The dust is beginning to settle a week after Israel’s first national election since Hamas’s attack on October 7, 2023, and the war Israel waged on Gaza in response. Neither Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu nor his opponents won the 61 parliamentary seats needed to govern.

Now the fate of the next government hinges on a less-discussed part of the Israeli electorate: Arab citizens, who voted in record numbers and whose parties have emerged with more leverage than ever before. They are not to be confused with the roughly 5.5 million Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, who live under Israeli control but are not citizens and cannot vote in national elections.

Although Israel has become a fault line in both American parties, with Democrats split over arms sales and whether to call the war in Gaza a genocide, and Republicans over whether Israel pulled the United States into war with Iran, these were not the central issues in the recent election.

Voters and candidates alike treated the election as a referendum on Netanyahu himself, who has governed Israel for most of the past 17 years and is currently on trial for corruption. And Netanyahu did lose support in this election: His right-wing and religious coalition fell from 64 of the Knesset’s 120 seats in 2022 to 53, while 67 seats went to parties that ran against him. 

Nineteen of those 67 opposition seats were won by two Arab parties, Ra’am and the Joint List, on a historic surge in turnout among Arab citizens of Israel. Arab parties had held just 10 seats after the last election.

But most of Israel’s Jewish parties have long treated a governing coalition that depends on Arab votes as taboo. Netanyahu spent the campaign portraying Ra’am and Joint List politicians as supporters of terrorism, and several of his Jewish opponents promised to never govern with them. Whether the four Jewish-led opposition parties that call themselves the “change bloc” will break that promise is now the central political question hanging over Israel — with major implications for Arab and Jewish citizens alike, and for what kind of country they share.

“There’s been a fair amount of commentary from American Jewish groups that over a million Arab citizens can vote, and that’s true, but the big asterisk is it matters only if those votes are taken seriously and if Arabs are treated as potential partners in a coalition,” Ilan Goldenberg, the chief policy officer for J Street, a liberal pro-Israel group founded as a counterweight to AIPAC, told me. “Otherwise it’s a pretty empty symbol, and it says something else about Israeli society and Israeli politics.”

Polling suggests most change bloc voters would accept a government that relied on Ra’am, if not the Joint List, whether inside the coalition or backing it from outside in exchange for policy commitments. Their leaders have been more cautious, though, partly because most Jewish Israelis still oppose an Arab-Jewish coalition and the politicians worry about losing those voters in the next election. Critics see that caution as the problem: Rather than try to bring the Israeli public along, the Jewish opposition leaders campaigned on rejecting an alliance they might need to form any kind of government at all.

It’s a pivotal moment for supporters of a liberal, democratic Israel, for those pushing sanctions and boycotts — some of whom want an end to Israel as a Jewish state — and for the roughly 900,000 Arab citizens who turned out to vote for urgent improvements in their daily lives. The next few months will decide who governs the country, whether Arab voters get real influence over policy or become further marginalized, whether pressure on Israel from abroad grows or fades, and whether anything changes for the Palestinians it rules.

Why Arab voters showed up

For Arab voters, this election was different in two ways. The Arab parties were more united than ever on a single priority — getting rid of Netanyahu — even if it meant working with Zionist parties whose vision of a Jewish state they’ve long opposed. And calls to boycott the vote, which Islamist and Palestinian nationalist groups within Israel’s Arab community have pushed in past elections on the grounds that voting legitimizes the state, were far more muted this time around. 

The prime motivating factor for Arab voters was Netanyahu’s coalition itself, the most right-wing government in Israel’s history. Its national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, who was once convicted of inciting racism after displaying a sign reading “Expel the Arab enemy,” has overseen the police while organized crime has killed record numbers of Arab citizens. Homicides in Arab communities more than doubled between 2022 and 2025, and police solved just 12 percent of them in the first half of this year. Netanyahu’s finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, who has said there is “no such thing as a Palestinian people,” also froze hundreds of millions of shekels promised to Arab towns, arguing the money would reach criminals. In 2025, Britain and four other countries sanctioned both men for inciting violence against Palestinians.

“The feeling is the state has completely failed to address criminal violence,” Yousef Munayyer, a Palestinian citizen of Israel and the head of the Palestine/Israel program at the Arab Center Washington DC, told me. “Brutal murders go uninvestigated and unsolved, and in many corners there’s a belief that the Israeli intelligence services are intentionally turning a blind eye.” 

Hassan Jabareen, the executive director of Adalah, a legal advocacy group for Palestinian citizens of Israel, told me the Arab parties have been deliberately keeping their demands to things an anti-Netanyahu government could practically deliver, like fighting crime, ending the demolition of Bedouin homes in southern Israel, and stopping settler violence in the West Bank. 

“We are not going to say to end the occupation, we are not going to ask for withdrawal from Syria,” Jabareen said. “Those issues, we know that they won’t agree with us, and the right-wing will use it against them, and they themselves won’t agree.”

Though Ra’am and the Joint List did not make Gaza central to their campaigns, Jabareen said the national election was a rare opportunity for Arab voters to express their anger at the war, something they’ve been heavily barred from protesting over the last three years. He added that Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank have been “happy and proud” of the record turnout of Arab citizens.

The choice facing Gadi Eisenkot

The “change bloc” is an alliance of four Zionist parties with little in common beyond wanting Netanyahu gone. Its leader is Gadi Eisenkot, a former army chief who sat in Netanyahu’s war cabinet after October 7, lost a son in Gaza, and quit the government over its handling of the war. His new centrist party won the most seats of the four. The others are a party led by two former prime ministers, the settler-right hawk Naftali Bennett and the centrist Yair Lapid, and Yair Golan’s party, the last of Israel’s Zionist left. The fourth is Avigdor Lieberman’s, hawkish on security and built on secular Russian-speaking immigrants who want the ultra-Orthodox out of government.

The four were split on Arab parties during the campaign. Golan was the only leader explicitly open to governing with them. Eisenkot set four conditions for any coalition partner, including recognizing Israel as a Jewish and democratic state and Hamas as a terrorist group, and said in September that no Arab party met them. (Arab leaders and many critics saw these conditions as a way to shut Arabs out without saying so.) Bennett, who in 2021 led the first governing coalition ever to include an independent Arab party, said this time he wanted only Zionist parties in government, and Lieberman, who sat in that same 2021 coalition, also ruled out relying on Arab parties again.

Ori Kol, a progressive campaigner who worked for Golan’s left-wing party, told me most Jewish opposition voters “were shocked” on election night, expecting the change bloc to win more seats.

“What people really expected is that Netanyahu voters would not turn out as they did, because the logic was after three years of war, two failed wars against Iran, attacking Qatar, the sanctions, and the incredible physical, emotional and economic toll on the country every Israeli living here has experienced, that Netanyahu would pay some sort of cost,” he said. And while Netanyahu’s coalition did lose about a dozen seats compared to 2022, his party still did better than expected, beating the final polls from three major Israeli broadcasters.

So what is the resistance to forming a Jewish-Arab government? Part of it is plain prejudice, a refusal to accept Arab parties as legitimate partners in governing a Jewish state. Arab parties have supported or joined an Israeli government only twice, briefly, in the 1990s and in 2021, and both times the Jewish parties involved treated it as a one-off they’d rather not repeat. Both times, too, the Arab parties were just a handful of votes at the margin, while this time they would represent nearly a third of the coalition. 

A vocal liberal minority of Israelis say that’s exactly the change the country is overdue for. In the week since the election, thousands have rallied to demand their leaders form a Jewish-Arab government. Some activists organized a pressure campaign outside Eisenkot’s home, while others have signed petitions, including one led by writers and artists, and another by Israeli healthcare professionals.

The other main hurdle, which can be hard to disentangle from bigotry, is electoral fear. Jewish opposition leaders worry that a Jewish-Arab coalition would be fragile from the start, and that if it collapsed in the near future, they would pay the price in the next election. Israelis vote on security above all, and Netanyahu leverages those concerns shamelessly. Two days before this past election, for example, he posted on X an AI-generated image of a mushroom cloud over Tel Aviv, warning of a second Holocaust if he lost. On election night he warned that it was “forbidden” to form a government that relies on anti-Zionist Arab parties. (This didn’t stop Netanyahu himself from negotiating with Ra’am in 2021, when he needed its votes.)

Ra’am, for its part, has spent the last few months trying to make itself an easier partner for Zionist parties to accept. In August its leader, Mansour Abbas, put a Jewish former deputy security minister in the No. 2 slot on the party’s electoral slate, and a few months earlier Ra’am cut its formal ties to the religious council that had guided its decisions, to show it answers to no one but its voters. Abbas has also repeatedly condemned the October 7 attack.

The Joint List is more nationalist, and one of its party leaders was forced out of the race in October over an article he published the day after October 7, calling the attack an “important historical event.” That leader has since said his language was badly worded and he did not mean support for it. The Joint List may not want to be formally in the coalition anyway. Its leaders have said they’d rather support an Eisenkot government from the outside, which would let them push for concessions on crime and budgets without having to share responsibility for the coalition’s decisions on Gaza and elsewhere.

For now, the Arab parties are signaling they don’t want to drive a hard bargain with Jewish leaders given the risk of Netanyahu staying in power. Over the weekend, one of the Joint List’s leaders said his party would back Eisenkot’s choice for Knesset speaker when the new parliament convenes on November 10. “We want to be part of the correction, part of the hope,” he said, adding that his party would “swallow frogs” to get things done. The Joint List’s chair also said the party was “truly ready” to help build a majority in the coming weeks. Opposition leaders have reportedly been in contact with both Joint List officials and Abbas. 

Eisenkot, for his part, posted a statement over the weekend that read as tailored to exactly that arrangement, Ra’am inside and the Joint List outside. He repeated the four conditions he set during the campaign and wrote that “the door to the government we establish will be open to any elected official who accepts these principles.” But he also described the state he wants as “Jewish, democratic, liberal and egalitarian,” a word choice seemingly aimed at Arab citizens. And he said partners could satisfy his national-service condition through “civilian service,” not just the army, a voluntary version of which most Arab citizens tell pollsters they’d support.

The sticking point is Eisenkot’s demand that all partners declare Hamas a terrorist organization, something Abbas has repeatedly said he considers a risk to his life and his family’s. Hamas has a record of killing Palestinians accused of collaborating with Israel, and Abbas has faced death threats before.

But over the weekend Abbas signaled, according to Channel 12, that Eisenkot’s conditions need not keep Ra’am out of a government, which suggests the two sides may be able to negotiate a compromise. 

What a Jewish-Arab coalition means for Israel’s friends and critics

For supporters of a liberal, democratic Israel, bringing Arab parties into government would signal that Arab citizens have a say in who governs the country, and undercut the claim that they are shut out of power. Whether that proves true depends on what those parties actually get, in cabinet posts and in policy commitments.

Still, Israel’s democracy stops at the Green Line, the boundary that separated Israel from the West Bank before the 1967 war. More than 3 million Palestinians on the other side of it live under Israeli control with no vote in the government that rules them, and the same is true of the 2 million in Gaza. No election inside Israel changes that.

After last Tuesday’s election, most major American Jewish organizations released statements praising Israel’s democracy, citing its high turnout as proof. For example, AIPAC, which did not return requests for comment, praised turnout as reflecting Israel’s “vibrant democracy and rich diversity.” The Jewish Federations of North America cheered Israel for its “deep commitment to democratic principles and civic participation.”

J Street and New Jewish Narrative were exceptions, with J Street’s statement calling on the Jewish opposition to form a government with the Arab parties. New Jewish Narrative said Arab citizens “must be allowed a full voice in what comes next.”

Munayyer, of the Arab Center Washington DC, has little patience for the democracy talk at this moment. “People who are using this opportunity to talk about Israeli democracy, they’re not serious people,” he told me. Palestinian citizens did win historic numbers, but if the millions who live under Israeli control could actually vote, “they’d probably have 60 seats, not 19.” That, he said, is what makes it apartheid, noting South Africa held regular elections, too.

J Street’s Goldenberg was clear that a coalition with Arab parties would not by itself be a reason to ease pressure on Israel. The United States, he said, should decide what’s in its own national interest and respond when an Israeli government acts against it, whether on settler violence or on Gaza. But he argued that most Democrats have not given up on Israel. “I think the overwhelming majority of Democrats are not in a position of viewing Israel as irredeemable,” he told me. “What they want is a change in behavior.” 

A government that depended on 19 Arab seats, he added, would be the clearest possible signal that there’s potential for change. “I can’t think of any single action the Israeli opposition could take that would buy Israel more goodwill,” Goldenberg said. “And I can’t think of anything that would further confirm for Democrats that this is not an Israel we can work with than a failure to try.”

Hadar Susskind, the president of New Jewish Narrative and a dual citizen who flew back to vote, doubted American Jews would have much influence over the forthcoming coalition talks. But if a new government forms, he told me, liberal Zionist groups like his see “a lot of positive opportunity” to work in both directions, pushing the new government to deliver real change and Congress to engage with it and hold it to account.

That possibility, a repaired relationship between Israel and the United States, is exactly what many of Israel’s staunchest critics are worried about. The Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement’s official statement on the election called Western attention to it a “desperate attempt” to rehabilitate Israel as a democracy and pin Gaza war crimes on Netanyahu alone. For BDS supporters and many other anti-Zionists, engaging with any Israeli government, however it’s composed, normalizes a state they deem illegitimate.

The journalist Mehdi Hasan, who runs the outlet Zeteo, made a narrower version of the same argument, saying his worry throughout the election has been that “political and media elites” will use it to push for a “reset” that could improve Israel’s standing in global public opinion. The push to condition military aid and sanction settlements gained ground around the world largely because of Netanyahu and his far-right ministers, and a new government could make those efforts harder to sustain even if Israel’s policies on the ground barely shift.

The paths from here

What would a Jewish-Arab government actually change? Natan Sachs, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute in Washington, flatly rejected the idea that an Eisenkot government would be no different from Netanyahu’s. It’s true that both want Hamas gone and Iran boxed in, and that neither is going to offer the Palestinians a state anytime soon. But Eisenkot, Sachs told me, would be slower to use force, would treat Arab citizens as part of the country rather than a threat, and would reverse the damage Netanyahu has done to the courts and the civil service. 

There is enormous pressure to reach a deal rather than go back to the polls.

Palestinian citizens turned out in huge numbers to make a former IDF chief prime minister, he said, “because they see the difference, so I would defer to them.” A coalition with Arab parties wouldn’t end the occupation or freeze settlements, but it would take the West Bank away from Smotrich and Ben-Gvir, the two ministers who’ve pushed hardest for annexation.

Even a short-lived Jewish-Arab coalition would matter, Jabareen of Adalah told me. “Even if it’s just for one or one and a half years, they can do a lot of things,” he said, pointing to forming a state commission of inquiry into the security failures before October 7, repealing Netanyahu’s judicial overhaul, and appointing Supreme Court justices. Beyond that, Arab leaders want to be inside the government to make sure its budgets reach their communities, with more money to fight violence and invest in construction and jobs.

Even before a governing coalition forms, the Jewish opposition parties can work with Ra’am and the Joint List in parliament, which convenes on November 10. Together they hold 67 of 120 seats, enough to pass laws and make appointments even without controlling the government. The first test will be replacing Netanyahu’s handpicked speaker, who controls what comes to a vote, which everyone in the opposition wants.

Almost any governing coalition will require some of the Jewish opposition leaders to break a campaign promise or two. The experts I interviewed were divided on how much that practically matters at this stage, and several noted it would hardly be the first time an Israeli politician had reneged. Eisenkot could also turn to the ultra-Orthodox parties, though that would likely mean compromising on the military draft exemptions his whole alliance campaigned against. President Donald Trump and Israeli President Isaac Herzog may also push for a so-called unity government with Eisenkot and Netanyahu. Whatever Eisenkot chooses, there is enormous pressure to reach a deal rather than go back to the polls, because few expect Arab citizens or the Israelis who flew in from abroad to turn out the same way in a repeat election, and a lower turnout would likely favor Netanyahu.

Kol, the campaigner who worked for Golan’s party, said what the moment requires is courage. 

“Centrist leaders have shown an alarming amount of passivity,” he told me. “There’s been a lack of willingness to carry people and lead.”

Source: Vox.