Israel's choice: Netanyahu's survival or a Palestinian-backed coalition after a contested election

Hours before the final results of Israel's election were in, the outline of the outcome was already visible. Benjamin Netanyahu's far-right coalition had lost its mandate, and the opposition held a firm majority. What was less clear was whether that majority could ever be turned into a government.

The obstacle is one the opposition has largely built for itself. Most of Israel's Jewish opposition ruled out governing with Palestinian-led parties, and they did so during a campaign in which Netanyahu cast Palestinian citizens as an enemy inside the state. If that ban holds, Netanyahu could convert a defeat into another term, or at least a prolonged stretch as caretaker prime minister, and possibly another round of elections.

That barrier became the focus of Israeli media and analysts. The newspaper Israel Hayom ran the headline "No Clear Government". Channel 12 published an article titled "Road to Unity Government Has Been Paved".

Yair Golan, leader of the centre-left Democrats, rejected that framing. "Netanyahu lost. I know how to count," he said in a statement calling for a government that includes Palestinians, who make up about 20% of Israel's population. He urged Israelis to stop accepting what he called Netanyahu's racist division between Jewish votes and Arab votes, and said the majority carried both a responsibility and an opportunity to form a change government in partnership with Arab citizens. The musician Yali Sobol put it more bluntly on Facebook: stop being racist, he wrote, and you will discover you have won.

The opposition's voters may be ahead of its leaders. Political psychology researcher Eran Halperin said a survey taken as polls closed showed a clear majority of opposition voters backed forming a government with the Palestinian-led Ra'am party to unseat Netanyahu. On Wednesday, though, opposition leaders were silent, apparently trying to reconcile their wish to remove him with their promises not to work with Palestinians. Gadi Eisenkot, a former general who leads the largest opposition party, has not ruled it out outright, but he has set conditions that make it politically impossible for Palestinian parties to join a coalition.

Palestinian leaders have been clearer. Yousef Jabareen, head of the larger Joint List, said they were ready to pave the way for ousting the Netanyahu government, adding that change comes through Jewish-Arab partnership. Ra'am, an Islamist party, placed a Jewish former police chief second on its slate as a signal of its commitment to working with Jewish Israelis. The objection that these parties are not Zionist is also uneven: some of the ultra-Orthodox groups central to Netanyahu's current coalition do not describe themselves as Zionist either. A precedent from three decades ago, when Yitzhak Rabin relied on Palestinian support for a minority government while pursuing a negotiated end to the conflict, gets little mention in today's debate.

Netanyahu placed racism at the centre of his campaign, a strategy critics said was meant both to lift his vote and to complicate the opposition's coalition-building afterward. A slogan on many of his posters read "The right or Palestine", framing a fifth of the population as an enemy within Israel's borders. On election night he shrugged off the loss of about 10 seats from the 64-seat coalition he assembled in 2022, a severe rebuke by most counts, and claimed vindication. The Knesset overall has moved further right, as have young Israelis. He declared that the right-wing bloc has a clear, decisive majority among the Zionist public and called for a strong national-right government, an open invitation to opponents to put their rejection of Palestinian parties ahead of their opposition to him.

Many Israelis described the vote as existential, as they struggled to halt the erosion of democracy inside the pre-1967 borders and to secure a State Commission of Inquiry into the 7 October attacks. For Palestinian citizens, who face surging crime, discrimination and home demolitions inside Israel while watching relatives and friends endure ethnic cleansing in the occupied West Bank and a war of annihilation in Gaza, that was viscerally true, and they turned out in record numbers.

Israel calls itself a Jewish and democratic state. If Palestinian representatives are effectively excluded from government because of their race, the Guardian's analysis argues, Netanyahu will have turned that promise into a choice between a Jewish future and a democratic one. The coalition talks now beginning will show whether the opposition's self-imposed ban holds.