Israel’s anti-Netanyahu bloc built its own walls. Now it needs gates
A coalition Rashomon
Since election night, everyone has been reading the same numbers differently. Netanyahu’s bloc fell from 64 seats to 53. The four Zionist opposition parties, known as the Change bloc, won 48, and the Arab parties won a record 19. Together, the last two make 67: a majority on paper.
Yet even after President Herzog’s consultations, the path from 67 to a government is anything but clear. Gadi Eisenkot won the recommendations of all 67, including Arab parties. But Herzog put off naming a candidate until Sunday, citing “mutual vetoes between the blocs and within the blocs themselves.” Yisrael Beytenu, which backed Eisenkot, had already told the president it would not rely on either Arab or Haredi parties.
Some see a majority ready to replace the government. Others see a Jewish majority that does not exist, a chance for the Arab parties to play kingmaker, or the case for a national unity government. Call it a coalition Rashomon. Two sets of findings from my research help explain it. The first comes from a long-running study that has surveyed many of the same Jewish Israelis again and again since 2016, so that we can see how their views change, most recently in a pre-election round of 1,004 respondents this fall. The second comes from the 2026 wave of the Index of Arab–Jewish Relations in Israel, which Sammy Smooha founded in 2003 and which he, Nuhad Ali and I now conduct at the Frieze Center for Shared Society at the University of Haifa.
Who filled the streets in 2023
The first set of findings shows that the anti-Netanyahu bloc has had walls since its birth. Those walls are rooted in how Jewish Israelis imagine their nation. Borrowing an approach that the sociologists Bart Bonikowski and Paul DiMaggio developed to map American nationalism, I asked survey respondents what being Israeli means to them. How close do they feel to the country? Who, in their eyes, is truly Israeli: must one be Jewish, born here, speak Hebrew? What makes them proud, from the army and Israeli science to Israeli democracy and its treatment of all citizens? Is Israel better than most countries, and should it be backed even when it is wrong? Do the Jewish people have a special role in history? Is Jewish history, above all, a story of persecution? Their answers fall into five distinct visions of the nation and of the kind of state Israel should be.
At one end are critical nationalists, about 8 percent in spring 2023, who hold an inclusive view of who belongs. They reject national particularism and embrace a more universalist view of membership and rights: being Israeli, in their eyes, is not reserved for Jews or for those born in the country, and rights should not depend on belonging to the national group. They take only moderate pride in Israel’s institutions and policies, and they reject claims of national superiority or of Jewish cultural exceptionalism. Most identify with the left.
At the other end are two groups that hold the most particularistic vision of the nation. Both believe strongly in Jewish exceptionalism and in a history of collective persecution, and both tie rights to membership in the national group, the core of what the political scientist Yoav Peled and the sociologist Gershon Shafir call an ethno-national discourse of citizenship. Ardent nationalists (22 percent) set demanding conditions for being Israeli, take great pride in nearly every aspect of the state and see Israel as superior to other nations. Most voted for Likud or the religious right. Ethno-religious nationalists (9 percent) define belonging almost entirely by Jewishness. Their pride in the state is more selective, centered on the army, national history and science, and most voted for the Haredi or religious-right parties.
In between sit the two largest groups, ethno-republicans (28 percent) and ethnocentrics (33 percent). Both are strongly attached to the country and moderately exclusionary, but ethnocentrics are stricter about who belongs and more convinced that the Jewish people are culturally unique. Together they carry what Peled called an ethno-republican civic discourse. It blends two ideas: that the state belongs to the Jewish people, and that rights and status should follow one’s contribution to the common good, so that not only individuals but also groups that contribute more should enjoy greater entitlements. In practice, this discourse protects the individual rights of all citizens, reserves collective rights for Jews alone, and ranks citizens and groups by a hierarchy of “good citizenship,” with those who serve and sacrifice at the top.
Those two middle groups carried the protest movement against the judicial overhaul. In a survey I fielded at the height of the protests, published in Israeli Sociology, more than two-thirds of protest participants were ethno-republicans or ethnocentrics. Critical nationalists, the carriers of a liberal vision, made up only about a quarter.
This map does not follow the familiar left–right line. In spring 2023, 63 percent of my respondents placed themselves on the right or moderate right, yet 46 percent opposed the overhaul. Much of the opposition came from people who did not call themselves leftists, many of whom had never voted for the left. Ethno-republicans and ethnocentrics are well represented in the center and on the moderate right.
The shift also reshaped the right. About a third of the 2022 Likud voters in these two groups had abandoned the party by April 2023. Loyal to the blend of nationalism and liberalism on which the Likud was founded, they no longer saw it as their home. Because the survey follows the same people over time, I can see that many never returned, despite October 7 and the wars that followed. That exodus is part of why Netanyahu’s bloc lost its majority. For Likud itself, voters moving between parties within the bloc softened the loss somewhat.
The protests put the ethno-republican vision on full display. Crowds of overwhelmingly Jewish citizens rallied every Saturday night, waving national flags and chanting “Shame!” and “Democracy!” Giant prints of the Declaration of Independence hung from buildings. Reclaiming the flag expressed a sense that the government had broken an imagined founding contract: a Jewish state, a democracy that protects citizens’ freedom to live as they choose, and a share of resources and status that follows one’s contribution to the country.
Two languages were woven together. One was liberal, voiced most forcefully by women marching in the red robes of The Handmaid’s Tale against religious coercion. The other was republican, voiced by groups who see themselves as carrying the country’s security and economic burden: combat soldiers, reservist pilots, veterans of elite intelligence units, high-tech workers. Peled and Shafir trace this republican strand to a tradition that measures good citizenship by contribution to the community. As sociologists Baruch Kimmerling and Uri Ben-Eliezer have shown — the latter in The Making of Israeli Militarism, a landmark study that changed how we understand the army’s place in Israeli society — military service, especially in combat and command roles, has been its highest expression since the state’s early days.
The liberal minority, whose central demand was an end to military rule in the West Bank under the slogan “There is no democracy with occupation,” often held small satellite rallies at the edges of the big demonstrations.
Two walls
The ethno-republican vision built two walls. One stood against the Haredi parties. Protesters set up a mock enlistment office in Bnei Brak. A poster hung on a Haredi institution in a secular city read: “You are in a liberal neighborhood! Zionist Israelis live here, loyal to the Declaration of Independence. Please do not disturb the sanctity of our values and our way of life.” It was signed by “those who serve in the IDF and pay taxes.” The protesters presented themselves as liberals, but their claim rested on service and contribution.
The other wall stands against Arab parties, and it follows from the same logic. In the ethno-republican view, Arab citizens are entitled to individual rights, but collective rights, and the standing that comes with military service, belong to Jews. In this fall’s pre-election round of the same survey, ethno-republicans scored 2.6 and ethnocentrics 2.3 on a five-point scale of willingness to share power with Arab parties, both below the midpoint. Yashar! is the largest party in both groups. Support for the judicial overhaul explains only a fifth to a third of these gaps: this is about how people imagine the nation, not about the reform.
The arithmetic follows. The opposition’s 48 seats reach 61 either with the Arab parties (67) or with Shas and UTJ (exactly 61). With UTJ’s Degel HaTorah declining to recommend Netanyahu, the second route is no longer purely theoretical. But each route runs into one of the bloc’s own walls.
Two publics, many voices
The second set of findings, from the Index of Arab–Jewish Relations in Israel, shows that Arab and Jewish citizens see political partnership very differently — but neither public speaks with one voice. In the Index, 60 percent of Arab citizens agree that Arab parties should be coalition partners, compared with 31 percent of Jews. Fifty-seven percent of Jews say no Arab party should ever be included.
Those averages hide a great deal. Among Jews who place themselves firmly on the right, 5 percent favor Arab partners, and among those leaning right, about a quarter. A third of those leaning right would accept an Arab party if no other government can be formed. Among Arab citizens, 76 percent of Ra’am voters back coalition partnership, compared with 17 percent of Balad voters. So do about 90 percent of those who identify as Arab-Israeli, compared with about 55 percent of those who identify only as Palestinian Arabs.
What Arab citizens want and what they fear
Arab support for partnership rests, above all, on what it is expected to deliver. Large majorities expect Arab parties in government to deliver material, symbolic, and emotional gains: bigger budgets for Arab towns (67 percent), a stronger sense of belonging for Arab citizens (63 percent), less crime (59 percent), and a stronger democracy (58 percent). The more they expect such gains, the more they support partnership. Among Arab citizens who expect bigger budgets, nearly four in five favor coalition partnership. Among those who do not, about a fifth. Most also want a real seat at the table. Fifty-nine percent favor Arab parties joining a government with ministers. Fewer, 46 percent, prefer backing a government only from the outside.
Arab citizens have fears too, but they concern their own national project. Between 42 and 48 percent expect partnership to exact a price: accepting the state’s Jewish character, weaker support for the Palestinian struggle, complicity in the occupation, or a loss of Arab unity. Those who hold these fears are less supportive of joining a coalition and more supportive of backing a government from the outside. Balad voters expect more such costs than benefits. Ra’am voters see the reverse.
Mirror images
Set side by side, the two publics mirror each other. On gains they speak the same language. In both, the hope or expectation of bigger budgets, a stronger sense of belonging, a stronger democracy and safer streets goes hand in hand with support for partnership. They part ways on national identity. About two-thirds of Jews fear that Arab parties in government would harm the state’s Jewish character or Jewish sovereignty, and these fears are among the strongest predictors of Jewish opposition. Only about a fifth of Arab citizens expect such harm, and whether they do has no bearing on their support. Each public fears for its own national project.
Those Jewish fears have deep roots. In work with Gal Ariely and Daphna Canetti, published this year in Nations and Nationalism, we find that Jewish Israelis who come to embrace narratives that tell Jewish history as a long chain of persecution grow more exclusionary toward Arab citizens. Deeply painful memories and narratives of persecution are also prevalent among Arab citizens of Israel.
Cracks in the walls
Put together, these findings form a map. The obstacles are real: a bloc whose core resists Arab partners, a wall against the Haredi parties, and fears for national projects on both sides. But the walls also have cracks, and two ways of reading the data bring them into view.
The first is to read the two publics together rather than one at a time. Seen jointly, they share more than either assumes. In both, support for partnership rises with the same tangible gains, and in both, majorities look to Arab parties in government for safer streets. The two publics also come closest on an arrangement now being discussed. The gap between Arab and Jewish support is 29 points for full coalition partnership, but only 12 for backing a government from the outside, the form that Arab citizens who fear for the Palestinian cause prefer anyway.
The second is to read the diversity within each public systematically, not just its average. Sorting Jewish respondents by their visions of the nation, and Arab respondents by party and identity, reveals openings that averages hide. A third of Jews who lean right would accept an Arab party if no other government can be formed. Among right-wing Jews, support for Arab partners climbs from near the bottom of the scale to its middle as hope rises. Among Arab citizens, a large majority of Ra’am voters, as well as many Joint List voters, favor partnership. Each of these groups is a crack in the wall, and a potential constituency for a gate.
Threats can widen the cracks or seal them. In an article with Ameer Fakhoury, published this year in the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, we show that the Jewish majority’s willingness to share power is not fixed and varies across visions of the nation. It depends on threat, and threats pull in different directions. Symbolic threats to the state’s Jewish character, and security threats, harden the boundary. A threat to the democratic regime can do the opposite: among Jews alarmed for democracy, willingness to include Arab parties grows. That is the very threat that mobilized the bloc in 2023.
The Haredi parties belong on this map too. Their voters have expectations, hopes and fears of their own: about military service, about their communities’ way of life and about their place in the state. The 2023 protest built a wall against them, and parts of the bloc still guard it. Yet Degel HaTorah’s refusal to recommend Netanyahu shows that their alliance with him is not fixed. They, too, are potential partners for a change government.
Untying the knot
What follows? First, defending democracy means deciding who belongs. The camp that defended the autonomy and authority of the Supreme Court in 2023 did so within a community bounded by Jewishness and the ethos of service and sacrifice. This election has exposed those boundaries. The more Israelis aspire to a liberal democracy, the more they should extend a hand to the representatives of both minorities: the Arab national minority and the Haredi minority.
Second, take hopes and fears seriously, on both sides. Reassurance about security and identity is part of democratic politics, though it must not harden the very boundary between the Jewish majority and the Arab minority that it seeks to soften.
Third, read each public’s diversity, not its average: the openings lie inside camps. Fourth, partnership rests on tangible and emotional benefits, such as safety, services and a sense of belonging, and on reducing symbolic threats to each group.
In my 2023 article, I recalled the sociologist Michael Mann’s warning that fusing democracy with ethnic nationalism opens the door to democracy’s dark side, including the danger of fascism. The protesters were right that the government’s judicial overhaul initiative was revolutionary: it sought to subordinate Israel’s citizenry entirely to its Jewish majority. Yet the upheaval of 2023 also held a revolutionary potential in the opposite direction, toward democratization. Realizing it depends on untying the Gordian knot tied at the state’s founding between ethnicity and nationhood, and between citizenship and rights. The 2026 coalition math has brought that knot to the negotiating table. How the parties handle it will shape not only the next government but the meaning of Israeli democracy. The walls were built by the bloc’s own vision of the nation, and so can its gates be.
