Yet, as so often in Israel’s fractured politics, the ballot box has spoken without reaching a conclusion. 

The exit polls were a dead heat; the count then swung to the Prime Minister’s bloc, peaking in the high 50s, before later boxes — Arab-majority areas and the 650,000-odd “double-envelope” ballots, including soldiers’ votes — eroded the lead. With the count all but complete, the Likud-led bloc stood at 53 seats, down sharply from the 64 Netanyahu’s camp won in 2022; the opposition at 48; and the Arab parties, at a historic high, at 19. Netanyahu was in front, yet short of the 61 needed for majority.

Gadi Eisenkot, his challenger, pronounced the Prime Minister “a caretaker,” urged him to accept defeat and step down, and vowed to “act immediately to implement the people’s decision.” 

Predictably, both men claimed the morning. Two rival mandates; one Knesset that, as it stands, confers neither.

With the ballots all but counted and official certification due in early November, the arithmetic will not manufacture the majority that eluded both camps on the night. 

Attention has already turned to President Isaac Herzog, who is reportedly working to broker the very combination the campaign ruled out — a Netanyahu–Eisenkot unity government. 

The move has drawn a sharp rebuke from the Democrats’ Yair Golan, who accused the president of “laying the groundwork” for it, even as Eisenkot reaffirmed he will not serve under Netanyahu, rotation or not. 

Short of that grand bargain, the roads out of the deadlock are a narrow coalition bought at a ruinous price, or yet another trip to the polls.

Man Who Shook The Throne

Eisenkot is a former Chief of the General Staff of the Israel Defence Forces, a member of the war cabinet after 7 October, and a father who lost a son in the Gaza fighting. 

In September 2025, he broke away to found a new party, Yashar — Hebrew for “straight” —pledging to put “security and national interests above all.” His platform reads less like a manifesto than a national-service charter: a commission of inquiry into the failures of 7 October; conscription extended at last to the ultra-Orthodox and to Arab citizens; the protection of judicial independence and a free press; term limits on the premiership.

It would be a mistake, though, to read Eisenkot as a dove. Reuters calls him a “political outsider, soldier, and security hawk”. He has dismissed demands for a Palestinian state as “irrelevant”, faulted Netanyahu for yielding “too readily” to Washington over Lebanon, and built his career on the doctrine of overwhelming force. 

A government he leads might lower the “temperature and toxicity” of the Netanyahu years, but it would not reverse Israel’s security doctrine. Tellingly, this son of Moroccan immigrants has been making inroads among the very Mizrahi voters who are Netanyahu’s bedrock — which is precisely why he frightens Likud.

And yet Eisenkot fell short of his own ambitions. 

He meant to lead the opposition to a majority and to make Yashar the largest party; he managed neither, with Likud finishing ahead. “The anti-Netanyahu camp had an election handed to them on a silver platter, and they still lost,” observed Reuven Hazan of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem — Israelis, he said, had sent “an ambiguous message: we don’t really like the current government, but we don’t see a viable alternative.” 

Why Numbers Still Won’t Add Up

Under Israel’s pure proportional representation — a single nationwide constituency, a 3.25% threshold — no party comes close to a majority alone, and coalition-building is everything. The Prime Minister’s natural partners may not carry him to 61, and the men who hold the seats he still needs — Naftali Bennett, Avigdor Lieberman, Yair Golan, Eisenkot — are each, for now, a closed door. 

The opposition’s own path runs through the Arab parties, which Netanyahu’s camp rules out and which Bennett and Lieberman, both of whom have branded him a traitor, have sworn never to sit alongside. 

Herzog is expected to press the two largest parties toward a unity government, yet, as one analyst dryly notes, “no one has explained exactly how that will work”: Likud and Yashar together muster only 45 or 46 seats, and Eisenkot has refused to serve under Netanyahu even in rotation.

A paradox is buried in the arithmetic. 

Count the Jewish-led parties alone, and Netanyahu’s bloc leads; count the Arab parties in — as arithmetic, if not Israeli convention, demands — and his rivals command something like 66 seats to his 53. “There is no need for the racist assumption that you need not count the Arabs,” as one opposition adviser put it. The anti-Netanyahu camp may thus control the Knesset — enough to elect a speaker and repeal laws — without being able to form a government.

The deepest irony is that the likeliest escape routes run through doors Netanyahu spent the campaign slamming: having demonised Arab lawmakers to drive up turnout, he may yet need one of their parties, as he nearly did in 2022 — for, as the pollster Dahlia Scheindlin observes, he “has certainly demonstrated his willingness to do anything to stay in power”.

Reading The Result

The world is watching Jerusalem because the next Israeli government inherits the most delicate file in the region: the morning after the war. 

A year on from the US-brokered ceasefire of October 2025, President Donald Trump’s 20-point plan for Gaza survives — but as scaffolding, not settlement. The hostages are home and a “Board of Peace,” chaired by Trump, oversees reconstruction; yet, Israeli forces still hold two-thirds of Gaza, the promised stabilisation force and Palestinian technocratic committee have not taken hold, and the central bargain — Hamas’s disarmament for Israeli withdrawal — remains unresolved. Reconstruction needs run past US$ 70 billion; pledges are a fraction of that.

Into this half-finished architecture steps whichever coalition Israel assembles. 

A Netanyahu government would hold his line: no withdrawal until Hamas disarms, no premature talk of Palestinian statehood. An Eisenkot-led one might cool the rhetoric and the drive to annex the West Bank, but it would neither leave Gaza nor embrace a Palestinian state. 

The course of Saudi normalisation, of pressure versus diplomacy toward Iran, and of the Board of Peace itself will be shaped, if not decided, by the answer Jerusalem is still working out.

Washington is the wild card. President Trump has hailed Netanyahu this week as a “warrior prime minister” and could even help broker a unity government — yet he is simultaneously pressing Israel into another round of war with Iran, a venture a cornered Netanyahu could turn into a demand for an emergency unity cabinet under his own command - precisely the politicisation of security Eisenkot has warned against. And beneath the personal warmth, American opinion across both parties is drifting measurably cooler toward Israel. 

View From New Delhi

For India, the stakes are concrete. In February 2026 Prime Minister Narendra Modi travelled to Jerusalem — the first Indian premier to address the Knesset — and, with Netanyahu, elevated the relationship to a “Special Strategic Partnership for Peace, Innovation and Prosperity”: a free trade agreement under negotiation, a defence cooperation memorandum expanded to cover AI, cyber and advanced weapons integration, cooperation from quantum computing and space to agriculture, water and the rollout of India’s UPI payments stack, and a pledge to admit 50,000 more Indian workers atop the tens of thousands already filling jobs opened up after Israel curtailed Palestinian labour.

That dense web of interests explains why the worry that a change of guard might unravel it is largely misplaced. India is one of Israel’s largest and most reliable defence export markets — radar, drones, missile-defence systems, precision-guided munitions — in a trade driven by hard security needs, not ideology; it runs, as one analyst put it, “beyond political leadership,” and has outlasted every permutation of Israeli coalition politics since full relations began in 1992. Eisenkot, a career soldier, is if anything more steeped in it than any civilian. 

New Delhi’s substantive interests in Israel are not hostage to the identity of the next prime minister. The risk lies elsewhere — not in what a new government might do to the bilateral tie, but in what a prolonged Israeli crisis would do to India’s wider position in West Asia.

India’s Real Exposure

India does not have an Israel policy so much as a West Asia policy, and Israel is one leg of a three-legged stool. The Gulf is the heaviest: India’s trade with the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) approached US$ 179 billion last year, some 10 million Indians live and work there, and their remittances and the region’s energy are foundational — New Delhi and the GCC signed the terms of reference for their own free trade agreement in February 2026. Iran is the third leg, India’s gateway to Afghanistan and Central Asia through Chabahar. 

These relationships pull in different directions whenever Israel and its neighbours are at war: a sustained Israel–Iran confrontation makes India’s balancing harder, and the India–Middle East–Europe Economic Corridor, unveiled at the 2023 New Delhi G20 to link India through the Gulf and Israel’s Port of Haifa to Europe, depends on exactly the regional calm a deadlocked, war-managing Israel may struggle to sustain. India-Middle East-European Economic Corridor (IMEC) cannot be built through a war zone.

There is, finally, principle. 

India has expanded its embrace of Israel while still, formally, backing a negotiated two-state solution; in February 2026, even as Modi stood in Jerusalem, New Delhi criticised Israeli moves to tighten control over the occupied West Bank. That balance holds only so long as the region is not forced to choose. A confrontational government in Jerusalem, or a failed-state drift in Gaza, would narrow India’s room to hold all three.

A Policy That Outlasts Personalities

Here is the lesson for New Delhi. 

The relationship has grown dangerously reliant on the personal rapport between Modi and Netanyahu — the embraces, the first-name diplomacy, the shared strongman idiom. That chemistry has delivered, but it is a wasting asset.

Netanyahu is, by his own challenger’s description, a caretaker whose era is closing, and the Israeli leaders now rising owe New Delhi no sentimental debt. The reform is to institutionalise what has been personalised.

Above all, it means hedging. India’s West Asia strategy for a Viksit Bharat cannot rest on any single relationship, least of all one as volatile as Israeli coalition politics has proved to be. 

Press ahead with Israel; deepen the Gulf partnerships that carry far greater economic weight; keep the Iran channel open; spend the diplomatic capital to keep IMEC alive. Israel will, in time, cobble together a government, or fail and return to the polls. 

For New Delhi, the lesson holds either way: its interests in Jerusalem are now too large, and the politics there too fickle, to entrust to the handshake of two leaders. Build the institutions, diversify the bets, and let the partnership stand on its own foundations — the work a mature power does while others are still counting the votes, and arguing over what the count means.

(The author is an ex-civil servant. Views are personal.)