Israel’s election pits the right against itself, as Netanyahu and Eisenkot compete within the same ideological orbit over coalition arithmetic, Haredi conscription, and who can better defend Jewish statehood.
Netanyahu Coalition Talks Expose Deeper Contest
With a week to go before Israel’s 27 October election, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his principal challenger, Gadi Eisenkot, are competing for the authority to govern a state whose Jewish identity neither contests. Their camps remain short of a parliamentary majority. Yet the political deadlock is already prompting discussion of arrangements both sides had presented to voters as unacceptable.
Recent polls put the prime minister’s bloc and the Zionist opposition close to a tie, with neither securing the 61 seats needed for a majority in the 120-member Knesset. Another election remains possible, especially while opposition leaders reject governing partnerships with Palestinian parties.
The struggle over who can assemble a coalition is sharpening a more fundamental competition: who can best defend Jewish security and administer the Jewish state.
Understanding that contest requires looking at the transformation of Israeli society, Suleiman Bisharat, director of the Yabous Center, tells The Cradle.
That shift toward the right took hold roughly a decade ago, rather than emerging only during the past two or three years. The electorate has continued moving toward the right and far right, narrowing the political ground on which the main contenders compete.
For Bisharat, the claim that Netanyahu represents the right while Eisenkot stands outside it misreads this transformation. Netanyahu represents the far right or extreme right; Eisenkot also belongs to the right and far right. Their rivalry concerns who can take a harder line on Jewish identity and the principles underpinning the state.
The right competes with itself
The campaign revolves around the identity of the state, enshrined in the 2018 Nation-State Law, and its religious-national character. These questions concern the future organization of a Jewish religious nation-state, including the relationship between its military, religious institutions, and political leadership.
Bisharat argues that Netanyahu and Eisenkot are competing to make their respective right-wing visions more convincing to far-right parties. Netanyahu brought extremist National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir into his governing coalition after the previous election and is trying to work with the same electoral logic again. The two candidates’ rhetoric, despite their rivalry, remains within the same ideological orbit.
Dr Saad Nimr, a political science professor at Birzeit University, offers a similar assessment. These elections pit the right against the right, he tells The Cradle, with both contenders operating within the right and far right. He sees little substantive disagreement over the nature of the state: both invoke a Jewish and democratic nation-state.
Their dispute centers on its management. Eisenkot regards Netanyahu as an overbearing leader with whom he cannot work, Nimr says. But both pursue broadly the same direction and share the same general ideas.
Opposition to Netanyahu has brought together politicians whose disagreements over coalition partners exceed their differences over the state they seek to govern.
Netanyahu bargains for survival
Netanyahu enters the election under legal and political pressure, while remaining the dominant figure in his camp. His campaign turns the vote into a referendum on national security and the Jewish identity of the state, presenting him as the indispensable guarantor of both. His emphasis on the multi-front “War of Redemption” also serves to minimize his responsibility for the intelligence failures exposed by Operation Al-Aqsa Flood.
Appealing to his religious and nationalist base, Netanyahu uses the unfinished war to deflect scrutiny of his corruption trial and responsibility for 7 October, casting his removal as a threat to the state’s security and Jewish identity.
At the same time, Netanyahu has begun putting distance between himself and Ben Gvir. Likud signed a surplus-vote agreement with Religious Zionism, leaving Ben Gvir’s Jewish Power outside that arrangement. Netanyahu has also said Likud would retain the defense, national security, and justice portfolios, rejecting Ben Gvir’s ministerial demands.
Culture Minister Miki Zohar has gone further, publicly proposing a rotation government with Eisenkot, with Netanyahu serving first. President Isaac Herzog has also pledged to work to prevent another election. These signals leave open the possibility that Netanyahu’s pressure on Ben Gvir serves a second purpose: making room for an agreement with Eisenkot after the vote.
Nimr says Netanyahu may dispense with Ben Gvir if a broader political arrangement offers a better route to power. Much will depend on Likud’s seat count. With divisions running through the prospective coalitions, Netanyahu will calculate how many partners he needs and what he must concede to secure them.
If his bloc falls short, he will try to gather the necessary votes despite his partners’ conditions, including those of the religious parties. Nimr argues that Netanyahu’s overriding objective is a government he heads, even when the price conflicts with the preferences of his own party.
Eisenkot’s security alternative
Eisenkot has emerged as Netanyahu’s strongest challenger. A 16 October Maariv poll put him ahead on suitability for the premiership, with 48 percent support to Netanyahu’s 41 percent, and projected his Yashar party to win 21 seats against Likud’s 18. Other surveys differ in their margins, but repeatedly leave both camps without a governing majority.
Drawing on his tenure as military chief of staff between 2015 and 2019, Eisenkot presents himself as the candidate of security and unity. His program includes a state commission of inquiry into the October failures, a new national security doctrine, and a comprehensive service law covering Haredim and Palestinians with Israeli citizenship. For the Palestinians, the proposed obligation includes national civilian service, rather than universal military enlistment.
His alternative remains firmly within the state’s Zionist framework. He has made recognition of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state, adherence to the Declaration of Independence, and acceptance of service obligations conditions for coalition partners. He has excluded Palestinian parties on that basis.
Netanyahu and Eisenkot agree on preserving the Jewish state and its security doctrine. They disagree over who should lead it, which parties should share power, and who must serve in its armed forces.
The Haredi price of power
Shas and United Torah Judaism, polling at roughly 14–16 seats between them, sit at the sharpest point of disagreement. They remain central to Netanyahu’s coalition calculations, while their opposition to compulsory military service clashes with Eisenkot’s platform.
Their parliamentary weight makes any settlement over conscription inseparable from negotiations over the next government. Netanyahu has repeatedly sought to shield their constituency from the draft to preserve their support.
The legal basis for blanket Haredi exemptions was struck down in 2024. By October 2026, Israeli reporting put the total number of people classified as evading military service at around 110,000, approximately 80 percent of them Haredim.
The widening pool of draft evaders has made the religious parties’ exemptions increasingly difficult to separate from the burdens imposed on serving soldiers and reservists.
In July, military chief Eyal Zamir opposed legislation suspending arrests and enforcement against Haredi draft evaders, warning that it would encourage noncompliance amid personnel shortages.
The law sought seven months of protection for yeshiva students. The courts subsequently struck it down, but enforcement remained stalled, allowing Netanyahu’s religious partners to retain much of the protection they sought.
Bisharat locates the dispute within a society organized around security and the perception of existential danger. Eisenkot demands a more equal distribution of security duties, while Netanyahu treats the Haredim as the “spoiled child,” granting their demands without requiring equivalent military participation. Conscription will consequently be one of the principal bargaining issues after the election.
Nimr says Eisenkot’s insistence on Haredi military service has been clear from the outset, as has the religious parties’ rejection of it. Netanyahu, meanwhile, seeks compromises, including recruiting only 30 percent into noncombat roles. The question is how much the religious parties would accept without abandoning the exemptions their leadership has defended for decades.
If both contenders reject broad exemptions, the Haredi parties will face a difficult choice. They prefer participation in government because it secures budgets for their religious schools and institutions.
A Netanyahu offer that falls short of full conscription could therefore keep them within his camp, even after a campaign marked by disputes over their privileges.
A unity government for the Jewish state
The deadlock has revived discussion of a Netanyahu–Eisenkot unity government. In the 16 October Maariv survey, 55 percent favored unity over another election if the vote produced no decisive result.
Avigdor Lieberman has accused Eisenkot of preparing to rescue Netanyahu again through an arrangement involving Likud and the Haredim. His attacks reflect the fear that the opposition’s campaign to remove Netanyahu could end with its strongest candidate entering a government alongside him. Lieberman has explicitly ruled out joining a Netanyahu-led coalition.
Israel Hayom has reported a proposal for a broad government tied to Washington’s regional plans. Under the reported arrangement, Netanyahu would remain for up to two years to conclude wars and pursue agreements with regional states before retiring. Eisenkot could claim the removal of Ben Gvir and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, an October inquiry, and a halt to the judicial overhaul.
US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee has met Eisenkot and other political contenders – but he publicly denied that Washington was pushing the reported unity arrangement.
Under such an arrangement, Netanyahu would retain the premiership, oversee the next stage of regional negotiations, and claim that his political course had prevailed even after surrendering some of his current allies.
Israel’s political history offers a precedent for bitter electoral rivals sharing power. After the 1984 election, Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Shamir formed a national unity government with a rotating premiership, despite the hostility between their camps.
The absence of comparable personal animosity between Netanyahu and Eisenkot could make an agreement conceivable if both consider the alternatives worse. Netanyahu could sell the bargain as securing another term in power; Eisenkot could claim credit for removing the ministers most closely associated with the government’s excesses.
Nimr remains skeptical. Each presents himself as the leader and resists serving beneath the other. A pact would also threaten Eisenkot’s relationships with opposition partners such as Lieberman.
Even if preserving the Jewish state under perceived existential threat brought the two together, disputes over leadership and coalition terms could quickly undermine the arrangement.
A two-year rotation is conceivable in Nimr’s assessment, but Netanyahu would insist on serving first. Eisenkot has, for his part, publicly rejected rotation and called for one prime minister to serve a full term. Netanyahu’s demand to go first would require Eisenkot to abandon that position before taking office.
Bisharat stresses that the electoral map remains unsettled. Turnout among Palestinian citizens in the territories occupied in 1948 could make it harder for Netanyahu to assemble a majority; lower participation would give him greater room.
Haredi turnout and the fate of smaller lists will also matter. The decisive contest begins after the vote, when the parties must turn their seats into bargaining power and decide which campaign commitments they are prepared to trade for office.
Netanyahu Coalition Talks Change Little for Palestinians
Replacing the prime minister would leave the foundations of the state intact. Netanyahu depends on religious and nationalist allies, while Eisenkot offers military authority and more orderly administration.
A broad unity government could redistribute power among them while preserving the same commitments to Jewish statehood and Israeli security. Excluding the most overtly extremist ministers would allow its architects to advertise a political break while leaving the state’s relationship with Palestinians largely untouched.
Bisharat expects no fundamental transformation in the state’s nature or principles. The right dominates, and its principal contenders compete over who can defend those principles more forcefully. Their confrontation may rearrange the coalition without opening a political alternative for Palestinians.
Nimr similarly argues that the occupying state’s approach to Palestine will endure regardless of the winner. The coalition may change its ministers and its public language, but the electorate is being asked to choose between rival custodians of the same state.
He identifies rejection of Palestinian statehood, claims to the whole Land of Israel, and ethnic cleansing as continuities in that project. For Palestinians, a change of leadership offers little prospect of ending dispossession and military domination.
An Eisenkot government would have to reconcile its service promises with the demands of any Haredi partners. A Netanyahu victory would renew bargaining with the religious and nationalist right.
In either case, the state remains bound to the same formula: Jewish and democratic, with its leaders fighting over the boundaries of those terms while Palestinians remain subject to the power both camps seek to wield.