Knesset Swears In: Rival Generals Haggle Over Who Rules

President Isaac Herzog will stand up at 4:00 pm today to address a freshly sworn-in 120-seat Knesset in which neither Benjamin Netanyahu's bloc nor Gadi Eisenkot's holds a majority. The ritual comes two weeks after the Oct. 27 election, and it opens a bargaining season in which a former senior military man is trying to assemble a government, and a prime minister on trial for corruption is trying to stop him.

The arithmetic is the whole story. Netanyahu's right-wing and religious alliance won 53 seats. The four Jewish-led opposition parties headed by Eisenkot won 48. Nineteen Arab-party seats and 13 ultra-Orthodox seats sit in the middle, and everything now depends on who can buy them. Herzog gave Eisenkot the initial mandate on Sunday after parties representing 67 lawmakers recommended him, against 46 for Netanyahu. Eisenkot has 28 days, with a possible 14-day extension, 42 at most. Even Herzog admitted the paperwork flatters reality: "The results of the consultations may appear clear, but the authority vested in me by law is to determine who has the ability to form a government, and that is not entirely clear, given the mutual vetoes between the blocs and within the blocs themselves."

The Generals' Table

Before the oath was even administered, the opposition had already carved up the furniture. Eisenkot's Yashar party announced that Matan Kahana, like Eisenkot a former senior military figure, will be its candidate for speaker. Avigdor Lieberman, the right-wing opposition leader who has played a key role in deciding who can enter the government, gets the chair of the foreign affairs and defence committee. The committee that oversees the army goes to a man whose political career has run on denouncing others. Citizens were not consulted on any of it.

The opposition's first target is Likud's speaker, Amir Ohana, and the rules of the game are being bent in real time. Ohana promised that "if a majority of them request such a debate, I will schedule it for an earlier date," but only if at least 61 lawmakers formally ask. A 2020 Supreme Court ruling against then-Speaker Yuli Edelstein limits his room to stall. Netanyahu's bloc is still trying to push back a vote on the speaker anyway. Professor Gideon Rahat of the Israel Democracy Institute told JNS: "Netanyahu remains politically powerful, but he no longer commands a majority in the Knesset. His opponents can replace the speaker and change parliamentary procedures."

The precedent they are copying comes from the other side. After the 2022 election, Netanyahu's incoming coalition passed significant legislation, including expanded ministerial powers over police, before forming its government. Whoever holds the gavel rewrites the machinery, and then hands the keys to the next crew.

Who Pays for the Majority

The coalition math runs straight through people the Israeli state has long treated as a problem to be managed. Arab-Israeli lawmakers won a record number of seats on the back of anger in their community over Netanyahu's hard-right government. Lieberman has said he will not let Eisenkot rely on them to come to power, and has proposed an alliance with the ultra-Orthodox instead, the same community he has bitterly denounced for its priority on keeping an exemption from mandatory military service. Netanyahu, for his part, has accused opponents of hypocrisy for courting haredi parties over conscription, while his own government backed the exemption without enshrining it fully into law. Everyone in this negotiation is trading a conscript's obligations or a minority's votes as currency.

The price of Arab support is spelled out in the base facts: Arab-Israelis are likely to object if Eisenkot carries out another major offensive in Gaza. Eisenkot has largely backed Netanyahu's war decisions. He has vowed to crack down on extremist settlers in the West Bank who have been attacking and stealing from Palestinians with virtual impunity, a vow that arrives after the impunity, from a man who wants the state's coercive machinery in his hands.

The Reform Trap

The opposition's promised repairs are a menu of institutional engineering. Targets include the March 2025 amendment to Basic Law: The Judiciary, passed 67–1 amid an opposition boycott, which changes how the Judicial Selection Committee is built. The July attorney general law, passed 65–51, would let the government disregard its chief legal adviser's opinions. The June law pulls the Police Investigations Department out of the State Attorney's Office and into the Justice Ministry. A broadcasting reform that reorganizes regulation of television has been partly frozen by the High Court. Each is a fight over who controls prosecutors, police investigators and the airwaves. None is a fight over whether those powers should exist.

A state commission of inquiry into Oct. 7 is also on the list, with a proposed amendment letting parliament start one without Cabinet approval and the Supreme Court president appointing its members. Four outcomes remain in play: national unity, an Arab-supported government, a haredi-supported coalition, or another election. Netanyahu's associates have reportedly warned that replacing Ohana could jeopardize unity negotiations.

The analysis ends on the question that matters to the people running this: whether the opposition can convert its majority into lasting advantage without destroying the alliances needed to replace Netanyahu. Millions of people live under whichever coalition wins that question. Their say in it ended when they voted.