Israel's hung Knesset meets its kingmakers: Herzog opens coalition talks as 19 Arab-led seats decide everything

Herzog turns the consultation order upside down

President Isaac Herzog will begin the formal search for Israel's next government on Wednesday, and he will do it backwards. The President's Office announced on Monday that Herzog will receive the parties elected to the 26th Knesset in ascending order of size, smallest first, a departure from the custom of starting with the largest factions. The first meeting, with Religious Zionism–Zehut, is set for 5 p.m. on Wednesday; the last, with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's Likud, closes the round at 8:30 p.m. on Thursday. The full timetable of a hung parliament is laid out in our earlier explainer on when a government can be formed.

The decision, the President's Office said, is meant to "encourage thinking outside the box," giving Herzog room to weigh every path to a majority before hearing the two largest parties. The consultations will be broadcast live on the president's official accounts. Between the two days, Herzog will meet Shas and Yisrael Beytenu on Wednesday evening, then United Torah Judaism, Otzma Yehudit, the Democrats and Ra'am on Thursday morning and midday, followed by the Joint List, B'Yachad and Yashar on Thursday afternoon and evening.

The calendar is fixed by law and arithmetic. Herzog receives the official results on Wednesday from Central Elections Committee chairman Justice Noam Sohlberg. Under Basic Law: The Government, the lawmaker he tasks with forming a coalition gets 28 days, with a possible 14-day extension. The 26th Knesset will be sworn in on November 10 whatever the state of the talks, and Herzog has left open a second round of consultations if the first fails to clarify a path forward.

The arithmetic nobody can dodge

The election of Tuesday, October 27 produced a parliament nobody can govern alone. The Central Elections Committee completed its count of roughly 13,000 polling stations in under two days: Netanyahu's Likud-led bloc won 53 seats, the opposition bloc led by Gadi Eisenkot's Yashar won 48, and the two Arab-led parties won 19. Sixty-one seats are needed for a majority in the 120-member Knesset.

The party-by-party breakdown, from the completed count as reported by Haaretz and the Indian Express: Likud 27, Yashar 21, B'Yachad 12, the Joint List 11, the Democrats 8, Ra'am 8, Yisrael Beytenu 7, United Torah Judaism 7, Otzma Yehudit 7, Shas 6, Religious Zionism 6. Turnout reached 77.9 percent, 5,716,665 ballots cast, the highest in decades, with 5,690,778 valid votes and an electoral threshold of 3.25 percent, or 184,947 votes. The figures remain subject to routine verification before certification on Wednesday. The night the count finished is recounted in our live coverage of the final results.

Who gets the mandate, and at what price

The decisive unknown is whether the Joint List and Ra'am will actually recommend Eisenkot when they sit down with Herzog on Thursday. A senior Joint List official told the Israeli outlet Walla they would, The Jerusalem Post reported on Sunday; and with the opposition bloc's 48 seats, those 19 recommendations would give Eisenkot 67, pointing the mandate toward the former military chief. But recommendations are not signatures, and no Arab-led party has ever sustained a governing coalition in Israel.

Nor is it clear what Netanyahu's camp does next. Likud has demanded a probe into alleged irregularities even as the election chief says the results stand; the Shin Bet is investigating suspected foreign interference, and the committee insists that probe changes nothing about the count. Herzog has warned that a second consultation round is possible; and, more darkly, that entrenched positions could force the country back to the polls.

Nineteen seats that rewrite the rules

Israel has had hung parliaments before; it has never had kingmakers like these. The Joint List and Ra'am, parties representing Palestinian citizens of Israel, hold 19 of 120 seats, about 15 percent of the vote, the strongest Arab-led showing in the country's history. Every road to 61 now runs through them or around them, and around them there is no road.

That is why Herzog spent Sunday urging party leaders to "face the reality" of the results and show flexibility, warning that refusal could mean another election; the outcome nobody claims to want and nobody can rule out. On Monday, The Bottom Line put the moral core of the dilemma on screen: partner with the non-Zionist parties or accept gridlock.

Why a Jewish-Arab coalition may be the only government possible

The question is no longer theoretical. Eisenkot has laid out four conditions for any partner; recognition of Israel as a Jewish, democratic, liberal and egalitarian state, allegiance to the Declaration of Independence, military, national or civilian service for all citizens, and recognition of Hamas as a terrorist organization whose military and governing capabilities in Gaza must be dismantled. Ra'am leader Mansour Abbas has signaled, via Israel's Channel 12, that the conditions would not keep his party out of a government. Whether words survive contact with a coalition agreement is the test of the coming weeks.

Exclusion is the deadlock's engine

The most quoted voice of the day belongs to Ofer Cassif, the Hadash lawmaker who sits with the Joint List. In the episode of The Bottom Line published on Monday, Cassif told host Steve Clemons that the "politics of exclusion" are what keep Israel in political deadlock; and that Israelis "need to understand that the future must be a future of Jewish-Palestinian partnership and not another form of exclusion." It is an argument aimed directly at the conundrum Al Jazeera's own summary names: a parliament where the largest bloc cannot govern and the balance of power sits with parties much of the political class has treated as beyond the pale.

Cassif's case is structural, not sentimental. Exclusion has a price measured in elections: five national votes in less than four years at the start of this decade, each one ending where the last began. Partnership has a price too; Eisenkot's conditions show how steep the entry ticket is. The space between those two prices is where Herzog's consultations will live or die, as the immediate aftermath of the close vote already suggested.

There is also a quieter signal in the day's choreography. Herzog meets the smallest parties first and Likud last; the Eisenkot-bloc leaders, Eisenkot, Naftali Bennett, Yair Golan and Avigdor Liberman, gather Tuesday in Herzliya to coordinate; Liberman has already said he will recommend Eisenkot and back Yair Lapid for Knesset speaker. The opposition is behaving like a government-in-waiting. Netanyahu, still prime minister of a caretaker government, is behaving like a man with one card left: the demand for a probe.

Washington, Tehran, and the Gaza clock

While Jerusalem counts seats, the region does not wait. President Donald Trump said on Monday he had a "very good talk" with Netanyahu and that they discussed Iran, Haaretz reported; a reminder that the Gaza war's endgame and the Iranian file will be managed, for weeks at least, by a caretaker prime minister whose bloc just lost its majority.

Netanyahu used the day to signal continuity: with Iran offering a deal on the Strait of Hormuz, he wants to "finish the job" in Gaza, France 24 reported. In Gaza, Israeli strikes killed three people on Monday, medics said. The truce architecture is fragile, the hostage file unresolved, and every coalition scenario now carries a war-policy price tag that the Arab-led parties, whose voters live the war's consequences most directly, will have to weigh in public.

Wednesday decides the shape of everything

The sequence from here is fixed. Tuesday: the four Eisenkot-bloc leaders meet in Herzliya. Wednesday: Herzog receives the certified results from Justice Sohlberg, then opens consultations at 5 p.m. with Religious Zionism–Zehut, followed by Shas at 6:15 and Yisrael Beytenu at 7:30. Thursday: United Torah Judaism at 8:30 a.m., Otzma Yehudit at 9:45, the Democrats at 11, Ra'am at 12:15, then the Joint List at 4:45 p.m., B'Yachad at 6, Yashar at 7:15 and Likud at 8:30. Then Herzog decides who gets 28 days to build a government.

What happens if nobody reaches 61?

The honest answer is that nobody knows; which is exactly what Herzog warned against on Sunday. A second consultation round is on the table. A minority government tolerated from outside is theoretically possible. And if every path closes, Israel returns to the polls, with the same arithmetic waiting on the other side. The 26th Knesset is sworn in on November 10 regardless; the government that follows is the thing still to be invented.