Key Takeaways:
- Israel’s first on-time Knesset election since 1988 is set for Oct. 27, 2026—after Gaza, Lebanon, and the 2026 Iran war—and is framed as a referendum on Netanyahu’s long run, October 7 accountability (including a disputed UAE-warning report he calls a lie), and whether a 3.25% threshold system of 38 lists can still produce 61 seats.
- September polls mostly put Gadi Eisenkot’s Yashar ahead of Likud (often ~22 vs ~18–22) while the two blocs sit within a few seats of each other; Naftali Bennett’s Together (with Lapid), Lieberman, and threshold risks for Winter’s Amcha Yisrael and others are the kingmakers. Haredi-draft fights and Ben-Gvir’s refusal to merge with Smotrich split the right.
- Trump’s Gaza plan, strained Bibi–Trump talks, eroding Democratic support in the U.S. midterms, a stalled Saudi track tied to a Palestinian horizon Netanyahu rejects, and debt/defense (~68.6% of GDP, large 2026 defense budget) will bind whoever wins. A Yashar/Bennett cabinet might move faster on an Oct. 7 inquiry, conscription, and Washington’s sequencing; a rebuilt Netanyahu coalition likely would not. The author calls the race genuinely uncertain.
An Analysis of Israel’s First Post–October 7, 2023 Election, its Kingmakers, and its Regional and Economic Stakes
Introduction
On October 27, 2026, Israelis will go to the polls for the first time since the October 7, 2023 attacks, the Gaza war they triggered, the war with Hezbollah in Lebanon, and the 2026 war with Iran (Britannica, 2026). The election is also without precedent in a narrower, more technical sense: it is the first Knesset election since 1988 to be held on schedule rather than early, meaning that Benjamin Netanyahu’s thirty-seventh government will be the first Israeli coalition since 1973 to complete a full four-year term in office (Haaretz, 2026c). That combination of circumstances—an election forced by law rather than by political collapse, arriving after the most traumatic and geopolitically consequential three years in Israel’s modern history—gives the October 27 vote an unusual character. It is simultaneously a referendum on a single leader’s uninterrupted sixteen-year dominance of Israeli politics, a reckoning with the security failures of October 7, and a structural test of whether Israel’s fragmented multiparty system can produce a stable governing majority in the aftermath of war.
This essay surveys the central questions animating the campaign as Israelis prepare to vote. It begins by situating the election within its institutional context, before turning to the central empirical puzzle: whether Prime Minister Netanyahu can secure a further term despite a polling environment considerably less favourable to Likud than at any point since 2022. It then examines the rise of General (res.) Gadi Eisenkot and his Yashar party, assesses the roles of Naftali Bennett and other prospective kingmakers, and maps the increasingly fractious religious and far-right bloc. A substantial section addresses the American dimension—the volatile Trump-Netanyahu relationship, the machinery of Trump’s Gaza peace architecture, and the slow but measurable erosion of unconditional Democratic Party support for Israel ahead of the 2026 US midterms. The essay then considers plausible electoral and coalition outcomes and their implications for regional security, interrogates the extent to which Netanyahu’s foreign policy is personal versus institutional and therefore likely to outlast him, assesses the prospects of the Abraham Accords and the Saudi normalization track, and closes with an account of the economic constraints that will bind whichever government emerges from the vote.
The Institutional and Electoral Context
Israel elects all 120 members of its unicameral Knesset through closed-list proportional representation in a single nationwide constituency, with a 3.25 percent electoral threshold and seat allocation governed by the Bader–Ofer (D’Hondt) method, which mildly favours larger lists and rewards parties that sign surplus-vote-sharing agreements with one another (Britannica, 2026). This system, well suited to representing Israel’s genuine social and ideological diversity, has in recent cycles also produced chronic fragmentation: thirty-eight parties submitted candidate lists for the 2026 election, a number that itself testifies to the intensity of factional realignment since 2022 (Levaton & Karmel, 2026).
The outgoing 25th Knesset’s survival to full term should not be mistaken for stability. Netanyahu’s thirty-seventh government—comprising Likud, Otzma Yehudit, Noam, the Religious Zionist Party, United Torah Judaism and Shas, later joined by the merger of Gideon Sa’ar’s New Hope into Likud—was punctuated by the mass protest movement against judicial reform in early 2023, the Supreme Court’s January 2024 invalidation of the coalition’s ‘reasonableness’ law by an eight-to-seven majority (Associated Press, 2024), the departure and return of National Unity under Benny Gantz and Gadi Eisenkot following October 7, and repeated walkouts by Haredi factions over the unresolved question of military conscription. In mid-2025 both United Torah Judaism and Shas resigned from government over the stalled conscription bill, a rupture that led directly to the removal that August of Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee chairman Yuli Edelstein, who had insisted on enforceable draft quotas, and his replacement with the more coalition-compliant Boaz Bismuth (Sokol, 2025; JNS, 2025). Although the Haredi parties typically returned to their posts, the recurring threat of collapse became a defining feature of the government’s final eighteen months.
Several procedural controversies have shaped the campaign’s final weeks. In late August 2026 roughly one hundred Israeli citizens living abroad discovered they had been administratively deregistered from the voter rolls under an Interior Ministry classification known as ‘Code 51,’ which records them as having ceased to be Israeli residents; organized as the ‘Our Right to Vote’ campaign and represented by attorney Gilead Sher, their High Court petition was dismissed on September 2 on procedural grounds, the court finding it had been filed too late and without first exhausting the statutory appeals process, though the ruling left the underlying dispute over the classification’s criteria unresolved (Jerusalem Post, 2026i; Jerusalem Post, 2026j). Separately, tens of thousands of Israeli expatriates registered with the Fly&Vote initiative to arrange discounted charter flights home, prompting Likud to petition the Central Elections Committee to block the scheme, which it characterized as conferring an illicit electoral benefit skewed toward the opposition (AFP, 2026a). These episodes are more than campaign trivia: they signal an election contested at the level of institutional trust itself, in a political culture still absorbing the shock of a catastrophic security failure that a sitting prime minister has been accused of minimizing in his own defence.
The candidate-selection process within the governing party has itself been unusually contentious. Likud’s internal primary, originally scheduled for early August, was repeatedly postponed amid disputes over a Likud Central Committee decision granting Netanyahu personal authority to fill eight of the first thirty slots on the party’s list (Jerusalem Post, 2026k). When the primary was finally held on August 17, with turnout reaching 53.5 percent among 76,068 party members, Energy Minister Eli Cohen took the top elected slot, followed by Knesset Speaker Amir Ohana and Justice Minister Yariv Levin, a result read across Israeli commentary as evidence that no clear internal successor to Netanyahu had emerged even as the party’s overall standing weakened (Jerusalem Post, 2026k). These organizational dynamics, a governing party consolidating decision-making power around a single leader even as its vote share erodes, capture part of the structural volatility defining this election cycle.
Will Netanyahu Prevail Again?
At the dissolution of the twenty-fifth Knesset, Likud held thirty-two seats and, with the absorption of Sa’ar’s New Hope, entered the campaign with a nominal base of thirty-six. That base has since eroded sharply. A wave of September 2026 polls, taken after party lists closed, shows Likud falling to between eighteen and twenty-seven seats depending on the pollster, with most surveys clustering around nineteen to twenty-two—its lowest tallies of the cycle (Haaretz, 2026a; Jerusalem Post, 2026a; Jerusalem Post, 2026b). A Channel 12 poll published on September 8 put Yashar at twenty-five seats against Likud’s twenty-one, with the Eisenkot-led bloc reaching fifty-seven seats to the Netanyahu bloc’s fifty-two (Haaretz, 2026a). An average of five polls conducted the night the lists closed gave Yashar 23.6 seats to Likud’s 21.8, with the two blocs essentially tied at roughly fifty-three to fifty-four seats apiece (Jerusalem Post, 2026a). A Channel 13 survey published on September 17—among the most recent available—found the picture narrowly reversed, with the pro-Netanyahu bloc edging ahead at fifty-four seats to the opposition’s fifty-two, even as Likud itself fell to eighteen seats and Yashar led all individual parties with twenty-two (Haaretz, 2026b).
Two conclusions follow from this data. First, in every published poll of the final campaign, Likud individually trails Yashar, often substantially so—a reversal with no precedent in Netanyahu’s post-2009 career, during which Likud has always been the largest single party at election time. Second, and more consequentially, the aggregate bloc competition is essentially a toss-up: across five polls published in mid-September, the difference between the pro- and anti-Netanyahu blocs never exceeded a handful of seats, and one outlier survey (i24NEWS/Direct Polls) showed a twelve-seat swing toward Netanyahu that no other pollster replicated (Jerusalem Post, 2026b). This volatility reflects genuine uncertainty about whether several small right-wing lists—Ofer Winter’s Amcha Yisrael, the Hendel-Zelekha Reservists-Economic Party alliance—will clear the 3.25 percent threshold at all, since a handful of ‘wasted’ right-wing votes could singlehandedly cost Netanyahu’s bloc its majority even if Likud’s own vote share stabilizes (Israel Policy Forum, 2026). Netanyahu himself has publicly warned right-wing voters against supporting small parties for precisely this reason, a concern the emergence of Winter’s list has only sharpened (The Jewish Chronicle, 2026).
Compounding Netanyahu’s difficulty is the campaign’s persistent focus on October 7 accountability. A more damaging episode arrived on September 8, 2026, when Haaretz published an investigation, excerpted from a forthcoming book by reporters Shlomi Eldar and Ruth Yuval, alleging that UAE President Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan had personally warned Netanyahu by phone roughly ten days before the October 7 attack that Hamas was preparing a major operation (Associated Press, 2026a). Netanyahu’s office called the report an “absolute lie” and the prime minister announced he would sue Haaretz and its authors, but the allegation prompted opposition leaders, including Eisenkot and Bennett, to publicly declare him unfit to serve and to renew demands for an independent inquiry (Al Jazeera, 2026c). Taken together, the evidence suggests that an outright Netanyahu ‘victory’—in the sense of Likud again emerging as the largest party and Netanyahu forming a stable coalition without protracted difficulty—is now the less likely of the two broad scenarios, though his political survival, given the razor-thin bloc arithmetic and his demonstrated skill at coalition assembly across six previous governments, cannot be discounted.
It is also worth registering the limits of poll-based forecasting in an Israeli context where undecided-voter shares remain substantial and where several parties are polling within a percentage point of the electoral threshold in either direction. The Walla poll conducted immediately after list submission, for instance, surveyed only 506 respondents out of 3,603 people contacted, with a margin of sampling error of 4.4 percent, a range wide enough to encompass the difference between a Netanyahu-bloc majority and its opposite (Jerusalem Post, 2026a). The unusually wide spread between the i24NEWS/Direct Polls survey, which alone among major outlets showed Likud reclaiming a decisive lead with twenty-seven seats and the Netanyahu bloc reaching sixty, and every other contemporaneous poll further illustrates the methodological fragility underlying single-poll pronouncements of victory for either side (Jerusalem Post, 2026b). What can be stated with greater confidence is the underlying trend: across the entire second half of the campaign, from the first post-primary surveys in mid-August through the final pre-election readings in mid-September, Likud’s seat projection has moved consistently downward, from the low-to-mid twenties toward the high teens, even as the overall bloc competition has remained essentially even. That combination, a collapsing core party within a competitive bloc, is historically unusual for an incumbent prime minister and reflects the particular character of this election as a referendum on personal accountability rather than solely on policy or ideology.
Gadi Eisenkot and Yashar: A Credible Challenge to the Netanyahu Era?
Gadi Eisenkot, a former Chief of the General Staff of the Israel Defense Forces, entered electoral politics as part of Benny Gantz’s National Unity alliance before resigning from it in mid-2025 amid disagreements over the alliance’s direction, going on to found Yashar (‘Straight’) together with fellow former Knesset member Matan Kahana (Jerusalem Post, 2026l). Eisenkot formally launched the party’s election campaign on June 30, 2026, centring its platform on institutional reform and, most prominently, on the establishment of a state commission of inquiry into the October 7 failures—a demand he has pursued with particular moral authority given his own family’s losses during the war (Associated Press, 2026b; Jerusalem Post, 2026l).
Yashar’s programmatic core combines several threads that distinguish it from both Likud and the traditional centre-left. The party has committed to drafting a written constitution for Israel, a position it shares with Bennett’s Together alliance and Lieberman’s Yisrael Beiteinu, reflecting a broader post-judicial-reform consensus that the existing Basic Laws provide insufficiently clear rules for legislative and constitutional change (Sokol, 2026). On the highly charged question of ultra-Orthodox military conscription, Eisenkot has staked out a calibrated position that gives him credibility with reservist and security-minded voters without appearing to seek confrontation with religious communities as such, consistent with the broader hardening of public opinion on the issue documented in Section 5 (Israel Democracy Institute, 2025).
Yashar’s polling trajectory has been the single most consequential development of the campaign. Having entered September in a tight race with Likud, the party pulled decisively ahead as the campaign’s final phase began: it topped four of five major polls published in mid-September, and in several surveys its combined opposition bloc reached as high as fifty-seven to sixty seats—within one seat of an outright majority in one Jerusalem Post-reported poll (Jerusalem Post, 2026c; Jerusalem Post, 2026a). On September 10, Yashar signed a formal surplus-vote agreement with the Democrats, mirroring a parallel agreement between Bennett’s Together and Lieberman’s Yisrael Beiteinu—an alignment of the four principal anti-Netanyahu lists that maximizes their combined seat yield under the Bader–Ofer formula (Jerusalem Post, 2026d).
Whether Yashar’s polling strength translates into governing power depends on coalition arithmetic that Eisenkot does not fully control. Attempts throughout early 2026 to fuse Yashar with Bennett’s list into a single unified anti-Netanyahu ticket repeatedly foundered on questions of personal leadership: Eisenkot rejected Bennett’s proposal in March 2026, explicitly declining to serve as the junior partner on a joint list (Jerusalem Post, 2026e). That the two men, ideologically adjacent and sharing an overlapping voter base, could not agree to unite is itself instructive: it suggests that the ‘anti-Netanyahu’ camp in 2026, much as in 2019–2021, remains a coalition of convenience organized more around opposition to a single figure than around a shared governing programme, a structural weakness that could complicate coalition negotiations even after votes are counted. Nonetheless, Eisenkot’s emergence as the most consistently leading individual figure in the polls—a former chief of staff whose critique of Netanyahu rests on operational and security credibility rather than ideological opposition—represents the most serious institutional challenge to Netanyahu’s continued leadership that Israeli politics has produced since 2022.
Yashar’s rise has also attracted defectors from established parties, a further indicator of the party’s gravitational pull on the anti-Netanyahu camp’s centre of mass, as figures from adjacent centrist and security-oriented lists joined Eisenkot’s slate in the campaign’s final weeks (Jerusalem Post, 2026l). This dynamic mirrors, in miniature, the broader logic of Israeli coalition politics, in which perceived momentum can become genuinely self-fulfilling as strategic voters and elites alike gravitate toward whichever list appears best positioned to translate votes into governing power. Whether that momentum culminating on October 27 proves durable once the formal counting begins, or whether it dissipates as undecided voters revert to more familiar partisan loyalties in the polling booth, remains the single largest source of uncertainty in forecasting the election’s outcome.
Naftali Bennett and the Kingmakers
If Eisenkot has emerged as the polling frontrunner, Naftali Bennett occupies the more classically pivotal position of a kingmaker whose choices could determine which bloc reaches sixty-one seats. Bennett, who served as prime minister for one year within the ‘change government’ of 2021–2022 before stepping back from politics, registered a new party under the placeholder name Bennett 2026 in April 2025 (Jewish Virtual Library, 2026). On April 26, 2026, Bennett and former prime minister Yair Lapid announced that their respective parties, Bennett 2026 and Yesh Atid, would contest the election on a single list named Together, with Bennett as its leader—reviving the informal ‘Brothers’ Alliance’ the two men first forged in 2013 (Times of Israel, 2026a). The merger gave Bennett access to Yesh Atid’s established national campaign infrastructure and state financing while allowing him to lead a combined list drawing on both centrist and right-leaning voters (Jewish Virtual Library, 2026).
Bennett’s platform is distinguished by two structural reform proposals. He has pledged that the first act of a government he leads would be to advance a Basic Law limiting prime ministers to two terms or eight years in office, whichever is longer, framing the proposal—alongside establishment of a state commission of inquiry into October 7—as a precondition for any party joining his coalition (Sokol, 2026). As with Yashar and Yisrael Beiteinu, Bennett has also committed to drafting a written Israeli constitution intended to entrench checks and balances against the kind of judicial-executive confrontation Israel experienced in 2023 and again in 2025 (Jerusalem Post, 2026f). On economic policy, responding to an April 2026 report finding Israel’s cost of living roughly twenty percent higher than in comparable wealthy European countries, Bennett has pledged a security-focused platform combined with a plan to lower living costs, promising to arrive in office with fully prepared reforms rather than convene new committees (Yahoo News, 2026). Bennett has explicitly positioned Together as a ‘Zionist’ bloc that will govern only with other Zionist parties, ruling out formal coalition partnership with Arab-majority parties—a stance that narrows his coalition options relative to his 2021 government, which had included Ra’am, but which also positions him to attract voters uneasy with that precedent.
The kingmaker landscape extends beyond Bennett. Avigdor Lieberman’s Yisrael Beiteinu has functioned since 2025 as an organizing hub for opposition coordination, issuing ‘guiding principles’ for a prospective post-Netanyahu government and repeatedly urging opposition parties to consolidate rather than split votes among themselves (Jerusalem Post, 2026g). On the right, Ofer Winter, a former IDF brigadier general who commanded the Givati Brigade and the Duvdevan unit, launched the new Amcha Yisrael (‘People of Israel’) party in Jerusalem on August 25, 2026, unveiling a slate that included Arab-Israeli activist Yoseph Haddad and former Jerusalem deputy mayor Fleur Hassan-Nahoum and presenting the election as a referendum between Israel’s existing leadership and a new generation shaped by October 7 (Jerusalem Post, 2026m). Winter has since stated his party will not join any government that has not first passed a law ending draft evasion, positioning Amcha Yisrael as open to alliance but only with ‘new and clean people’ rather than existing Knesset factions (Jerusalem Post, 2026n). Benny Gantz’s Blue and White, once a major force, has by contrast polled below the electoral threshold throughout September, a reminder that political capital in Israel’s fluid party system can dissipate as quickly as it accumulates (Jerusalem Post, 2026a).
The kingmaker calculus is further complicated by the ambiguous status of the Arab-majority parties, which collectively poll in the range of eleven to fourteen seats across most September surveys yet remain explicitly excluded from the governing coalitions envisioned by Bennett and much of the self-described ‘Zionist opposition.’ Whether any anti-Netanyahu coalition reaching sixty-one seats through nominally ‘Zionist’ partners alone could sustain itself without at least the tacit abstention of Arab-party lawmakers on confidence votes, much as Ra’am’s external cooperation proved important to the 2021 Bennett-Lapid government, remains one of the more delicate, and least discussed, arithmetic questions hanging over the post-election bargaining that will follow October 27.
The Religious and Far-Right Bloc: Fragmentation Under Pressure
The parties anchoring Netanyahu’s governing coalition since 2022—the Religious Zionist Party, Otzma Yehudit, Shas and United Torah Judaism—enter the 2026 election in a considerably weaker and more internally divided position than at any point in the outgoing term. Netanyahu spent much of late August 2026 publicly and repeatedly urging Religious Zionism leader Bezalel Smotrich and Otzma Yehudit leader Itamar Ben-Gvir to merge their lists, warning that a split right-wing vote could ‘waste tens of thousands’ of votes and hand power to Eisenkot; Ben-Gvir refused, citing internal polling suggesting a merger would cost his party three to four seats, prompting Likud to accuse him of effectively ‘crowning’ a left-wing government (The National, 2026; Al-Monitor, 2026a; Jerusalem Post, 2026o). Unable to secure that alliance, Smotrich instead pursued merger talks with Moshe Feiglin’s Zehut party, negotiations Ben-Gvir publicly criticized as a cynical pressure tactic once their existence became known (Jerusalem Post, 2026p).
The conscription question has remained the bloc’s most acute internal fault line throughout the term. Public support for ending Haredi exemptions rose sharply during the war years: an Israel Democracy Institute survey found that 84.5 percent of the non-Haredi Jewish public backed some form of Haredi conscription by November 2024, compared to sixty-seven percent in January of that year, while support for the status quo exemption collapsed from twenty-two percent to just nine percent over the same period (Israel Democracy Institute, 2025). The Supreme Court had declared continued blanket exemption unlawful in 2024, and the resulting enforcement standoff between the army and Haredi leadership fed directly into the mid-2025 coalition rupture described in Section 1: after Shas and United Torah Judaism walked out of government over the terms of a proposed conscription bill, Likud’s own faction voted to remove committee chairman Yuli Edelstein, who had insisted on real enforcement mechanisms, replacing him with Boaz Bismuth in a move opposition leader Yair Lapid characterized as orchestrated by Haredi factions seeking to evade service obligations (Sokol, 2025).
Taken together, these developments depict a religious-right coalition under genuine strain: squeezed between a public that has hardened decisively in favour of universal conscription, a new competitor (Amcha Yisrael) drawing support with a hybrid platform of conscription reform and broad-tent right-wing governance, and internal disputes over merger strategy that Netanyahu has been unable to resolve through personal intervention. Whether this fragmentation costs the pro-Netanyahu bloc its majority likely depends less on any single party’s ideological trajectory than on the mundane arithmetic of whether Amcha Yisrael, the Reservists-Economic Party alliance, or both clear 3.25 percent of the national vote.
The conscription dispute also illustrates the extent to which Israel’s judiciary has become an unavoidable actor in what is nominally an electoral and legislative question. The Supreme Court’s 2024 ruling that continued blanket exemption for Haredi yeshiva students was unlawful did not, on its own, compel the coalition to legislate a durable alternative; rather, it produced an extended standoff between the army, the courts and the coalition’s own religious parties that persisted essentially unresolved through the entire final year of the twenty-fifth Knesset (Sokol, 2025; JNS, 2025). This unresolved status means the incoming government, whichever coalition it comprises, will inherit both a legal mandate for conscription reform it cannot indefinitely postpone and a religious-right electorate for whom any credible reform threatens to be experienced as an existential assault on a communal way of life organized for generations around full-time religious study in place of military service. Few other issues in the campaign illustrate as starkly the gap between what public opinion has come to demand, an overwhelming and hardening majority in favour of universal service, and what any governing coalition dependent even partially on Haredi votes or Haredi-adjacent religious-Zionist partners can realistically deliver.
The American Dimension: Trump, the Democrats, and the 2026 Midterms
Israel’s election unfolds against the backdrop of an unusually strained relationship between Netanyahu and President Donald Trump, whose second term began with expressions of unconditional alliance but has evolved into a more transactional and occasionally openly adversarial dynamic. According to reporting compiled by Chatham House, Trump privately expressed frustration with Netanyahu’s military posture toward Lebanon and Iran even as the two publicly maintained the rhetoric of a ‘beautiful friendship,’ and is reported to have used explicit language describing Netanyahu as ‘crazy’ during a tense phone call preceding the announcement of a Gaza ceasefire (Chatham House, 2026). Trump’s twenty-point peace plan, unveiled after months of hesitation, effectively imposed a ceasefire framework on both Israel and Hamas rather than emerging from bilateral negotiation on equal terms—a sequence some observers read as evidence that Netanyahu, having reportedly delayed key decisions during the Biden administration in anticipation of a more accommodating Trump presidency, discovered instead a US administration willing to exert direct pressure once in office (Chatham House, 2026).
That pressure has grown more visible as the election approaches. In August 2026, Nickolay Mladenov, the official leading Trump’s Gaza ceasefire implementation as head of the president’s ‘Board of Peace,’ publicly criticized continued Israeli strikes on Gaza, framing the choice starkly between a disarmed and reconstructed territory and a rearmed, radicalized one on the edge of renewed war (NPR, 2026). Netanyahu has resisted the plan’s central disarmament sequencing, insisting Israeli forces will not withdraw from their current lines in Gaza until Hamas fully disarms—a position Hamas has in turn conditioned on Israeli withdrawal to the ‘yellow line’ established by the October 2025 ceasefire, producing a standoff neither side has broken (CNN, 2026a). A further episode in early August, in which a weekend of Israeli strikes killed civilians and destroyed medical supplies, drew a rare public rebuke from Mladenov and a joint visit by him and senior US adviser Aryeh Lightstone to press Netanyahu directly to halt operations—pressure to which Netanyahu’s office responded by publicly reaffirming Israel’s refusal to withdraw (CNN, 2026b). Notably, Netanyahu himself remained conspicuously silent through much of this episode even as his coalition partners spoke out, a caution widely read as reflecting the political sensitivity of appearing to bend to American pressure less than three months before an election in which his own security record is under unprecedented scrutiny (CNN, 2026b).
This friction represents a marked evolution from the tone of the relationship earlier in Trump’s second term. When the two leaders met at Mar-a-Lago in December 2025 to discuss the initial phases of the ceasefire plan, Trump publicly praised Netanyahu as a wartime prime minister and extended what he described as full support for Israel, while Netanyahu in turn credited the Trump administration with what he termed a fundamental transformation of America’s regional posture (News on Air, 2026). That warmth persisted through the earliest phase of ceasefire implementation, during which Hamas released eighteen hostages and Israel eased its offensive in exchange for the release of Palestinian prisoners, but subsequent meetings grew markedly tenser as the two sides worked through the far more difficult second-phase questions of disarmament, territorial withdrawal, and Gaza’s political future (Al Jazeera, 2025). The trajectory from unqualified alliance rhetoric in early meetings to public friction over implementation by mid-2026 illustrates a broader pattern common to Trump’s approach toward allied leaders: an initial phase of maximal public affirmation followed by growing impatience once an ally’s domestic political constraints are perceived to be obstructing the president’s own stated objectives, a pattern with direct relevance to how a re-elected or newly elected Israeli prime minister might expect to be treated by Washington in the term ahead.
On the American domestic side, the 2026 midterm election cycle has coincided with a measurable erosion of the historic bipartisan consensus favouring Israel, concentrated overwhelmingly within the Democratic coalition. An AP-NORC poll found that fifty-eight percent of Democrats now believe the United States is too supportive of Israel, up from forty-five percent in January 2024, while sixty-two percent say American support for Palestinians is insufficient (The National Desk, 2026). Progressive primary challengers have translated this sentiment into electoral gains: Abdul El-Sayed, who has called for ending the $3.8 billion in annual US military assistance to Israel and has characterized the Gaza campaign as genocide, won the Democratic Senate nomination in Michigan despite roughly $54 million spent against him by AIPAC-aligned groups, while a slate of progressive candidates backed by New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani won primary victories in deep-blue districts running explicitly on curtailing the US-Israel alliance (Al Jazeera, 2026b; INSS, 2026a). At the Democratic National Committee’s spring 2026 meeting, the party leadership deferred votes on resolutions that would have restricted military aid to Israeli units accused of war-crimes violations and rejected a measure condemning AIPAC-linked campaign spending, underscoring a widening gap between the party’s institutional leadership and its more vocal activist base (Arab Center DC, 2026).
Two important qualifications temper any narrative of wholesale Democratic abandonment of Israel. First, the party’s mainstream establishment—illustrated by groups such as Democratic Majority for Israel—continues to insist that support for a negotiated end to the war is fully compatible with, rather than a departure from, longstanding pro-Israel policy, and party leaders have generally resisted binding commitments to cut aid (Arab Center DC, 2026). Second, Republican voters’ sympathies toward Israel have remained comparatively stable, meaning the shift is a Democratic-specific phenomenon rather than a bipartisan realignment, and Israel’s formal military and diplomatic relationship with Washington depends substantially on which party controls Congress and the White House after November 2026 (The National Desk, 2026). Nonetheless, the practical implication for whichever government emerges from Israel’s October 27 vote is that it will govern within a Washington political environment measurably less automatically permissive of unconditional support than the one Netanyahu enjoyed for most of his post-2023 wartime leadership—a structural constraint that operates independently of, but interacts consequentially with, the outcome of Israel’s own election.
The financial dimension of this Democratic realignment has itself become a campaign issue on the American side, with direct relevance to how any future Israeli government might read its own leverage in Washington. Pro-Israel political action committees, AIPAC foremost among them, spent over one hundred million dollars in the 2024 cycle to defeat progressive incumbents who had called for conditioning military assistance, and financial filings ahead of the 2026 midterms indicate both pro-Israel and progressive counter-organizations are accumulating unprecedented campaign war chests for a repeat contest (Streamlinefeed, 2026). That such large-scale spending is now required simply to hold ground within the Democratic coalition, rather than to expand it, is itself indicative of how far the political centre of gravity has shifted since 2023. For an incoming Israeli government, and particularly for a Netanyahu-led coalition whose relationship with the Trump administration has already grown visibly strained over Gaza disarmament sequencing, the erosion of automatic Democratic support removes what was historically a crucial hedge: even when relations with a Republican administration cooled, as they periodically did during the Obama and Biden years, bipartisan congressional support provided a floor beneath the US-Israel relationship that is now, for the first time in decades, no longer assured.
Likely Outcomes and Implications for Regional Security
Three broad scenarios frame the range of plausible outcomes on October 27. In the first, a Yashar-anchored coalition—drawing on Eisenkot’s plurality, Bennett’s Together, Lieberman’s Yisrael Beiteinu, the Democrats, and potentially Gantz’s residual Blue and White voters—crosses the sixty-one-seat threshold without formal Arab-party participation, consistent with the explicit ‘Zionist government’ commitments Bennett has made during the campaign. Such a government, while ideologically heterogeneous, would likely converge quickly on two immediate priorities on which its constituent parties are already aligned: establishing a state commission of inquiry into October 7 and advancing universal conscription legislation, both of which enjoy substantial public support and unify otherwise disparate coalition partners.
In the second scenario, Netanyahu reconstitutes a version of his current coalition, contingent on enough small right-wing parties—Amcha Yisrael, the Religious Zionist–Zehut bloc, Otzma Yehudit—clearing the electoral threshold to supply the marginal seats his weakened Likud can no longer provide alone. Given the polling volatility documented in Section 2, this scenario remains fully live, and Netanyahu’s demonstrated capacity across six previous governments to assemble and sustain multiparty coalitions under pressure should not be discounted even amid his party’s historically poor individual standing. A third, less dramatic but institutionally significant possibility is a prolonged post-election stalemate in which neither bloc can reliably reach sixty-one seats, potentially reproducing the pattern of repeated elections and caretaker governments that characterized 2019–2022, notwithstanding the current cycle’s rhetorical emphasis on ending precisely that instability.
Each scenario carries distinct implications for regional security. A Yashar- or Bennett-led government, less structurally dependent on settler-movement and Haredi coalition partners, would likely find it politically easier to accept the full sequencing of Trump’s Gaza disarmament and reconstruction plan, including withdrawal to the October 2025 ‘yellow line’—a step the current government has resisted—thereby reducing the risk of the plan’s collapse into renewed conflict that Mladenov has explicitly warned against (CNN, 2026a; NPR, 2026). The stakes of that sequencing extend well beyond Israel itself: Morocco’s own diplomatic pivot toward the Trump-brokered ‘Council of Peace,’ including its stated readiness to deploy police and training personnel in support of Gaza’s stabilization, illustrates how directly Arab partners have staked their own regional standing on the plan’s success, and how a collapse would carry costs for the broader coalition Washington has assembled around it, not for Israel alone (Chtatou, 2026e). Such a government would also be better positioned to pursue a credible ‘political horizon’ for Palestinians, the precondition Saudi Arabia has consistently attached to normalization, discussed further in Section 9. Conversely, a reconstituted Netanyahu-Smotrich-Ben-Gvir coalition would likely sustain the harder line on Gaza withdrawal and Hamas disarmament sequencing that has already drawn open friction with the Trump administration’s own envoys, prolonging both the immediate humanitarian and security risks in Gaza and the diplomatic strain with Washington documented in Section 6. In either case, the near-even bloc arithmetic revealed by September polling suggests that whichever government does emerge is likely to govern with a narrow and potentially fragile majority, constraining its capacity for decisive policy shifts regardless of its ideological composition.
Netanyahu’s Foreign Policy: Personal Ideology, Institutional Interest, or Both?
A central analytical question posed by this election is how much of what is conventionally described as ‘Netanyahu’s foreign policy’ reflects durable Israeli state interests and ideological convictions likely to persist under any successor, and how much reflects the specific political incentives of a leader whose parliamentary survival has depended, since 2022, on coalition partners drawn from Israel’s settler-movement and ultra-Orthodox right. The evidence assembled in this essay suggests the honest answer is a fusion of both, in proportions that are themselves difficult to disentangle.
Several elements of Netanyahu’s foreign policy stance appear rooted in longstanding ideological conviction independent of any particular coalition. His explicit and repeated opposition to Palestinian statehood—reaffirmed even as Trump’s own peace framework explicitly envisions a ‘credible pathway’ toward a two-state outcome—reflects a position he has held consistently across decades and multiple governments, not merely a concession extracted by Smotrich or Ben-Gvir (NPR, 2026). Similarly, his insistence, articulated pointedly in response to the disarmament dispute, that Israel will act for its own security even against the preferences of its closest allies reflects a longstanding strategic doctrine of unilateral deterrence that predates the current coalition by decades (CNN, 2026a).
Other elements, however, appear more clearly contingent on the specific political arithmetic of his current coalition and personal survival. The Chatham House analysis of the Trump-Netanyahu relationship suggests that Netanyahu’s pattern of delaying consequential decisions—on a Saudi normalization track, on the terms of hostage-ceasefire negotiations—for as long as domestically possible reflects less a fixed strategic doctrine than an ongoing effort to manage a coalition whose most ideologically extreme members would treat concessions on Gaza withdrawal or Palestinian statehood as grounds for bringing down the government (Chatham House, 2026). His continued resistance to full withdrawal under the Trump plan, even at the cost of open friction with Washington’s own peace envoys, is difficult to explain purely in security terms given that Israel’s military establishment itself has largely achieved its stated operational objectives; it is more readily explained as a function of coalition dependency on partners who have historically treated territorial withdrawal as an existential red line (CNN, 2026a; CNN, 2026b).
This distinction has direct implications for what would change, and what would not, under a successor government. A Yashar- or Bennett-led coalition, freed from dependency on Smotrich and Ben-Gvir, would likely retain Israel’s core doctrine of military deterrence and scepticism toward internationally imposed frameworks—both Eisenkot’s and Bennett’s own security backgrounds make continuity on these points highly probable—while plausibly diverging sharply on the tactical questions currently driving friction with Washington: the pace of Gaza withdrawal, the openness to a genuine political horizon for Palestinians as a precondition for Saudi normalization, and, not least, the willingness to submit October 7 itself to independent, non-self-authored investigation. In this sense, the October 27 election is less a referendum on whether Israel’s fundamental strategic posture will change than on whether the specific coalition dependencies that have constrained Netanyahu’s tactical flexibility since 2022 will persist into the next government.
A further consideration bears on how much of Netanyahu’s approach reflects institutional path dependency rather than individual choice at all. Israel’s post-1973 security establishment has developed durable doctrines, active defense through systems such as Iron Dome, preventive strikes against emerging threats, and a general reluctance to rely on multilateral security guarantees, that reflect decades of accumulated institutional learning within the IDF and the defense ministry rather than the preferences of any single prime minister (Chatham House, 2026). Eisenkot, as a former chief of staff, is if anything more closely identified with these institutional doctrines than Netanyahu himself, whose background is in diplomacy and business rather than the military chain of command; his platform’s emphasis on accountability and reform should therefore not be mistaken for doctrinal dovishness. What genuinely distinguishes the candidates is less their view of Israel’s security requirements in the abstract than their assessment of how those requirements interact with alliance management, domestic legitimacy, and the specific question of whether the security establishment’s own October 7 failures require independent scrutiny that a sitting prime minister implicated in the outcome has structural incentives to resist. On that narrower but politically decisive question, the choice facing Israeli voters on October 27 is unusually clear.
The Abraham Accords and the Future of Israel’s Relations with the Arab World
The Abraham Accords have proven institutionally resilient through the Gaza war, even as their expansion has slowed considerably relative to the pace anticipated before October 7 (JISS, 2026; Chtatou, 2026a). Kazakhstan formally joined the framework in November 2025, and in December 2025 Netanyahu unilaterally extended Israeli recognition to Somaliland, which pledged in turn to join the Accords (Middle East Institute, 2026). During the 2026 Iran war, security cooperation among Accords signatories deepened substantially, most visibly through Israel’s deployment of an Iron Dome battery and supporting personnel to the United Arab Emirates—a degree of operational integration that would have been difficult to imagine before 2020 and that demonstrates the Accords’ value extends well beyond commercial and diplomatic normalization into concrete crisis-response cooperation (Heritage Foundation, 2026). In parallel, the US State Department submitted a formal strategy to Congress in mid-2026 for expanding the Accords geographically into Central Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa while continuing to prioritize Saudi Arabia as the framework’s most consequential potential addition (Heritage Foundation, 2026). Morocco’s own experience within the framework is instructive here: its 2020 normalization rests on centuries of documented Jewish-Muslim coexistence and constitutional recognition of Moroccan Jewish heritage, making it, in this sense, less a purely transactional bargain than a partial recovery of historical ties—a religious and civilizational dimension of the Accords that has proven durable even as the framework’s newer, more transactional accessions have stalled (Chtatou, 2026b). Rabat has continued to deepen this relationship even through the war years, upgrading its diplomatic representation with Israel in September 2026 while maintaining its own established position favouring a negotiated Palestinian settlement, an approach that illustrates how normalization and continued advocacy for Palestinian statehood have coexisted within the Moroccan model rather than functioning as alternatives (Chtatou, 2026c).
Saudi Arabia remains the decisive test case, and its position has if anything hardened rather than softened since October 7. Riyadh’s pre-war normalization track, reportedly close to completion by late 2023, stalled with the outbreak of the Gaza war and has not resumed at anything like its former pace (Middle East Institute, 2026). Saudi officials have continued to insist that normalization depends on credible progress toward Palestinian statehood, a position the kingdom has not publicly relaxed despite President Trump’s July 2026 statement explicitly linking a prospective US-Saudi civil nuclear cooperation agreement to Saudi accession to the Accords (Legal United States, 2026). Analysts at Israel’s Institute for National Security Studies have further noted a concerning countervailing trend: even as the Saudi government has made curricular reforms removing antisemitic material from textbooks, the Anti-Defamation League issued an unusual formal statement in January 2026 expressing concern over intensifying antisemitic discourse and public criticism of the Accords among prominent Saudi commentators, suggesting that elite diplomatic calculation and popular sentiment within the kingdom are, if anything, diverging (INSS, 2026b).
The connection between Israel’s domestic political outcome and the Saudi track is therefore not merely incidental but structural. Riyadh’s stated condition—a credible pathway to Palestinian statehood—is precisely the position Netanyahu has most consistently and explicitly rejected, including in his direct rebuttal to Trump’s own peace envoys (NPR, 2026). This diagnosis is consistent with the assessment that Israel’s declared rejection of Palestinian sovereignty in any form, reinforced by accelerating West Bank settlement activity, removes the political foundation on which a stable post-conflict regional architecture could otherwise be built (Chtatou, 2026d). A government led by figures less structurally bound to the settler-movement right, and more willing, as Bennett and Eisenkot’s campaign rhetoric on Oct 7 accountability and institutional reform suggests, to align with rather than resist the Trump administration’s broader regional architecture, would be substantially better positioned to offer Riyadh the political cover it requires to proceed. Absent such a shift, the most plausible near-term trajectory for the Accords is continued incremental expansion at the margins—additional Central Asian or African partners, deeper security integration among existing signatories—without the transformative addition of Saudi Arabia that would fundamentally alter the framework’s regional weight.
It is also worth noting that the Accords’ institutional resilience through the Gaza war does not equate to strategic vindication of the model that produced them. Scholarship on the framework’s post-2023 reconfiguration has emphasized that the Accords were never a substitute for resolving the underlying Israeli-Palestinian conflict but rather a parallel track premised on the assumption that expanding regional economic and security integration could proceed independently of that conflict’s resolution; the events of October 7 and the war that followed constituted a direct challenge to that assumption, one the Accords survived operationally but which exposed their limits as a substitute for, rather than complement to, progress on the Palestinian question (Manara Magazine, 2026). Connectivity initiatives associated with the broader normalization architecture, including the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor and the Trump-branded Route for International Peace and Prosperity, continue to be cited by US officials as evidence of the framework’s expanding economic logic, but their realization remains contingent on precisely the security and political stability that the war has placed in question (Heritage Foundation, 2026). For Morocco and other early Arab signatories that normalized relations with Israel in 2020, the coming Israeli government’s posture on Palestinian statehood will likely shape not only the prospects for new accessions but also the durability of public and elite support for existing normalization within their own societies, where the war has visibly strained the domestic political consensus underpinning the original agreements.
Economic Implications of the Election
Whichever government forms after October 27 will inherit a fiscal position substantially more strained than at any point in the preceding decade. Israel’s public debt-to-GDP ratio rose from roughly sixty percent at the end of 2022 to 68.6 percent at the end of 2025, according to the International Monetary Fund’s 2026 Article IV assessment, with the central government balance swinging from a 0.6 percent surplus in 2022 to a deficit exceeding six percent of GDP by 2024 (IMF, 2026). The OECD’s mid-2026 outlook projected the deficit would widen further, to 5.3 percent of GDP in 2026 before narrowing to an estimated 4.2 percent in 2027, contingent on declining defense expenditure and continued strong tax receipts (Ynetnews, 2026). The IMF assessed the government’s own 2026 budget deficit ceiling of 3.9 percent of GDP as a step toward consolidation but insufficient, absent further measures, to place the debt ratio on a sustainably downward path (IMF, 2026).
Defense spending remains the dominant structural driver of this fiscal strain. Outlays peaked at nearly eight percent of GDP in 2024 and have remained elevated since, with the approved 2026 defense budget reaching NIS 144 billion—leaving, according to Jerusalem Post analysis, comparatively little fiscal space for civilian priorities including housing, transport, healthcare, and education even as the cost-of-living crisis has become a central campaign issue for Bennett, Yashar and other opposition lists alike (Jerusalem Post, 2026h). A separate Calcalist analysis cited by Ynetnews warned that a proposed $118.7 billion multi-year defense plan, combined with efforts to reduce reliance on US assistance, could push Israel’s debt-to-GDP ratio as high as eighty-three percent by 2035 if military operations continue at anything approaching their 2024–2026 intensity (Daily Sabah, 2026).
Against this backdrop, growth forecasts present a more encouraging but complicated picture. The Bank of Israel projected 3.8 percent growth for 2026 as of its early-2026 assessment, revised downward from an original 5.2 percent forecast issued before the outbreak of the 2026 Iran war, with the OECD’s own mid-year projection settling at 3.3 percent for 2026 and a sharp rebound to 5.6 percent anticipated for 2027 assuming the security situation stabilizes (Times of Israel, 2026b; Ynetnews, 2026). Analysts caution, however, that headline growth figures substantially overstate underlying economic health: much of the rebound reflects delayed consumption and elevated government spending rather than organic private-sector expansion, and per-capita GDP has not returned to its pre-war trajectory, leaving many Israeli households experiencing a materially lower standard of living even as aggregate output figures recover (Jerusalem Post, 2026h). Israel’s cost of living, roughly twenty percent above comparable wealthy European economies as of an April 2026 assessment, has consequently become a defining and largely bloc-neutral campaign issue, with both Bennett’s cost-of-living platform and Yashar’s own messaging targeting the same underlying voter grievance (Yahoo News, 2026).
Israel’s sovereign creditworthiness has nonetheless shown notable resilience through the war years, with international bond issuances—exceeding $75 billion in 2024 and $60 billion in 2025, followed by a further oversubscribed $6 billion issuance in early 2026—suggesting that international capital markets continue to price Israeli risk as manageable despite the credit-rating downgrades all three major agencies imposed in 2024 (Allianz Trade, 2026). A separate asymmetry with direct electoral salience concerns Israel’s trading relationship with its principal partner: the United States has imposed a fifteen percent tariff on certain Israeli exports even as Israel has reduced its own tariff on American imports to zero, a trade posture that compounds the domestic cost-of-living debate feeding directly into campaign platforms across the political spectrum (Allianz, 2026). Ultimately, the fiscal and structural constraints documented here will bind any government that emerges from the October 27 vote: the accumulated debt burden, elevated defense baseline, and labour-market strain from prolonged reservist mobilization are functions of nearly three years of continuous warfare rather than of any single party’s fiscal philosophy, meaning that political change in Jerusalem is likely to affect the pace and distribution of fiscal adjustment far more than it affects the underlying scale of the challenge.
The 2026 state budget itself, at NIS 144 billion for defense alone and described by lawmakers as Israel’s largest ever, illustrates how the fiscal debate has become entangled with the conscription controversy examined in Section 5: substantial transfers continue to flow to Haredi educational and religious institutions even as the same government struggles to enforce conscription obligations on the community these transfers primarily benefit, a juxtaposition that has become a recurring target of opposition criticism from Yashar, Together and the Democrats alike (Jerusalem Post, 2026h). The labour-market dimension of the fiscal strain deserves particular emphasis: extended reservist mobilization has removed a substantial share of the male working-age population from civilian employment for cumulative periods unprecedented in Israel’s post-1973 history, while a sharp reduction in the availability of Palestinian workers, historically a significant source of labour in construction and agriculture, has compounded sectoral shortages even as unemployment paradoxically fell to 2.6 percent by February 2026, reflecting labour scarcity rather than robust job creation (Ynetnews, 2026). Whichever coalition governs after October 27 will therefore face a structurally tight labour market, a defense budget difficult to compress given the unresolved security situation on multiple fronts, and a public increasingly unwilling to accept indefinitely deferred civilian investment as the price of continued military readiness, a set of pressures that will shape budgetary politics irrespective of which parties hold the finance and defense portfolios.
Conclusion
The October 27, 2026 election arrives at a genuinely unsettled moment in Israeli politics, and the evidence surveyed in this essay resists any confident prediction of its outcome. Benjamin Netanyahu, seeking to extend a premiership already the longest in Israel’s history, confronts a Likud party polling at historic lows, a public increasingly insistent on accountability for the October 7 failures his own government has been accused of obscuring, and a religious-right coalition fracturing under the combined pressure of the conscription question and new competitors on its own flank. Gadi Eisenkot’s Yashar party has emerged as the most consistent polling leader among individual parties, offering a security-credentialed, institutionally reformist alternative, but its path to government depends on coalition partners—Bennett foremost among them—with whom it has struggled to reach even preliminary terms of cooperation. The bloc-level arithmetic, oscillating within a handful of seats of an even split across successive September polls, means the most honest forecast is genuine uncertainty rather than a predetermined outcome in either direction.
What is less uncertain is the significance of whichever result emerges. This essay has argued that Netanyahu’s foreign policy represents a fusion of durable ideological conviction—scepticism of Palestinian statehood, doctrinal commitment to unilateral deterrence—with tactical positions more clearly contingent on his specific coalition dependencies, positions a successor government freed from reliance on Smotrich and Ben-Gvir could plausibly revise. That distinction matters directly for the trajectory of Gaza’s postwar order, where continued resistance to the Trump administration’s disarmament sequencing risks the renewed conflict its own envoys have publicly warned against; for the prospects of Saudi normalization, which hinges on precisely the political horizon for Palestinians that Netanyahu has resisted; and for Israel’s relationship with a United States whose Democratic coalition is exhibiting the most significant erosion of unconditional support for Israel in a generation, even as the Republican-controlled executive branch pursues its own increasingly assertive peace framework. Beneath all of these external dynamics lies a fiscal and economic reality—elevated debt, structurally high defense spending, and a cost-of-living crisis affecting Israeli households across the political spectrum—that will constrain whichever coalition governs, regardless of its ideological composition. In this sense, the October 27 election is best understood not as a single referendum on one man’s leadership, however central that question has become, but as a structural stress test of whether Israel’s fragmented parliamentary system can convert widespread public demand for accountability and reform into a governing coalition capable of navigating the interlocking security, diplomatic, and economic challenges that nearly three years of continuous warfare have left in their wake.
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