math is straightforward: 67 opposition seats versus 53 for Netanyahu's diminished coalition. The politics are not. The opposition bloc's structural fracture is ethnic and ideological. Palestinian-led parties hold 19 of the 67 seats — over a quarter of the bloc — but several Jewish-Israeli opposition factions have explicitly refused to sit with them or accept their backing for a minority government. Without those 19 seats, the opposition falls below Netanyahu's coalition. This is the contradiction at the heart of the "change" bloc: it needs Palestinian-Israeli voters to win elections but won't share power with their representatives. Avigdor Lieberman, the rightwing opposition leader, is pursuing a flanking maneuver — courting ultra-Orthodox parties away from Netanyahu by dangling flexibility on military draft exemptions. This is a remarkable reversal for a politician who built his brand on universal conscription and hostility toward Haredi privileges. As ultra-Orthodox journalist Arye Erlich wrote: "Has the End of Times arrived?" More than 160 retired security chiefs — former heads of military, intelligence, and police — warned that rightwing activists plan violent disruption of Tuesday's swearing-in ceremony, aiming to physically prevent MKs from entering the building. The Democracy's Protective Wall forum explicitly named the threat: tens of thousands of citizens encouraged to block the democratic transition. Eisenkot has promised "creative and unconventional political acts" to broker a national emergency government, while acknowledging that election promises will need to be broken. The strategic calculus is clear: even a fragile minority government, once installed, is hard to dislodge. As Hebrew University political scientist Gideon Rahat noted, governing — even badly — creates its own momentum. Netanyahu's optimal scenario is delay. Every day without a new government is a day to peel defectors, cut side deals, and exploit the opposition's fault lines. If the mandate process fails entirely, new elections follow — and Netanyahu stays on as caretaker PM. The speaker's chair isn't a symbolic prize; it's the valve that controls how much time Netanyahu has to work.