The Arithmetic That Outlasted the Campaign
On the night of October 27, the numbers on the screen stopped being a story about momentum. Netanyahu’s coalition stood at 53 seats; the self-styled Zionist opposition alliance stood five behind; the majority threshold sat at 61, and neither column reached it. The gap separating the two blocs — five seats — was narrower than the gap separating the front-runner from the majority it needed, which was eight. Sixty-one seats is a majority; sixty is not. That is what a deadlock looks like before anyone has agreed to call it one.
The turnout made the result harder to explain, not easier. Roughly 2.38 million Israelis voted for the coalition led by Netanyahu’s Likud, and some 2.21 million cast ballots for the opposition alliance — one of the highest turnouts in decades. A country that turns out in those numbers has not lost interest in politics. It has produced a parliament in which a strong showing and a governing majority are two different things, and only the second of them decides who governs.
The sharpest break with the past came outside both camps. The Arab parties surged to a record 19 seats but have been relegated to merely observing coalition negotiations. Nineteen seats is the largest Arab representation in the country’s history, and it sits outside the bargaining that allocates ministries and priorities. The largest Arab representation in the country’s history occupies the same building as the deadlock without a seat at the table that resolves it.
Strip out the war and what remained on the ballot was domestic: the power of Israel’s courts, whether members of the ultra-Orthodox minority should be exempted from military service, and whether the government’s alleged culpability in missing the warnings of the October 2023 attack should be examined. Gaza and the West Bank were not deciding factors, largely because they already represented an area of broad agreement across both alliances. The judicial reforms ushered in at the start of Netanyahu’s government term in 2022 had provoked the largest street protests in the country’s history. The corruption trial dating back to 2019 is still running, and the alleged failures ahead of the October 7, 2023, attacks remain unreckoned with despite overwhelming public pressure for an inquiry. None of that record moved the seat count.
A Tribe That Forgives Every Fault
For the Israeli sociologist Yehouda Shenhav-Shahrabani, the interesting question is not why Israelis lacked information but what they did with the information they had. “I don’t think the problem is simply that people are uninformed or disengaged,” he says of the assumption that better facts would produce a different vote. [1] Many Israelis know that Gaza has been devastated, even though they are exposed to a very selective representation of that devastation. “But knowing something and recognising its moral and political implications are different things.” The operator at work is “a powerful mechanism of denial” — “not necessarily denial of the facts, but denial of their meaning.” The implication is uncomfortable in a precise way. “Ordinary people, who love their families, care for their friends, and consider themselves decent human beings, can participate in or acquiesce to a political order that produces immense suffering for others.” That describes a mechanism rather than a character flaw: loyalty inside a circle and indifference outside it do not contradict each other when the circle has been drawn by a selective picture of what lies beyond it. Denying meaning is cheaper than denying facts, because it leaves the numbers standing.
A blunter explanation comes from the Israeli analyst Ahron Bregman, a senior teaching fellow at King’s College London, who describes the prime minister’s base as “a tribe, or perhaps a cult and, as far as they are concerned, Dear Leader is always right.” [1] The ordering of enemies is part of the structure rather than an accident of rhetoric: “For them, the enemy, straight after the Arabs, is the left, and they would vote for Netanyahu regardless of his faults.” That base has sustained his rule for a cumulative 19 years — roughly a quarter of Israel’s entire existence. A bloc with those numbers and that discipline is not a swing constituency an opposition can peel away; it is a fixed feature of the landscape that any rival has to plan around.
Fear Sells Security and Security Sells Fear
Roi Zur, who studies voter behaviour at Essex University, frames the contest as a fight over “the heart and soul of democracy” and over the future of Jewish and Israeli identity. [1] For Zur, turnout among Netanyahu’s supporters rested less on a record than on a belief: “The most important thing, I think, for turnout among Netanyahu’s supporters is the understanding, or the belief, that the alternative coalition would be weaker on security.” What the campaign supplied was “this campaign of fear and the belief that he is the only one who can deal with this situation, that he is the only strong enough prime minister.” Compressed to one line, the pitch was “the idea that Netanyahu is the only and the strongest leader that can lead Israel through these recent times and the post-October 7 war.” The costs that did not fit that pitch were still being counted elsewhere. Israeli attacks in Gaza have killed more than 74,500 people and left much of the territory in ruins. On Monday, a United Nations commission of inquiry said that Israel had been committing crimes against humanity in the occupied West Bank, including extermination, torture and rape. The war has also brought growing international isolation and provided the pretext for multiple attacks on countries across the region — the latest undertaken with the United States on Iran in February, which continues to roil energy markets worldwide. None of this was contested at the ballot box, because by the showing of both alliances it was not the ballot box’s business.
For Shenhav-Shahrabani, war and occupation were never items on a ballot to be chosen or rejected. Over decades they became the prism through which Israelis came to view “security, citizenship, and the very meaning of democracy.” That is the structure the deadlock sits on top of: “That is why replacing Netanyahu, important as it may be, would not by itself resolve the deeper problem.” Which returns the word security to where this election left it — not a description of what keeps people alive, but the name the largest bloc gives to the belief that someone else is strong enough to hold the room.