Netanyahu’s party has done better than expected, but not well enough to win an outright majority.

It’s interesting, isn’t it? – the “better than expected” part. The not reaching a majority part was completely expected. It had been widely predicted that neither coalition would reach a majority in the election.

The results so far: It seems that the Netanyahu bloc has 53 seats and his opponent Eisenkot’s bloc has 48, with the Arab parties having 19.

If Eisenkot were to form a government it would need to include the Arab coalition. Would he and his allies do so? I don’t think it’s likely, although it depends on how nakedly ambitious they are and how strongly they’re dedicated to stopping Netanyahu. Several of them have gone on record prior to the election as saying they wouldn’t agree to a coalition with the Arab parties, but will they adhere to that? The other alternative would be a coalition government with Netanyahu.

In an opinion piece by an Israeli – in the Netanyahu-hating Guardian – the headline reads, “A bitter night in Israel for all who craved a fresh start. Netanyahu survives for now – and we are more divided than ever.”

An excerpt:

At 10pm Jerusalem time, three television stations published their exit polls by veteran pollsters showing a stinging loss for Netanyahu’s current government. In all three, his current coalition won just 50 out of 120 parliamentary seats, with 70 for the opposition. It was small consolation for Netanyahu that his Likud party held a slight lead over the main challenger, the Yashar party led by former IDF chief of staff Gadi Eisenkot.

Millions of Israelis who voted for opposition parties felt exhilarated. Together, four Zionist lists within the opposition ran a two- or three-seat lead over Netanyahu’s bloc, though neither of those groupings was close to a 61-seat majority. Eisenkot gave a passionate speech about the defeat of the “coalition of failure”, by a “larger and stronger Zionist majority”. ….

Then the counting began. Within hours, Netanyahu’s bloc staged a reversal, pulling significantly ahead of the four opposition Zionist parties many hoped would replace him. The Arab parties retained a strong showing but lower than the original heady projections. But three of the four Zionist parties preferred to exclude them for coalition-building purposes. As a result, even if the total opposition vote outweighs support for the outgoing government, Netanyahu might have done it again.

It is not yet clear if any one group of parties can reach a 61-seat majority. Negotiations to form a coalition will take dizzying twists in the coming weeks; maybe a minority government or a stalemate will be the unsatisfying result.

More here:

Parties opposed to Netanyahu have a clear majority … But they are fractured and divided between right, left and center, and between Jewish and Arab parties.

Eisenkot’s Yashar party is the largest in the opposition, projected to win 21 seats, but his path to power runs through cooperation with the Arab parties, … a scenario not all the party leaders in the opposition are willing to accept.

We’ve seen this sort of thing (or something like it) before in Israel. Netanyahu often has managed to pull out a coalition but in 2019 he failed to do so:

Israeli lawmakers have voted to dissolve parliament after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu failed to form a coalition government.

The vote triggered a fresh election, which will be held on 17 September.

Mr Netanyahu was unable to reach a deal for a fresh right-wing coalition following last month’s election.

At the heart of the impasse was a military conscription bill governing exemptions for ultra-Orthodox Jewish seminary students.

The upshot was that no one could form a government, and the Knesset once again dissolved itself and there was a third election in March of 2020. Here’s how that went:

The result was initially a stalemate, which was resolved when Likud and Blue & White reached a coalition agreement. Under the terms of the agreement, the premiership would rotate between Benjamin Netanyahu and Benny Gantz, with Gantz given the new position of Alternate Prime Minister until November 2021. …

Netanyahu and the new Israeli government were sworn in on 17 May. On 23 December, the Knesset again dissolved, resulting in the need for new elections.

In that next election in March of 2021, Bennet and Lapid took power by allying with the Arab parties So there is precedent for that, but the whole thing didn’t last very long; in November of 2022 there was still another election and Netanyahu won an outright majority.

The thirty-sixth government, a national unity government formed between eight political parties following the 2021 elections, held the narrowest possible majority (61 seats) in the 120-member Knesset. In April 2022, MK Idit Silman left the governing coalition, leaving it without a majority.

On 20 June 2022, following several legislative defeats for the government in the Knesset, prime minister Naftali Bennett and alternate prime minister Yair Lapid announced the introduction of a bill to dissolve the 24th Knesset, which was approved on 30 June. Simultaneously, in accordance with the rotation government agreement that was part of the 2021 coalition deal, Lapid became prime minister and led a caretaker government until a new government took office.

Within the context of the 2018–2022 Israeli political crisis, this was the fifth Knesset election in nearly four years,

After that experience, it seems to me that there will be a lot of pressure for the two sides to have a unity government and avoid seemingly-endless repeats. Then again, I don’t know that the spirit of compromise looms large.