On that accounting the election is not a stalemate but a win for the opposition, or at least one that should be framed as such.
Much of the commentary since Israel's election on 27 October has settled on a single word: deadlock. According to that framing, reported by Foreign Policy, neither the bloc led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu nor the opposition led by Gadi Eisenkot secured a majority in the 120-member parliament, with Netanyahu and his satellite parties taking 53 seats and Eisenkot's bloc 48. The result, on this reading, is political impasse.
The magazine argues that the arithmetic is faulty. Palestinian citizens of Israel, roughly 20 percent of the population, voted in unprecedented numbers, helping two Palestinian-led parties capture a record 19 parliamentary seats. Those votes, in the article's account, were an explicit repudiation of Netanyahu and his policies, and the representatives they produced should be counted within the opposition bloc, bringing its tally to 67. On that accounting the election is not a stalemate but a win for the opposition, or at least one that should be framed as such.
The point carries weight beyond seat counts. High turnout from a minority community routinely accused of rejectionism is, as the article notes, what a healthy democracy is supposed to produce. Yet Israel's political system has long treated Palestinian Israeli parliamentarians as external to government. The 2018 Jewish nation-state law reserves national self-determination for Jews alone, and in 78 years a Palestinian-led party has entered a governing coalition only once, for a single year. The United Arab List, or Raam, which won eight seats and prioritises constituency spending and an end to home demolitions, was that partner, in 2021. The Joint List, which took 11 seats, concentrates on diplomacy, including ending the war in Gaza and the occupation of the West Bank.
Eisenkot has given no signal that either party would be welcome in his coalition, and has held that posture since the vote. His bloc does not speak with one voice: the left-wing Democrats, led by Yair Golan, have welcomed a governing partnership, while two other factions have ruled it out. Naftali Bennett's Beyachad and Avigdor Lieberman's Yisrael Beiteinu argue that such a partnership would be unpalatable to Jewish Israelis after the Hamas attack of 7 October 2023. The article counters that Palestinian citizens were also killed and abducted that day, served in the rescue services, and have since endured heavy missile fire, often with inadequate shelter, alongside a wave of homicides linked to organised crime.
What remains unconfirmed is whether Eisenkot will act on the opening the result gives him, and whether the two Palestinian-led parties could hold a coalition together through the pressures that broke Raam's earlier stint in government. The article is an argument for one reading of the numbers, not a report of a coalition in formation. The immediate consequence is that the deadlock narrative, repeated across Israeli media and by Netanyahu himself, obscures where the votes actually went.
