Where Did Netanyahu’s Ten Seats Go?

Two months ago, a leaked strategy session quoted Benjamin Netanyahu admitting: “10 seats slipped away from us, and I don’t know how to get them back.” With over 90% of the votes counted, the picture is clear—and answers where those ten seats went.

In the Netanyahu block, Likud lost seven seats (from 33 to 26) and Shas lost four seats (from 11 to 7). The joint list of Smotrich and Ben-Gvir which ran separately this time ultimately lost one seat. Yahadut Hatorah stayed the same. Twelve seats altogether. Where have they disappeared?

In the Change bloc, Lapid lost 12 seats, from 24 to 12, and Gantz lost 12 seats, but those votes didn’t cross the aisle—they were consolidated under Gadi Eisenkot. Eisenkot didn’t generate a shift between opposing camps; he simply reshuffled votes inside his own bloc. Actually, Eisenkot absorbed three seats fewer than what Gantz and Lapid lost.

Liberman went up from 6 to 7 seats. Maybe he absorbed one seat that moved between the blocs; maybe it’s a seat that moved to him from Lapid.

The Democrats went up from 5 to 8 seats. Considering Labor stood at 5 seats in past elections and Meretz stood at 3, the result shows no change whatsoever.

Overall, the Change bloc’s total weight remained virtually unchanged.

The real shift came from voter turnout. Arab party representation expanded by seven seats across Ra’am and the Joint List framework. Ra’am went up from five seats to seven. Hadash-Ta’al stood at five seats. If you add Balad’s two seats, the rise of the Joint List stands at five seats. In other words, the Arab parties grew by seven seats.

Of the twelve seats lost by Netanyahu’s bloc, a few shifted toward opposition realignment, but the bulk transferred to Arab lists due to differential turnout.

The initial conclusion is that there was no change in the Jewish public vote. What has remained the same is that there was no voter switching. What did change is the voter turnout, which transferred seven seats from the Netanyahu bloc to the Arab lists.

This leaves us with a fundamental question: After everything Israel has experienced over the past four years, how has public opinion remained so rigid?

Two answers emerge. First, deep-seated political alignments change slowly and incrementally. Second, from the perspective of many voters, the crisis is still ongoing—the fear of war is still in the air, and the country has not yet entered the period of retrospection and reflection that usually triggers major political realignments.