Yossi Schwartz, ISL (RCIT section in Israel/Occupied Palestine) 08.11.2026
Despite the Change Bloc leaders’ strategy to attract the right to the bloc, they have not been able to reach an absolute majority without the Arab parties, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is counting on them not to dare to rely on them. And if Netanyahu remains in power, the responsibility will no longer be solely his own; it will also be Bennett, Eizenkot, Lapid and Golan.
The day after the elections, Naftali Bennett declared that “the alliance of servants has defeated the alliance of dodgers today.” Yair Lapid stated that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his government had suffered a “severe defeat” and a “total collapse.” At the time, Netanyahu. Together with his allies, he waged an organized campaign in most television studios to annul the election results and erode public confidence in the elections. Netanyahu’s bloc, which received 64 seats in the 2022 elections, received 53 seats this time. But the “change” bloc received only 48 seats.
Lapid and Gantz together received 1,279,917 votes and 36 seats in the 2022 elections. Bennett and Eisenkot’s lists, which reorganized most of the Zionist center, received 1,445,621 votes, translating into 33 seats. In other words, they gained about 166,000 votes. But the number of valid votes in this election increased by about 927,000. To maintain their predecessors’ market share, even before they captured one more voter from the “soft right,” Bennett and Eizenkot were about 83,000 votes short.
Meanwhile, the Arab lists increased from 511,399 votes to 838,368 votes, translating into an increase of nine seats, and participation in Arab society rose from 53.2% to about 77%. In the unrecognized Bedouin villages in the Negev, it has almost doubled, from about 38% to about 74%.
The reasons for the jump in the vote of Palestinian citizens of the State of Israel were a spike in crime, racism, house demolitions, and the government’s attitude toward their communities that brought them to the polls. In other words: Itamar Ben Gvir. He is responsible for the protest vote of the Palestinian citizens of the Zionist state. The leaders of the Change Bloc, in their chutzpah, take credit for this, while continuing to exclude them. Instead of telling them the truth: There is no majority in Israel for the camp that wants to get rid of Netanyahu without Arab society.
However, in order to create an egalitarian society instead of the apartheid state, the Zionists must pay a price that they are not willing to pay: the return of the refugees, support for the transformation of the Zionist state into a Palestinian state in which the Jewish minority has equal civil rights, the breaking of the rioting settlers, the immediate withdrawal from Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon and Syria.
Netanyahu is still in control: He didn’t have to wait for the polls to open to know that the camp against him had no majority without Arab society. That’s why his campaign was delegitimizing Arab society as an equal partner in political rights, which Eisenkot’s bloc adopted; Bennett and Eisenkot adopted Netanyahu’s working assumptions: no Arabs and no diplomatic arrangements. Lapid, who declared at the end of 2022 at the UN General Assembly that a political settlement based on two states serves Israel’s security, adopted Bennett’s declaration that “we will not hand over an inch of land from the Land of Israel.” And Bennett made sure to repeat the message over and over again: The Arabs are not partners. Liberman is a partner of the bloc. He has a history of extreme right-wing ideas. His merchandise is mainly hatred for the ultra-Orthodox and the Arabs, and he is to the right of Netanyahu in almost every field, but he is against Bibi for personal reasons and is therefore fit for partnership in the change block.
If Bennett, Eisenkot and Lapid continue to play by the rules set by Netanyahu, they will give him what the voters took away from him: power. If they do come to power, it will be because of the support of the Joint List and Ra’am, who were humiliated by the bloc.