Israel Certifies Netanyahu’s Loss as Coalition Talks Begin
Israel’s election authorities certified a result that stripped Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s bloc of its Knesset majority on Wednesday, November 4, closing the vote-counting phase and opening a high-stakes struggle over who can build the country’s next government.
President Isaac Herzog accepted the final results as legally binding and immediately began consultations with the parties elected on October 27. “The elections are over. Now is the time to face reality,” Herzog said, according to the Associated Press.
Photograph: Isaac and Michal Herzog at Costa Rica’s National Stadium, May 8, 2026, by the Presidency of Costa Rica · public domain
The vote creates a three-part Knesset
The arithmetic is decisive but not conclusive. The official Knesset results give Netanyahu’s Likud 27 seats and his religious-nationalist allies another 26, leaving the bloc at 53—eight short of a majority. Opposition parties aligned against Netanyahu hold 48. The Joint List won 11 seats and Ra’am won eight, giving the two Arab-led parties an unprecedented 19 seats and the balance of power.
That result leaves former military chief Gadi Eisenkot, whose centrist Yashar party won 21 seats, without a ready-made majority of his own. He can reach 61 only through an agreement with Arab-led parties, a broader unity arrangement, or defections from Netanyahu’s camp. Netanyahu faces the same constraint from the other direction.
Photograph: Gadi Eisenkot, June 7, 2026, by Yahav Trudler · CC BY-SA 3.0
Fraud claims fail the evidence test
The certification also rejected the effort to delegitimize the Arab vote. Netanyahu and his allies had alleged that Arab-led parties “stole” the election and raised claims of foreign assistance. The Central Elections Committee said it found “no evidence of irregularities that compromised the integrity of the election or affected its results.”
A separate Shin Bet investigation into possible foreign funding remains open. But election committee chair and Supreme Court Justice Noam Sohlberg stressed that the intelligence claims remain unproven and would not overturn the result. “At this stage, these are merely suspicions, and even if they are substantiated, the scope of their potential impact is limited,” he said. Public trust, he warned, is “easy to destroy, yet very difficult to repair.”
Herzog also condemned racist attacks on Arab citizens and said they “must not be smeared.” That intervention matters because the 19 Arab-led seats are not a procedural footnote. They represent citizens whose votes now shape the governing majority, and they puncture a political system long organized around treating Palestinian citizens of Israel as useful only when their participation can be challenged or ignored.
The next stage will test whether Israel’s opposition accepts that mandate in practice. An Eisenkot-led coalition supported by the Joint List and Ra’am would break Netanyahu’s hold on power, but it would also force centrist parties to negotiate openly with Arab representatives on budgets, policing, housing, discrimination and the war’s consequences. A unity deal with Netanyahu could avoid that reckoning while preserving much of the existing order.
Coalition talks begin under pressure
Herzog will hear recommendations from every faction before choosing the lawmaker he believes has the best chance to form a coalition. Three parties from Netanyahu’s base backed him during the first consultations; former ally Avigdor Lieberman’s Yisrael Beiteinu recommended Eisenkot. Eight parties, including both Arab-led factions, were scheduled for Thursday. If the first nominee fails, another may try. If both fail, Israel could return to an election early next year.
The contest also reaches beyond Israel. Netanyahu tied himself closely to Donald Trump and the Republican Party while U.S. support for Israel fractured under the weight of the Gaza assault and the joint war on Iran. After Democrats captured both chambers of Congress in Tuesday’s U.S. midterms, Eisenkot promised to restore the relationship’s “bipartisan foundations,” Reuters reported.
That pledge cannot answer the harder question raised by the Israeli result: whether a government formed without Netanyahu would change policy toward Palestinians or simply change the manager of the same system. The certified vote creates an opening, not a transformation.
For now, one fact is settled. Netanyahu’s bloc lost its majority, the election commission found no fraud that altered the result, and Arab-led parties emerged stronger than ever. The coalition talks will show whether Israel’s political establishment respects all three conclusions.
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