Early Israeli election results show deadlock as Palestinians make huge gains - Middle East Eye

Neither Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu nor the Zionist opposition parties have enough seats to form a government following a huge surge in voting from Palestinian citizens of Israel, according to preliminary results released on Wednesday.

With nearly 77 percent of ballots counted by 12:30 pm local time (10:30 am GMT), Netanyahu’s bloc had secured 54 seats, while the opposition was projected to win 49, according to partial results published by the Central Elections Committee.

Both blocs fall well short of the 61 seats required to secure a parliamentary majority and form a government.

The Joint List and Ra'am, two slates representing Palestinian citizens of Israel, secured 17 seats, which would be a record number of Arab MPs in Israel’s parliament, the Knesset.

The results remain provisional and could change as the vote count continues.

It was clear throughout polling day on Tuesday that turnout would be high in the first election since the Gaza genocide and various Israeli wars in the region since the 7 October Hamas-led attack.

The Central Elections Committee said that overall voter turnout reached 77.7 percent, the highest since 1999. 

Over the past four years, Palestinian citizens have watched the Israeli state lay waste to Gaza, violent settlers make life hell in the occupied West Bank and Israel's leaders and society become ever more discriminatory towards Arabs.

On Tuesday, they voted in record numbers, with Palestinians telling Middle East Eye in the leadup to the election that they feared their very existence was at stake.

Early results have shown that Palestinian citizens had upended the election and stopped Netanyahu and his Jewish supremacist allies from forming a government.

Eisenkot's bloc of opposition parties, meanwhile, appear unable to form a working coalition without the participation of Palestinian parties, despite many of his partners ruling that out during the campaign.

Palestinian citizens make up around 20 percent of Israel's population, but the parties that represent them are almost always frozen out of any governing coalitions.

For now, Netanyahu remains prime minister as a period of coalition-building negotiations begins.

His party, Likud, is projected to be the largest in the Knesset with 27 seats, which traditionally means the president will offer him the first attempt at forming a government.

Gadi Eisenkot, the former military chief of staff leading the opposition bloc, said the election results show "lack of confidence" in Netanyahu. 

His party, Yashar, has secured 22 seats, according to the early results. 

Yair Lapid, another opposition leader and former prime minister, said Netanyahu suffered a "crushing defeat".

Final results could take days to finalise, with half a million votes from soldiers due to be counted later in the week.

Veteran political commentator Meron Rapoport said that while Netanyahu's Likud appears to be the largest in parliament, this would mean nothing if his coalition is very far from the 61 seats needed to form a government.

“It is not clear what kind of government we will have. Maybe there will be new elections if no government can be formed,” he told Middle East Eye

Rapoport noted that key opposition leaders Naftali Bennett and Avigdor Lieberman are very hostile to Palestinians and have ruled out sitting in a coalition with them.

“But putting ideology aside, if politicians see the chance to form a majority of 70 seats while Netanyahu has 50, I think they will be almost suicidal to go for another election that gives Netanyahu another chance.”

Another possible outcome, floated in Israeli media, is a "national unity government" based on a power-sharing arrangement between Netanyahu and Eisenkot to break the political deadlock.

Ameer Fakhoury, an analyst at Israel's Vanleer Institute think tank, described the mobilisation of Palestinian citizens in this election a "truly historic development".

"They went to the polls in extraordinary numbers to confront a political leadership responsible for what they regard as the gravest crimes against their people: devastation in Gaza, ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, and years of persecution and intimidation at home," he told MEE.

Fakhoury said the election results are not merely a question of replacing Netanyahu, Israel's longest-serving prime minister. "It is a choice between perpetuating apartheid and beginning political and moral repair. "History has placed Palestinian citizens of Israel in an extraordinary position. Having mobilised first and foremost to protect their own people, they may now also help rescue Jewish Israelis from their country's destructive trajectory," he said. "The question is whether Jewish Israeli political leaders are prepared to accept that possibility - or prefer the continued descent into a militarized, ethnocratic Sparta."