Benjamin Netanyahu's far-right coalition has lost its majority in what many Israelis called the most consequential election in their country's history. The final tally: Netanyahu's bloc took 53 seats, Gadi Eisenkot's opposition grouping won 48, and Palestinian-led parties secured a historic 19 seats — a record high. No bloc reaches the 61-seat Knesset majority alone. The math is simple; the politics are not. The opposition can govern — but only with Palestinian support. The Joint List, led by Yousef Jabareen, has said it cannot join a coalition that backs Israel's military operations in Gaza and southern Lebanon, but has left open the possibility of supporting a minority government through confidence votes. Ra'am, led by Mansour Abbas, has coalition experience — it joined Naftali Bennett's government in 2021, the first time a Palestinian party entered an Israeli coalition, though that pact collapsed after 18 months over disagreements about the occupied West Bank. Eisenkot has not explicitly barred Palestinian parties on racial grounds, but he has laid out conditions for any coalition partner that are politically impossible for them to accept — a distinction without much practical difference. A survey taken as polls closed showed a clear majority of opposition voters support forming a government with Ra'am to unseat Netanyahu. The voters are ahead of their leaders. Netanyahu, meanwhile, has moved immediately to delegitimise the result. He claimed Palestinian-led parties "stolen the election" despite Israeli police and the central elections committee confirming there is no evidence of fraud. Far-right finance minister Bezalel Smotrich called for the arrest of Arab Israeli leaders. President Isaac Herzog rebuked Netanyahu directly, warning against "tarnishing an entire community." Qatar rejected accusations of election interference as "ridiculous and dangerous." The false-fraud narrative is a familiar playbook: during the campaign, Netanyahu repeated the slogan "the right or Palestine" (which rhymes in Hebrew), voters received robocalls falsely claiming Palestinian party leaders had been caught with envelopes of cash, and far-right allies consistently framed the 20% Palestinian population as an enemy within. As the Guardian's Emma Graham-Harrison noted from Tel Aviv, this amounts to "attempting to paint Palestinians as untrustworthy citizens with dual loyalties, a racist trope that also appears in antisemitic attacks." There is precedent for what the opposition faces. In the 1990s, Yitzhak Rabin relied on Palestinian support for a minority government while pursuing a negotiated end to the Israel-Palestine conflict. Palestinian citizens already play outsized roles in Israeli civic life — as medics, security guards, including much of the team at Eisenkot's own election night headquarters. The question Graham-Harrison poses is blunt: "If you trust Palestinian citizens to secure your campaign events, why don't you trust them to be part of your government?" The country now faces weeks of coalition negotiations, rancour, and uncertainty. If the opposition cannot agree on some arrangement — coalition or minority government with Palestinian confidence support — Netanyahu gets a lifeline: either a right-wing coalition cobbled together, or new elections during which he stays on as caretaker prime minister. The voters chose change. Whether their representatives will deliver it depends on whether structural racism or the desire for accountability wins the next round.
