As the projected results of Israel’s elections were announced on Tuesday night, the atmosphere in Tel Aviv was oddly quiet. In Habima Square, which has hosted raucous anti-government protests in the past three years, only a trickle of people showed up. Some waved the Israeli flag, colored pink to signify resistance; others walked around in a daze. No one seemed to know whether to celebrate or weep.

Here’s what the results showed: A decisive majority of Israelis rejected the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. His coalition of far-right and ultra-Orthodox partners went into the election with sixty-eight seats, out of a hundred and twenty; it is projected to emerge with fifty-three—eight seats short of what Netanyahu needs to form a majority government.

Palestinian citizens of Israel voted in unprecedented numbers, with a turnout rate estimated as high as eighty per cent. Predominantly Arab parties are projected to have almost doubled their representation in the Knesset, from ten to nineteen seats. It’s not hard to imagine that the current political climate would discourage Palestinian Israelis from voting: the national-security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, openly regards them as enemies; gangs of Jewish settlers act with impunity in the West Bank; Gaza has been almost completely destroyed. Instead, their outrage seemed to have served as an extraordinary mobilizer. Many of them were reportedly inspired to vote by Ben-Gvir’s claim that he would demand the defense ministry in the next government.

But the results also show that Netanyahu’s Likud Party maintained its dominance. His main challenger, Gadi Eisenkot, fell short of the results that most polls predicted. Eisenkot’s party, Yashar, is projected to have twenty-one seats—a decent showing for a new party, but not a groundswell by any measure.

If you combine the Jewish parties and the Arab parties in the anti-Netanyahu bloc, they secured more votes. But the pro-Netanyahu bloc won more votes from Jewish Israelis. Many will view this as the election’s bottom line: that a “Zionist majority” is the only one that counts. (What they mean is a Jewish majority. The ultra-Orthodox parties are openly anti-Zionist.) Eisenkot himself seems to have adopted a similar framework when the exit polls were first released. “Netanyahu finds himself tonight facing a larger and stronger Zionist majority,” he said.

“It is disappointing, but comes as no surprise,” Noa Landau wrote in the left-leaning newspaper Haaretz, to see how Eisenkot “framed the election results in the form of a ‘Zionist’ majority for a government led by him and fell precisely—and I mean, precisely––into the trap Netanyahu laid for him.”

Under the Israeli electoral system, the next step is for the country’s President, Isaac Herzog, to ask party leaders which candidate they recommend for Prime Minister. That candidate then has roughly a month to form a majority. As things stand, it is unclear whether that task will fall to Netanyahu, the leader of the largest party, or Eisenkot, who could become the leader of the largest bloc of parties. But Eisenkot would need support from Arab parties to form a coalition, and he spent his campaign equivocating on whether he would be willing to do so; some of his partners in the opposition have flatly rejected the idea.

That leaves Netanyahu. His campaign strategy in the days before the election seemed to rely on scaring the Israeli public into voting for him. In a series of interviews, Netanyahu acknowledged that the multi-billion-dollar annual defense package that the U.S. gives Israel “is over.” He added that crippling international sanctions were inevitable, so the country should be prepared to “circumvent” them by turning to cryptocurrency. (He seemed to regard his government’s policy of expanding Jewish settlements in the West Bank, which has already triggered sanctions from eleven European countries, as irreversible.) The comments rattled markets and scandalized experts. “All he has to offer the Israeli economy is a bizarre solution that is common among criminal organizations,” a scathing letter signed by more than a hundred Israeli economists concluded.

Netanyahu will now do everything in his power to peel lawmakers away from the opposition to cobble together a majority. It won’t be easy. Although some opposition leaders vowed not to sit in a coalition with Arab parties, all of them vowed not to join one headed by Netanyahu. This is the deadlock that many Israelis feared going into the election. It means that the country will now face weeks or months of coalition wrangling, of raw nerves and bitter infighting—only to risk ending up in the same impasse.

Once those negotiations are exhausted, there are two likely scenarios. There will be enormous pressure from within Israel and from abroad to form some sort of national-unity government, headed by both Netanyahu and Eisenkot. Trump indicated as much, when unnamed U.S. sources told Israeli media that he wants to “make sure” that the next government does not include Ben-Gvir. On Wednesday, the popular Israeli news site Ynet laid out a possible framework for such a government. It would include Netanyahu, Eisenkot, and Naftali Bennett—a former Prime Minister who is now in the opposition. The article suggested that the three would each take a turn serving as Prime Minister, in alignment with “Trump’s vision.”

For Netanyahu, though, breaking away from his longtime ultra-Orthodox partners could spell the beginning of his political end. (The last time he turned his back on them, in 2013, his coalition splintered after less than two years.) Eisenkot and Bennett also seem unlikely to agree to a unity government anytime soon. Not only did they promise voters that they would not join forces with Netanyahu—they also personally believe that he represents an active danger to democracy. “I know Netanyahu,” Eisenkot said on a recent campaign stop, in Tel Aviv. “He’ll stop at nothing” to remain in power. Bennett, for his part, has called Netanyahu’s aides’ alleged work as influence agents for Qatar the “most serious act of treason” in the country’s history. Yet they might reconsider if Israel seemed headed toward another imminent escalation with Iran. On Wednesday, the Wall Street Journal reported that the U.S. and Israel were preparing for a possible round of strikes on Iran after the American midterms.

The other scenario is that the results will be so inconclusive that, in a few months, Israelis will be sent to the ballot box again. It wouldn’t be the first time. Between 2019 and 2021, there were four rounds of elections in just two years, and the government that was ultimately sworn in dissolved within eighteen months.

Netanyahu may well be counting on a repeat election. He knows that Israelis living abroad, an estimated sixty-seven thousand of whom showed up to vote in this week’s elections, are unlikely to make another trip in a few short months. And Arab Israelis are unlikely to repeat their historic turnout if they conclude that it did nothing to improve their standing. In that scenario, Netanyahu would not only stay in office, as the leader of a caretaker government; he could emerge from the next election with a wider lead and a solidified base of support.

Eisenkot is clearly aware of that risk. Early on Wednesday, he said that, after an election “with such high turnout,” it would be “a mistake” to call another.

And so, in opposition circles and in online forums, momentum began gathering around a simple argument. The anti-Netanyahu bloc, along with the Arab parties, will have a decisive majority in the next parliament. Why not use it?

“We can no longer accept Netanyahu’s racist division between Jewish votes and Arab votes,” Yair Golan, who heads a left-wing opposition party called the Democrats, wrote as results filtered in. Golan is the only Jewish party leader who had stated that he would happily join a coalition with an Arab party. He added, “The vote of an Israeli citizen voting in Tira”—an Arab city—“is worth exactly the same as that of an Israeli citizen voting in Givat Shmuel,” a Jewish city. Historically, it’s not only that Arab parties were excluded from coalition negotiations. They themselves refused to participate, so as not to be seen as aiding the Zionist project. That changed in 2021, when Mansour Abbas, the head of an Islamist party called Ra’am, joined Bennett’s short-lived government.

Amit Segal, a political commentator for Channel 12 who is deeply influential on the right, on Tuesday tried to brush off Arab voters’ electoral potential. “The Israeli government will not sing ‘Biladi, Biladi,’ ” he said, referring to the Egyptian national anthem, which one Arab-majority alliance had reportedly sung as returns came in.

The Arab Israeli vote is largely divided between two parties: the Joint List, an alliance of factions which is projected to have twelve seats, and Ra’am, which is projected to have seven. Abbas had already proved willing to be an active member in a coalition government. Yousef Jabareen, the leader of the Joint List, expressed the same willingness on Wednesday. Jabareen said that he was prepared to “leverage our political power to advance the values we believe in.” He put forth a stark choice before the Israeli people. “It is either continued racism, continued exclusion, and continued supremacy, or genuine Jewish-Arab partnership,” he said. “We will be ready to pave the way to topple the government of Netanyahu, Ben-Gvir, and Smotrich—and send them home.” ♦