Israel’s Election Changes the Arithmetic, No...

Summary

• RANE judged that Iran is the file on which the result matters most, with Netanyahu more inclined to act alone and Eisenkot to work more closely with Washington.
• RANE concluded that Riyadh wants a credible path to a Palestinian state before anything else, and that neither Netanyahu nor Eisenkot is likely to reverse course on settlements or on operations in Gaza and the West Bank.
• Gulf states and Europe should resist treating the next cabinet as a blank page; as RANE put it, it will be judged on outcomes in Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon, not on who holds the premiership.

AI Generated Summary

Israelis went to the polls on Tuesday, for the first time since the Hamas-led attacks of October 2023 and came away with a result that pleases nobody. Neither Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu nor his challenger, the former military chief Gadi Eisenkot, got anywhere near the 61 seats needed to govern a 120-seat Knesset. Partial counts put Netanyahu’s bloc at 54, seven short; Eisenkot’s bloc and the Arab parties together reached 66. Turnout was about 77.7 percent, the highest for a Knesset vote in 27 years. Official results are due November 4. A hung parliament is the headline. The more worrying part is what it leaves behind: a region that expected a decisive Israeli mandate has been given a waiting room, and the waiting may prove more dangerous than a clear win for either side.

The arithmetic is brutal. Eisenkot has refused to serve under Netanyahu, even in a rotation deal, so a unity government looks remote. The other route is hardly smoother. Yair Golan, who leads the Democrats, wants the opposition to build a government with Arab-party backing, an idea that much of the Jewish electorate has treated as untouchable for decades. Netanyahu, for his part, insists his bloc holds a decisive majority among Jewish and Zionist voters, which is a claim about one slice of the electorate rather than about the Knesset. Expect a long caretaker period. There is precedent: after the 2022 vote Netanyahu needed 58 days to assemble a coalition. Markets, never patient, have already reacted. Israeli bonds and the shekel both sold off on Wednesday.

Look past the noise, though, and analysts who agree on little else tend to agree on this: whoever governs, Israel’s strategic posture will move far less than its personnel. A pre-election assessment from the RANE Network argued that any government would put the same things first (stopping Hamas and Hezbollah from rearming, keeping freedom of action in Syria and Yemen, and halting Iran’s nuclear and missile programs). Regional policymakers and analysts quoted by GV Wire reached a similar view; the election may swap the leader but not the strategy, with Iran still the main adversary and force still the preferred instrument.