Next Week’s Israeli Election Could Change the Face of the Country. Here’s Why.

Everything you wanted to know about Israel’s election but were afraid to ask

Israeli election banners for former Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and current prime minister Yair Lapid.
Israeli election banners for former Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and current prime minister Yair Lapid. (Getty)

On November 1, for the fifth time in less than four years, Israeli voters will head to the polls. This election has received relatively scant coverage, which is understandable given the fatigue that now accompanies what is seemingly a biannual affair. But the oversight is a mistake. That’s because this latest contest is potentially more consequential than any of the previous ones, as it finds Israel poised on the precipice of two very different futures. The outcome of Tuesday’s showdown could affect everything from the stability of Israel’s democratic institutions to the future of Jewish-Arab collaboration in its politics. I want to explain why, but first, some basics.

Why does Israel keep having elections?

The Knesset, Israel’s parliament, has 120 seats. This means that to control the chamber, an aspiring prime minister must cobble together a coalition of at least 61 members. This seemingly simple formula, however, has proven exceedingly elusive in recent years, which is why Israel keeps holding new elections.

Simply put, the country is split between two roughly equal blocs of 60 seats. On one side is former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his allies. On the other, a motley crew of leftists, conservatives, Jews, and Arabs who have united to deny Netanyahu—currently on trial for corruption—another term. In June 2021, this unlikely alliance—formed by current Prime Minister Yair Lapid—managed to oust Netanyahu with a slim 61-seat coalition. But the resulting rickety government collapsed after one year in office, leading to next week’s contest and a potential Netanyahu comeback.

So why should I care? How is this election any different from the previous ones?

On the surface, it’s not. The public polls show a similar 60–60 divide, projecting continued gridlock. But underneath the hood, something more momentous is happening. Past elections were a referendum on Netanyahu himself and whether he’d be able to wriggle out of his corruption case. But this election has also become a referendum on both Arab inclusion in Israeli politics and the potential mainstreaming of the far right in parliament.

These two phenomena are intrinsically linked. To create the current anti-Netanyahu coalition, opposition leader Lapid did something that had never been done before: He brought an independent Arab party into the government. Israel’s Arab citizens comprise some 20 percent of its population, but their political parties have traditionally refused to join Israeli coalitions, preferring to stand apart in a sort of permanent protest—an arrangement that suited many Jewish parties just fine.

That all changed with the ascension of Mansour Abbas, leader of the Islamist United Arab List party. In 2021, Abbas ran on the explicit promise that he would replace protest with politics and join any Israeli government willing to invest in its Arab citizens. Lapid took him up on the offer. Their alliance was not just a marriage of convenience. It led to record investment in the country’s Arab sector, and even a new script for talking about terrorism that no longer pitted Israeli Jews and Arabs against each other. Last month at the United Nations, Lapid became the first Israeli prime minister there to publicly cast the country’s Arabs as partners in its ongoing creation. Should Lapid form another government, it is assumed that an Arab party will be in it—something that was utterly unthinkable just a couple years ago.

United Arab List Leader Mansour Abbas in the Israeli Knesset (Getty)

But change this dramatic rarely goes unchallenged, and these developments have fomented a brutal backlash. Nowhere is this more evident than in the ascension of a hard-right political alliance led by openly anti-Palestinian politicians like Bezalel Smotrich—who has called for segregating Jews and Arabs in maternity wards and labeled Arab lawmakers “enemies” who are “here by mistake”—and Itamar Ben-Gvir, a disciple of a notorious Jewish extremist who has a penchant for waving his gun at nearby Arabs. In the current Knesset, this group, which is staunchly opposed to Arab integration and casts the community as a fifth column, holds six seats. According to the current polls, however, it could hold as many as 14 in the next parliament. Netanyahu has happily embraced these individuals as future members of his government, after midwifing their party into existence in the first place.

The upshot is this: Previous elections have hinged on whether or not parties were willing to pass legislation that would grant Netanyahu immunity from his corruption prosecution. This time, not only does Netanyahu’s trial hang in the balance, but so does the entire nascent project of Jewish-Arab partnership in Israeli politics. If the contest yields a conclusive result, the consequences for Israel’s democratic institutions, its internal cohesion, and its image abroad will be profound.


Who’s going to win?

Pundits predict the future in the Middle East at their peril, and I have no special insight into next week’s outcome. But I can point to the factors that will likely determine it—and most of them advantage Benjamin Netanyahu.

The electoral threshold: Despite the surface polling showing another 60–60 tie, a quirk of the Israeli electoral system means that Bibi’s support is more assured than his opponent’s. That’s because Israel requires that a party receive 3.25% of the vote to make it into the Knesset. Netanyahu’s allies are all safely above this threshold. But several of the parties in the anti-Bibi bloc are hovering just above it: the center-left Labor, leftist Meretz, and both major Arab parties. (Another, smaller Arab party is projected to miss the threshold entirely.) If just one of these parties fails to make it over the line, their votes will be functionally redistributed to all the other parties, which in practice could give Netanyahu his 61st seat. This situation has hobbled Lapid’s ability to fully campaign for his own leadership, forcing him to do a delicate dance to avoid stealing seats from his allies and inadvertently pushing them under the threshold.

The coalition wrangling: Even if Netanyahu doesn’t win 61 seats outright, he’ll only need to pry a single seat loose from the opposition to govern. He’s failed to do this in the past, but it will be easier for him to accomplish than Lapid, as Bibi’s allies are far more homogenous and wedded to his leadership. Netanyahu might even leverage the specter of including the far right in his coalition to persuade members of the opposition bloc to cross over, join him as the lesser evil, and keep the extremists out. Though he’s not in power now, Netanyahu did not become Israel’s longest-serving prime minister by accident, and it is always hard to bet against him.

For his part, Lapid is not so much playing to win as to not lose. He is currently serving as prime minister during the election period, and if Tuesday’s contest is inconclusive and no new coalition is formed, then he will remain in power until a new election is held. This is precisely how Netanyahu retained the premiership for almost a year, from 2019 to 2020, despite being unable to win an election. Lapid has outperformed expectations throughout his entire political career, and may yet prove to be the Eli Manning to Bibi’s Tom Brady. But if he’s going to pull off his holding action, or somehow win outright, it will depend overwhelmingly on a single factor …

The turnout: It’s an insufferable cliché in political circles, but for a reason—the election will come down to voter turnout. Specifically, the competing turnout of two largely opposed groups: right-wing voters and Arab voters. Last election, it is estimated that around two seats’ worth of voters for Netanyahu’s Likud party stayed home, exhausted by continuous election cycles. This cost Bibi crucial ground that made Lapid’s coalition possible, and he has campaigned feverishly to ensure that it doesn’t happen again.

Meanwhile, Arab turnout also plummeted last election compared to its previous rates. Should it rebound, Netanyahu will be hard-pressed to form a government. Whether that will happen is unclear. Initial surveys suggested that Arab voter enthusiasm was at record lows but, following recent appeals by Lapid and others, it appears to be inching back up. If Lapid’s electorate peaks at the right time, he may have what he needs to hold on.

Yair Lapid (Getty)

Anything else I should know?

As soon as the polls close at 10 p.m. in Israel, there will be a lot of information released that should be treated with caution. First, there will be exit polls. These do not incorporate the last two hours of voting, which has led to them being dramatically wrong in the past. But even if they are largely accurate, they are unlikely to be conclusive in such an incredibly close contest. As discussed, the election may come down to whether one party drops a fraction of a percentage point and misses the Knesset, tipping the entire result. Outcomes like that probably won’t be knowable on election night. Indeed, past contests have seen parties drop in and out of the Knesset as ballots are fully tabulated, significantly altering the final result—that’s how Abbas’s party got into parliament and ultimately booted Bibi.

For this reason, treat any immediate claims about who won the election with skepticism. Setting aside the unfinished vote count, an Israeli election isn’t won until a prospective prime minister musters 61 seats, and this process itself can take months with many twists and turns. On election night in March 2021, the New York Times declared that “Netanyahu has a path to a majority and sixth term, exit polls show.” That June, Lapid swore in his new coalition.


Further Reading:

Deep Shtetl has covered many of the personalities and developments referenced above in greater depth. Here are a few of those editions.

Israel’s Version of the Latinx Question: A deep dive into the complexity of Arab identity in Israel, and the aspirations of the country’s “Israeli-Palestinian” citizens that rarely make the international press

Yair Lapid’s Vision for a New Israeli Future: A comprehensive profile of the man who currently leads Israel and the “anti-extremist” future he aspires to shape for his country

What to Do About Racism in Israel: A primer on the rise of radical anti-Arab racism in Israeli society, and those working to combat it

Thank you for reading this edition of Deep Shtetl, a newsletter about the unexplored intersections of politics, culture, and religion. Be sure to subscribe if you haven’t already, and as always, send your questions, comments, and critiques to deepshtetl@theatlantic.com.

Yair Rosenberg is a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of its newsletter Deep Shtetl, about the intersection of politics, culture, and religion.