Israel’s Election Changes the Arithmetic, Not the Region’s Dilemmas

Israelis went to the polls on Tuesday, for the first time since the Hamas-led attacks of October 2023 and came away with a result that pleases nobody. Neither Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu nor his challenger, the former military chief Gadi Eisenkot, got anywhere near the 61 seats needed to govern a 120-seat Knesset. Partial counts put Netanyahu’s bloc at 54, seven short; Eisenkot’s bloc and the Arab parties together reached 66. Turnout was about 77.7 percent, the highest for a Knesset vote in 27 years. Official results are due November 4. A hung parliament is the headline. The more worrying part is what it leaves behind: a region that expected a decisive Israeli mandate has been given a waiting room, and the waiting may prove more dangerous than a clear win for either side.

The arithmetic is brutal. Eisenkot has refused to serve under Netanyahu, even in a rotation deal, so a unity government looks remote. The other route is hardly smoother. Yair Golan, who leads the Democrats, wants the opposition to build a government with Arab-party backing, an idea that much of the Jewish electorate has treated as untouchable for decades. Netanyahu, for his part, insists his bloc holds a decisive majority among Jewish and Zionist voters, which is a claim about one slice of the electorate rather than about the Knesset. Expect a long caretaker period. There is precedent: after the 2022 vote Netanyahu needed 58 days to assemble a coalition. Markets, never patient, have already reacted. Israeli bonds and the shekel both sold off on Wednesday.

Look past the noise, though, and analysts who agree on little else tend to agree on this: whoever governs, Israel’s strategic posture will move far less than its personnel. A pre-election assessment from the RANE Network argued that any government would put the same things first (stopping Hamas and Hezbollah from rearming, keeping freedom of action in Syria and Yemen, and halting Iran’s nuclear and missile programs). Regional policymakers and analysts quoted by GV Wire reached a similar view; the election may swap the leader but not the strategy, with Iran still the main adversary and force still the preferred instrument.

Where the two camps differ is in appetite for risk. RANE judged that Iran is the file on which the result matters most, with Netanyahu more inclined to act alone and Eisenkot to work more closely with Washington. That should not be mistaken for softness. Eisenkot backs military action against Iran’s nuclear program if it comes to that, although in recent weeks he has described regime change in Tehran as something force cannot achieve. NBC News noted that a Netanyahu win could see the war in Iran, which he and Trump launched together, flare up again. For the Gulf, and for anyone who buys oil, the real question is not who sits in the prime minister’s chair but how soon someone sits there with the authority to decide on escalation, and to answer for it.

Gaza shows the price of drift most plainly. ABC News observed that the leading candidates barely mentioned it, and that none offered a plan beyond Trump’s peace proposal. The Atlantic Council reports that Board of Peace officials have been explaining away Israel’s refusal to accept a phased disarmament plan, and the deployment of an International Stabilization Force, by pointing to the campaign. Fair enough, if sincere. But the campaign is over and the excuse has outlived it. A caretaker government can barely sign off on concessions; a brittle coalition will not want to. Meanwhile each week without an answer leaves Gaza’s governance undefined, hands armed groups time to regroup, and keeps the Trump plan a document rather than a reality on the ground. Washington can no longer treat Israeli coalition-building as someone else’s domestic affair. Whether its own plan survives depends on it.

Saudi normalization, the great prize of the last few years, looks no closer whoever forms the government. RANE concluded that Riyadh wants a credible path to a Palestinian state before anything else, and that neither Netanyahu nor Eisenkot is likely to reverse course on settlements or on operations in Gaza and the West Bank. The Middle East Institute warns that a renewed slide into fighting in Gaza, Lebanon, Iran or the West Bank would push any opening further away. The Atlantic Council is blunter still: it calls progress on normalization inconceivable while settler violence goes on.

The Gulf capitals are watching closely, and not without preferences. Sanam Vakil of Chatham House told Semafor that most of them would welcome a Netanyahu defeat, which she said could open some diplomatic space on Gaza and the West Bank. She also cautioned, in the same breath, that a new government need not change course on Iran or the Palestinians. A different cast might improve the tone. It might not touch the substance.

So what should outsiders do? Not wait, for a start. Washington could use the gap to lock in whatever can be agreed without a new Israeli government (humanitarian access, say, and the technical groundwork for stabilization). Gulf states and Europe should resist treating the next cabinet as a blank page; as RANE put it, it will be judged on outcomes in Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon, not on who holds the premiership. And everyone ought to plan for turbulence. A coalition resting on thin margins, whether on the right or leaning on Arab parties, will be exposed to defections and brinkmanship, which is an awkward setting in which to manage a nuclear-threshold Iran.

None of this is beyond dispute. Netanyahu’s supporters say the vote confirms a lasting right-of-centre majority among Jewish voters, and that a hung parliament reflects the quirks of the electoral system rather than any loss of faith in his security record. Some critics on the right go further and fault him for not finishing the job against Iran and Hamas, as ABC’s reporting noted. Others hold that deadlock is itself a sign of democratic health, and that Israel’s security establishment supplies continuity whatever the politics. The numbers, too, are provisional; they could move once special ballots, military votes included, are counted. On one point, at least, there is little to argue about: the region will not wait for Israel to finish counting.