Israel’s Most Dangerous Political Gamble: Power at Any Cost
Israel has voted, but Israel has not decided!
The October 27 election produced one of the most complicated Knessets in recent memory. Benjamin Netanyahu’s bloc finished with 53 seats, while the opposition bloc centered around Gadi Eisenkot secured 48. The two Arab-led lists, the Joint List and Ra’am, together won 19 seats. With no bloc reaching the 61 seats required to form a government, Israel now faces a political dilemma that goes far beyond another round of coalition negotiations.
The argument is no longer simply Netanyahu versus Eisenkot, Right versus Center, religious versus secular, or coalition versus opposition. The deeper question is whether the desire to remove Benjamin Netanyahu has become so powerful that parties defining themselves as Zionist are prepared to establish, or at minimum sustain, a government dependent on political factions whose positions on Hamas, Zionism and the Jewish character of Israel remain fundamentally disputed.
The phrase “anyone but Bibi” has dominated Israeli politics for years. Opposition politicians argue that no democracy should revolve permanently around one man. They point to Netanyahu’s long tenure as reasons that Israel needs political change. But removing Netanyahu is not itself a governing philosophy. A government must still answer the most fundamental question facing every Israeli leadership: who will be trusted with the security of the Jewish state?
That question becomes especially serious when the parliamentary numbers make Arab-party support potentially decisive. During a July interview, Ra’am leader Mansour Abbas was repeatedly asked whether Hamas is a terrorist organization that must be destroyed. Rather than answer directly, he pointed to Ra’am’s condemnation of October 7 and terrorism, but declined to provide a definitive answer when pressed specifically about Hamas. After the election, when asked the question again, Abbas reportedly said that the matter would be discussed during government-formation negotiations. For many Israeli voters, that is not a minor semantic dispute. Hamas is not an academic subject in Israel, and the question of how a prospective governing partner defines it cannot simply be postponed until the coalition negotiations begin.
Hamas murdered approximately 1,200 people on October 7, kidnapped 251 hostages, and triggered the bloodiest period Israel has endured in generations. Israeli soldiers have spent years fighting the organization in Gaza, while families across the country have buried sons, daughters, fathers and mothers because of that war. Against this history, asking a political leader who could help determine Israel’s next government whether Hamas is a terrorist organization is not an unreasonable loyalty test. It is one of the most elementary national-security questions imaginable.
The Joint List raises additional questions: the list has not accepted conditions reportedly laid out by Eisenkot requiring prospective partners to recognize Israel explicitly as a Jewish and democratic state and classify Hamas as a terrorist organization. That disagreement matters because Israel is not merely a state with a Jewish majority. It was established as the nation-state of the Jewish people, and the preservation of that national character is central to the country’s identity.
Israel’s army exists because Jewish history taught us the price of depending on others for our protection. Its Law of Return exists because Jews must always have a country willing to receive them, while its national institutions, language, holidays and symbols reflect the restoration of Jewish sovereignty after two thousand years. Political parties are free to criticize Zionism, and Arab citizens are entitled to full civil rights regardless of their political views. But Zionist parties are equally entitled to ask whether a government charged with defending the Jewish state should depend for its parliamentary survival on parties unwilling to affirm that state’s Jewish national character. This is not a question of race or ethnicity. It is a legitimate constitutional and political question concerning the foundations upon which the next Israeli government would be built.
The controversy surrounding former Balad leader Sami Abu Shehadeh illustrates why these concerns cannot simply be dismissed as campaign propaganda. The day after October 7, Abu Shehadeh published an article describing the Hamas assault as an important historical event militarily, politically and strategically; during the 2026 election process, even Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara’s office argued that his statements warranted serious consideration for disqualification. When the case reached the Supreme Court, the justices indicated they were likely to uphold his disqualification, and Abu Shehadeh eventually withdrew his candidacy.
There is also the controversy involving organizations associated with Ra’am and the Southern Branch of the Islamic Movement. A Justice Ministry investigation found grounds to dissolve charities linked to that broader political-religious network after determining that they had transferred funds or cooperated with organizations that Israel had designated as terrorist organizations or linked to terrorism. In May 2026, a district court ordered the dissolution of one such nonprofit, citing serious concerns that included cooperation with a declared terrorist organization.
When a political party could become indispensable to the formation of an Israeli government, the public has every right to demand transparency about such relationships. That demand should not be interpreted as a declaration that every representative of that political movement is responsible for the actions of associated organizations. Rather, it is a question of accountability, political judgment and the standards expected of any party seeking influence over the direction of the state.
The security implications also require a serious and accurate discussion. Some political rhetoric suggests that the moment an Arab party supports a government, Israel’s most classified intelligence automatically becomes accessible to its members of Knesset. That is incorrect. A party supporting a minority government from outside would not automatically receive seats in the security cabinet or operational intelligence from the Mossad, Shin Bet, or IDF. Even government ministers do not all possess the same level of access to classified military information.
Nevertheless, this does not make the security issue irrelevant. Coalition negotiations involve political power, including ministerial appointments, parliamentary committee positions, budgets, legislative commitments and political leverage. Members of the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee and certain subcommittees can receive extraordinarily sensitive classified material. A government dependent on outside parliamentary support may also face pressure concerning military operations, security budgets, policing, Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria, and Gaza. Therefore, the question is not whether Arab MKs would automatically receive Israel’s most sensitive intelligence, because they would not. The question is what political and institutional concessions might be required to secure their support and whether those concessions would remain compatible with Israel’s national-security requirements.
This leads to an even broader issue: how far should political parties be prepared to go simply to remove Netanyahu? Avigdor Liberman has already rejected the idea of participating in a minority government dependent on Arab parties. Although he has said he would recommend Eisenkot for prime minister, he has also made clear that he would not participate in such an arrangement. His position exposes the central contradiction facing the anti-Netanyahu bloc. If replacing Netanyahu requires creating a government that cannot survive a confidence vote without parties whose leaders will not unequivocally define Hamas as a terrorist organization, the public is entitled to ask whether opposition to one politician has begun to outweigh more fundamental questions of national identity and security.
Yet Israel is not necessarily trapped between another Netanyahu government and a coalition dependent on Arab-party support. The newly elected Knesset contains a substantial Zionist majority spanning the Right, Center and Left. Likud, Eisenkot’s party, Bennett and Lapid’s bloc, Yisrael Beytenu and other Jewish-Zionist factions disagree fiercely on Netanyahu, judicial reform, settlements, religion and state and responsibility for October 7. But they also agree on considerably more than Israel’s political discourse sometimes admits. They agree that Israel must continue to exist as a secure state, that Hamas cannot be allowed to rebuild its former military capabilities, that Iran presents a serious strategic threat and that the IDF must remain capable of defending the country.
Israel Hayom’s Yoav Limor calculated that the new Knesset contains potentially 87 Zionist seats if the major Zionist factions are considered outside the traditional Netanyahu-versus-anti-Netanyahu bloc structure. That number should matter because perhaps the real lesson of this election is not that Israelis must choose between Netanyahu and dependence on Arab parties. Perhaps it is that the political obsession with Netanyahu, both in support of him and in opposition to him, has become so overwhelming that political leaders can no longer see the potential coalition sitting directly in front of them.
Israel has just survived years of war. It has fought Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen, Iranian proxies across the region and Iran itself. Reservists have spent hundreds of days away from their families, thousands of Israelis have been killed or wounded, and entire communities have been evacuated. Throughout these years, Israel’s enemies have not distinguished between the political preferences of its citizens. They do not care whether the prime minister is Netanyahu, Eisenkot, Bennett or Lapid. Their strategic calculations depend on Israel’s strength, unity and ability to defend itself. This is therefore not the moment for political mathematics that places personal hostility above strategic responsibility.
But permitting a party to participate in democratic elections and choosing to depend on that party for the survival of a government are two fundamentally different questions. The first concerns democratic rights, while the second concerns political judgment. Israeli voters have every right to ask whether a party that could hold the balance of power recognizes the Jewish character of the country, whether it considers Hamas a terrorist organization, whether it supports the permanent dismantlement of Hamas’s military capabilities, and whether it accepts the basic security doctrines required to defend Israel. These are not inherently anti-Arab questions. They are questions that every prospective governing partner should be required to answer.
The danger facing Israel today is not simply that one political bloc may form a government with another. The greater danger is that the entire political system has become so consumed by the question of Benjamin Netanyahu that every other principle risks becoming negotiable. For Netanyahu’s opponents, the question should not merely be whether they can remove him from office, but what kind of government they are prepared to create in order to accomplish that objective.
Democracy also requires honesty. If a future government intends to depend on Ra’am or the Joint List, Israelis deserve to know exactly what that dependence means before the government is sworn in. They deserve to know what commitments have been made, which ministries or committee positions have been discussed, what security policies remain non-negotiable, and whether every party supporting the government recognizes Hamas as a terrorist organization and accepts Israel’s right to remain a Jewish and democratic state. Those questions should be answered publicly rather than left to speculation about agreements negotiated behind closed doors.
Israel has paid too much in blood to treat national security as a technicality of coalition arithmetic. The next government should not be constructed merely around the principle of “yes Netanyahu” or “no Netanyahu.” It should be built around something far more important: yes to Israel. Yes to the Jewish state, yes to its democratic institutions, yes to the security of its citizens and yes to the dismantlement of organizations that massacre Israelis.
Above all, Israel deserves a government whose parliamentary foundations are clear enough that its citizens never have to wonder whether that government’s political survival has become more important than its willingness to defend them.