The religious parties want to move up the vote to 15 September before Yom Kippur (and distance themselves from Netanyahu). The Bennett-Lapid alliance is failing in the polls, giving former General Eisenkot a chance to emerge as the top opposition leader. But no one seems to have the numbers to form a majority without the support Arab parties that Jewish parties reportedly want to keep at bay.

Tel Aviv (AsiaNews) – In Israel, the shifting news surrounding arms-length negotiations between the United States and Iran is intertwined with the country’s election campaign, now well underway.

The outgoing legislature, marked by 7 October 2023, is set to end on 27 October 2026; last week, however, the Knesset almost unanimously passed in first reading a bill for an early dissolution, which would move the vote forward by a few weeks.

Three more steps are needed for this scenario to become a reality, but it is primarily the parties representing the Haredim, ultra-Orthodox religious Jews, who are pushing for a vote on 15 September, for two reasons, to send a signal of "independence" from Netanyahu, and hold the election campaign before the religious holidays of Yom Kippur and Sukkot, which this year falls in the second half of September.

Notwithstanding the tug-of-war over the election date, the leading topic in Israel at present is the political landscape surrounding the vote, which Prime Minister Binyamin (Bibi) Netanyahu has always tried to push back as far as possible.

Polls today seem to point to a stalemate like that of the five elections Israel held between April 2019 and November 2022, with governments lacking parliamentary support or hanging on a single vote and therefore destined not to last more than a few months.

To tip the balance in his favour, in the fall of 2022, Netanyahu decided to include in his coalition Itamar Ben Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, two ministers from the far-right movements that Yitzhak Rabin had outlawed nearly 30 years earlier.

Today, even with them, he appears far from the 61 seats needed to secure a majority. However, the opposition is not in a much better position.

There has been much talk of the "return" of Naftali Bennett. The right-wing politician challenged Netanyahu and became the only leader to keep Bibi out of the prime minister's office in 2021 and 2022, at the helm of a assorted coalition that also included Ra'am, one of the Arab parties represented in the Knesset.

This time though, Bennett said that he no longer intends to re-establish such an alliance. To strengthen his position, last month he created a new party, b'yaḥad (Together), which also includes Yesh Atid (There is a Future), the party of opposition leader Yair Lapid.

It was supposed to be a move to secure a relative majority in parliament by overtaking the Likud and, at the same time, set the party as the only real alternative in the anti-Netanyahu camp.

As the weeks went by, however, the Israeli electorate is proving extremely lukewarm to the former prime minister; in the latest polls, Together is behind Likud; and it appears to be picking up fewer seats than Bennett's and Lapid's parties individually.

This is playing in favour of Gadi Eisenkot, a former general who is very popular in Israel and who, after splitting politically from Benny Gantz, founded a new party called Yashar (literally "upright").

Eisenkot is seen as the face of the wing of the army that has repeatedly challenged Netanyahu's decisions on how run the war in Gaza (a conflict in which he lost a son).

In recent weeks he has been in contact with Avigdor Lieberman, the leader of the Russian-speaking party, another old acquaintance of Israeli politics, long aligned "on the right" against Netanyahu.

An electoral alliance between Eisenkot and Lieberman would likely significantly surpass Bennett and Lapid's party in terms of seats, and could count on the fact that Eisenkhot is much stronger than Bennett in polls as a potential prime minister.

The former general also has the advantage of being less disliked by the Haredim than the ultra-secular Lapid; he has reportedly already met with Moshe Gafni, one of the most prominent parliamentarians from the Jewish religious parties.

The Democrats, the heirs of Labour and Meretz (the pacifist left-wing party), are in the anti-Netanyahu camp, but significantly behind in terms of potential seats. They too are now led by a former general, Yair Golan, and are the only ones to openly raise the issue of the need to reopen political negotiations with the Palestinians.

As for the Arab parties, much will depend on the outcome of the lengthy negotiations to unite the four separate forces that comprise this coalition into at least one electoral coalition.

This fragmentation undermines representation since to be elected a party must past the 3.25 per cent threshold. It is no coincidence that when they reached an agreement to run together in March 2020, they achieved a record 15 out of 120 Knesset seats.

With the high stakes of these elections and the attacks already being levelled from the right against this significant segment of the Israeli electorate, it is likely that the single list will ultimately be formed. Much, however, will depend on the choices single parties that comprise it make in the aftermath of the elections. 

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• israel
• election
• 7 october 2023
• right-wing
• coalition
• netanyahu
• bennett
• eisenkhot
• lapid
• gantz
• haredim
• arab parties