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For Josh Shapiro, a run for governor borne of Jewish identity and political ambition
(JTA) — On the day before he was set to be sworn in as Pennsylvania’s governor, Josh Shapiro had somewhere important to be: the Jewish community center in the state capital of Harrisburg.
Shapiro and his family spent Monday volunteering at the Alexander Grass Campus for Jewish Life, which was hosting a Martin Luther King Day celebration for the region.
It was an erev-inauguration stop that made sense for Shapiro, elected in November over a Republican whose campaign was continually mired in antisemitism allegations. From his stint as Pennsylvania’s attorney general to his gubernatorial campaign ads to his victory speech, Shapiro has long woven his Jewish identity into his politics — making him an archetype for a new breed of Jewish politician.
“They seem above politics because they exude pride,” said Scott Lasensky, a professor of American Jewish studies at the University of Maryland, about Shapiro and other Jewish politicians who demonstrate comfort with their identity. “It offers a much-needed respite from the reactive, defense posture that has seized the community.”
As Shapiro is sworn in Tuesday on a stack of three Hebrew Bibles — including the one that was on the bimah when a gunman massacred 11 Jewish worshipers in a Pittsburgh synagogue in 2018 — the novelty becomes reality: A Jewish day school grad and dad is now one of the most influential elected officials in the United States.
“You’ve heard me quote my scripture before, that no one is required to complete the task, but neither are we free to refrain from it, meaning each of us has a responsibility to get off the sidelines, to get in the game and to do our part,” Shapiro said in his victory speech in November, referring to the famous passage in Pirkei Avot, the compilation of ethical teachings excerpted from early Jewish writings.
It’s a speech that Shapiro’s friends, teachers and associates could have envisioned decades ago. In interviews with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, nearly a dozen of them said Shapiro, 49, has openly melded Jewishness and activism since his early teens, practicing a politics of bringing together disparate communities with his Jewish identity at the core.
“He gets done what he needs to get done, what he wants to get done,” said Robin Schatz, the director of government affairs at the Jewish Federations of Greater Philadelphia. “And it is always in that framework of Jewish values.”
Schatz contrasted Shapiro’s openness about his Jewish identity with one of his Jewish predecessors as governor, Ed Rendell, for whom Schatz worked when Rendell was mayor of Philadelphia.
“Josh shows up for us just by being so proudly Jewish and that is really something because Rendell, who I worked for and who I love, I mean, he never hid his Jewishness, but he didn’t wear it on his sleeve,” she said.
Perhaps Shapiro’s most direct antecedent is Joe Lieberman, the Orthodox former Connecticut senator who was Al Gore’s vice presidential running mate in 2000. Lieberman, the first Jew on a major-party presidential ticket, recalled being ridiculed and questioned by Jewish groups for expressing his faith at campaign events.
That hasn’t happened for Shapiro, who is part of a relatively younger generation including congresspersons Elaine Luria of Virginia and Becca Balint of Vermont who express unabashed Jewish identities when campaigning among the broader public. Luria and two others just left Congress: Andy Levin of Michigan, who was defeated in last year’s primary after redistricting, and Ted Deutch, a Florida Democrat who last year made the transition this year to leading the American Jewish Committee. None of them wears a kippah on the campaign trail or strictly observes Shabbat, as Lieberman did, but all infuse Jewishness in their public comments and personas.
What separates Shapiro is his outsized success in a competitive race in a swing state — a record that has insiders bandying about his name as a potential presidential candidate one day.
Shapiro’s political orientation was apparent early on. Fresh out of his bar mitzvah, a 13-year-old Shapiro looked forward to his chats with Mark Aronchick, who was a leader with Josh’s parents, Steven and Judi, in the movement for Soviet Jewry in the Philadelphia area.
Shapiro centered his bar mitzvah on a letter-writing campaign to free a refusenik, a Jew whose intended emigration was blocked by the USSR’s cruel bureaucracy, and he liked to ask Aronchick about the movement, about organizing activism. But then the conversations took a turn Aronchick didn’t expect. Josh wanted to know about running a big city.
“I had been the chief lawyer for the city of Philadelphia in the early 80s,” recalled Aronchick, who became a mentor to Shapiro. “He was fascinated when we talked about that.”
In an interview last year with the Forward, after a campaign event with union organizers, Shapiro said he understood organizing as an effective tool when he was 6 and he joined his parents in campaigning for the release of Jews in the Soviet Union. (The refusenik who was the focus of Shapiro’s bar mitzvah activism, made it out in time to attend Shapiro’s bar mitzvah, which earned Shapiro Philadelphia news coverage.) Shapiro’s parents “set a very good example for me to live a life of faith and service,” he said.
From left: Then-Democratic candidate for U.S. Senator John Fetterman, former President Barack Obama, Josh Shapiro and President Joe Biden at a rally at the Liacouras Center in Philadelphia, Nov. 5, 2022. (Mark Makela/Getty Images)
Sharon Levin taught Shapiro government at Akiba Hebrew Academy (now called Jack M. Barrack Hebrew Academy) and said he stood apart at an age when boys interested in politics tend to flex their intellectual muscles through outspoken opinions and grandstanding.
“This was a pretty difficult group of kids, I don’t mean problematic, but kids who like to argue, to debate every point,” she said. “And Josh believes in cooperation, I think of him in those days as a team-builder.”
Todd Eisenberg, now a Montgomery County judge, recalled playing basketball with Shapiro for the high school team.
“He was the point guard so he was always the leader of everything,” Eisenberg said. “And he would always try to get everybody involved and make everybody feel like they’re a part of the process.”
Eisenberg was impressed by Shapiro’s leadership but not surprised — Shapiro had been pulling together kids from across the playground since first grade, when they first met.
“You know how kids are in cliques or they’re picking on other kids, he was never like that,” he said. “He was always nice to everybody involved in everything.”
In high school, Eisenberg said, Shapiro organized a chapter of Students Against Drunk Driving. “I remember him standing up for everybody and being a part of everything,” he said.
Shapiro ran for student president and lost, to classmate Ami Eden (who is now CEO of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency’s parent company, 70 Faces Media). Shapiro has for decades told people it was the only race he lost.
Levin, his government teacher at Akiba, said Shapiro had a realistic assessment of his skills and what he needed to do to succeed. He went to the University of Rochester, qualifying for the Division III basketball team, but soon realized that excellence on the Akiba court was mediocrity in an NCAA setting, she recalled.
“So he said, ‘my fallback from school was government,’ and he was the first sophomore ever to be student president at the University of Rochester,” she said. “I knocked on every door,” Shapiro recalled to Philadelphia Magazine in 2007.
From Rochester, he moved to a series of legislative aide positions in the 1990s on Capitol Hill, working for Pennsylvania Rep. Joe Hoeffel and New Jersey Sen. Robert Torricelli. His bosses remember a guy in his early 20s who was soon supervising staffers, and his colleagues recall not minding. Shapiro was pleasant, they say, but clearly on a track for greater things.
“No one ever worked for me who was as bright and focused, with such steely determination,” Torricelli told The Philadelphia Inquirer last year.
By the time he was 31, in 2004, Shapiro was running for his first elected position as a Pennsylvania state representative. He ran against Jon Fox, a Jewish Republican who had been a congressman. Shapiro impressed people in the district with his lowkey straightforwardness, said Betsy Sheerr, a Jewish lay leader and a Democrat who was friendly with both candidates, and that provided a contrast with Fox, who would shift his positions depending on the listener.
“We used to joke that John Fox was multiple choice, you know that one day he was pro-choice and the next day he wasn’t,” Sheerr recalled. “With Josh, there never has been any confusion about where he stands on things.”
Within two years, Shapiro rose to statewide prominence when he brokered a deal to break a deadlock in the state house, where Democrats had a one-seat majority. Under Shapiro’s plan, Democrats would back a moderate Republican, Denny O’Brien, to keep the scandal-plagued incumbent speaker, Republican John Perzel, from reelection. As soon as he got the job, O’Brien named Shapiro deputy speaker.
Shapiro’s backers cite the now-legendary episode as a sign of Shapiro’s leadership; his detractors say it is a signal of his self-promotion and gamesmanship. In 2008, Shapiro turned on a one-time mentor, Democratic state Rep. Bill DeWeese, saying he should step down from the party leadership because of corruption investigations. (DeWeese and Perzel both ended up serving time in prison.)
Schatz said Shapiro remained sensitive to the issues affecting the Jewish community, helping expand Medicare assistance for the elderly, instituting Holocaust education and targeting terrorist-backing countries like Iran for sanctions.
A moderate Democrat, he also stood out for breaking with the establishment. Aronchick recalled Shapiro in 2004 seeking the endorsement of Howard Dean, the former Vermont governor who was then a standard bearer for progressives.
“Josh is a consensus builder,” he said. “Others might think, ‘Do I look too progressive?’ It wasn’t a thought on Josh’s mind.”
In 2008, Shapiro was among just a handful of establishment Democrats who endorsed Barack Obama for president in a state that Hillary Clinton won in the primaries. Shapiro defended Obama when his former pastor Jeremiah Wright, came under fire for antisemitic comments.
Obama did well enough in the state, Shapiro told JTA at the time, that he believed he would do well nationally. “I think that demonstrates that the hype that Senator Obama had a problem with the Jewish community was just that — it was hype. It was not reality.” He would be proved right.
The Democratic machine killed off the “deputy speaker” title in 2009, leading the Philadelphia Jewish Exponent to muse, “The Once-Lofty Shapiro; Has He Been Brought Down a Few Pegs?”
But Matt Handel, a onetime Republican activist who left the party after Donald Trump was elected president, said that while Shapiro made enemies in the statehouse, he never let it get to him.
“He can be angry about things, you know, he can find them offensive. But if you watch him speak, he maintains control of what he says and how he responds,” said Handel, who interacted with Shapiro when Handel chaired the Pennsylvania Jewish Coalition, a statewide advocacy body.
Shapiro soon was looking elsewhere: He ran for and won a spot on the three-member Montgomery County Board of Commissioners, where he was elected chairman, effectively the mayor of the populous and prosperous suburban Philadelphia area.
Levin, his high school teacher, recalled a call Shapiro made when he was considering a run for the U.S. Senate.
“What he said was, if, if I end up going to Washington, I’m gonna do a Biden, you know, back and forth on the train, because it’s so important for my kids to remain at the school where I went to school.” A while later he called back.
He said, “You know, I’m not a legislator. I’m an executive.” (Levin remains close to Shapiro and his family; last fall, she ran into Shapiro and his daughter Sophia, who led student outreach during his campaign, at an airport in San Antonio. “Look who I saw!” she said in an email, photos of hugs attached.)
In 2016, Shapiro was elected Pennsylvania attorney general. He led battles against Trump’s efforts to limit entry to the United States of people from a number of Muslim-majority countries, and to keep Trump acolytes from overturning his 2020 loss in the state. He also led a widely publicized investigation of child abuse in the Roman Catholic church.
Shapiro’s gubernatorial campaign launch last April was an ad in which he declared, “I make it home Friday nights for Sabbath dinner,” while the camera closed on challahs. (It also stars his four kids and his wife, Lori, whom he refers to as his “high school sweetheart.”)
Josh Shapiro embraces his wife, Lori Shapiro, on stage after giving a victory speech to supporters at the Greater Philadelphia Expo Center in Oaks, Penn., Nov. 8 2022. (Mark Makela/Getty Images)
Shapiro’s ultimate victory was especially sweet to many Jews because he defeated a Republican, Doug Mastriano, who had centered Shapiro’s Jewishness, but not in a positive way. Mastriano had allied with an outspoken antisemite, Andrew Torba, the founder of the far-right social media site, Gab, paying for promotion on Gab and accepting a donation from Torba. (Mastriano renounced antisemitism, but pointedly, not Torba.) Mastriano also mocked the Jewish school Shapiro attended and where he sends his four children.
It is a source of delight to Shapiro and his backers that his open Jewish identity did not alienate Pennsylvanians; indeed, he fared well in the conservative center of the state, a fact that his campaign boasted about in an email sent to the media a week after the election, when most campaigns are wrapping up business.
“Josh Shapiro won Beaver, Berks, Cumberland, and Luzerne counties — significantly outperforming Joe Biden’s margins in 2020 and flipping those counties blue,” the campaign said, attaching a chart showing the flips. “From the very beginning of his campaign, Josh vowed to go everywhere. That meant campaigning heavily where other Democrats don’t often win and investing in communities across the state.”
Jill Zipin, a longtime Shapiro backer who leads Democratic Jewish Outreach Pennsylvania, said Mastriano’s Christian nationalism did not play well in a state that was founded on religious freedoms. “Pennsylvania was founded on religious pluralism, it was founded by Quakers,” she said. “Anyone of any religious stripe was welcome.”
Mastriano’s team, toward the end of the campaign, appeared to notice the resonance Shapiro’s beliefs had among Pennsylvanians. His surrogates pivoted to claiming Shapiro was not a genuine Jew, with one consultant saying Shapiro’s defense of abortion rights made him inauthentic, and Mastriano’s wife claiming she and her husband loved Israel more than Jews did.
The moves may have backfired, said Schatz. Shapiro’s Jewish expression, she said, “was a way of actually relating to religious conservatives. They say that ‘maybe he doesn’t follow our religion, but because he does have a belief, he’s a religious person.’”
In a sign of his polish with Pennsylvanians, Shapiro’s margin of victory was substantially wider than that of John Fetterman, the Democrat elected to the state’s open Senate spot.
“While we won this race — and by the way, we won it pretty convincingly — I want you to know, the job is not done, the task is not complete,” Shapiro said during his victory speech, prompting 15 seconds of cheers and applause.
Shapiro has stayed largely out of the public eye since his election, instead focusing on putting together a transition team and preparing for his inauguration on Tuesday. He did not respond to JTA’s requests for an interview.
That transition team bears signs of Shapiro’s long and deep Jewish ties. Marcel Groen, a retired attorney on the economic development advisory committee, first met the new governor because he attended synagogue with Shapiro’s father. He became a mentor to the inchoate politician, who several years ago recruited Groen’s mother, a Holocaust survivor, to speak to incarcerated teens.
During the encounter, which Groen and Shapiro did not make public at the time, the teens went from standoffish to hugging 93-year-old Sipora Groen after hearing her story. (Sipora died in 2017.) It was, Groen said, typical of Shapiro’s approach to changing hearts and minds: “Josh realized that’s how you reach kids who got in trouble and who needed to understand life in a different manner,” he recalled.
Shapiro’s plans for his inauguration are laced with Jewish significance. In addition to the Tanakh from the Tree of Life synagogue, his swearing-in will reportedly take place on a Bible used by a Jewish soldier from Pennsylvania in World War II.
But asked by CNN’s Dana Bash after the election if he wanted to make history as America’s first Jewish president, Shapiro demurred.
“I have an ambition to get a little bit of sleep, to reintroduce myself to my kids, and then to serve the good people of Pennsylvania as their governor,” he said.
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The post For Josh Shapiro, a run for governor borne of Jewish identity and political ambition appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Israel’s election deadlock: 3 scenarios for what comes next
(JTA) — JERUSALEM – As election results from Israel’s parliamentary vote on Tuesday continue to trickle in, what seems clearest is that no side in this political race will have enough votes to form a majority government, meaning the question of who Israel’s next prime minister will be remains uncertain.
According to the vote count so far, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party could have as many as 28 seats, yet his bloc of right-wing and ultra-Orthodox parties will fall short of the 61 seats needed to form a majority government.
Yashar, the party led by Netanyahu’s main rival, former Israeli army chief Gadi Eisenkot, looks set to be the second-largest party, with around 22 seats. The so-called “change” bloc that Eisenkot leads will likely have around 47 seats, also far short of what is needed to form a government on its own.
Meanwhile, Israel’s Arab parties, which both blocs have said they wouldn’t include in a coalition, are on pace to get at least 17 seats collectively and could become key to helping the opposition oust Netanyahu.
The formal process whereby each party holds consultations with Israel’s President Isaac Herzog to recommend a candidate for prime minister will likely begin next week. Political analysts are already speculating on possible scenarios.
Their tentative takeaway: Reality may force political leaders to break their solemn promises to not work with certain other parties.
So what are the possible scenarios if the final results leave the political arena so starkly divided? Here are the three most likely outcomes.
1. The “change” bloc plus the Arab parties
All the parties in the change bloc bar the Democrats, led by Yair Golan, stated throughout their campaigns that they would not form a government with either of the Arab parties, even though Mansour Abbas, the leader of Ra’am, an Islamist faction, joined a centrist coalition from 2021-2022, breaking what had once been a taboo. Abbas is again offering to join forces with the change bloc.
“Clearly this is emerging as an option mathematically and politically,” Yohanan Plesner, president of the Israel Democracy Institute, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency on Wednesday. But he added, “It’s obviously not only a violation of campaign promises, but I think the Israeli public opinion is deeply unprepared for such an option.” Tolerance for working with an Islamist party has diminished since the deadly Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas-led raids.
Another variation on this option is for the change bloc — Eisenkot’s Yashar party, B’Yachad, led by former prime ministers Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid, and Avigdor Lieberman’s Yisrael Beiteinu party, as well as the Democrats — to form a minority government.
While 61 seats are needed to form a majority government, there is nothing to prevent a government with fewer than 61 seats from being formed if it can gain support on key legislative decisions.
This could happen if Arab factions support the change bloc on key votes but otherwise don’t play a role in the government. This would give the change bloc up to 65 seats when Arab parties’ support from the sidelines is added in.
Even this step has been rejected by Lieberman, yet Professor Jonathan Rynhold, of the Department of Political Studies at Bar-Ilan University, said it was possible that Eisenkot could put pressure on him to accept.
“Even though Lieberman has said no to such an option, he might say yes if he’s the prime minister,” Rynhold said.
On the other hand, the Arab parties, especially the Joint List, might demand concessions for such an agreement that Eisenkot himself finds hard to stomach.
2. Formation of a unity government
A quick look at the political map following Tuesday’s vote shows that center-right parties ranging from Eisenkot’s Yashar party to Lieberman’s Yisrael Beiteinu, with Likud and B’Yachad in between, gained a substantial share of the seats. One possible scenario is that some of these parties, even though they are avowed political foes, could join forces.
“I think it is perhaps more likely that there will be serious negotiations around a unity government,” Plesner said. “I would imagine that Netanyahu would prefer unity based on him forming a coalition with all of his bloc members, and then luring one of the ‘change bloc’ parties to his government.” That would mean including ultra-Orthodox parties Shas and United Torah Judaism and far-right parties led by Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich.
However, Plesner said the change bloc parties would most likely push for a “real unity government,” whereby Netanyahu “gives up on one of the far-right parties that has caused a lot of challenges for Israel’s international image, or perhaps an ultra-Orthodox party that has refused to pass a military draft bill.” He was referring to a law that would force more haredi men to serve in the military, from which they’ve traditionally been exempted. This, he said, would create a “Zionist, more centrist-leaning option.”
“I think this is something that Israeli public opinion would be able to live with and perhaps even prefer, but I can’t say anything about the political viability of it,” Plesner said.
The change bloc ran on replacing Netanyahu, and no doubt many of its voters would feel betrayed by such an outcome.
3. Another round of elections
In his election night speech, Eisenkot declared that “after an election with such high voter turnout, it would be a mistake to hold another election.” Some 77.7% of voters cast ballots, the highest since 1999, according to election officials.
However, with no bloc reaching a majority and serious ideological disagreements among the parties, another round of elections might be the most likely possibility. For Netanyahu in particular, allowing the process to play out while he retains his position as interim prime minister until another election is held could well be the most favorable outcome for the long-serving leader, according to Plesner.
A similar scenario played out beginning in 2019, when Netanyahu’s bloc of supporters failed to achieve a majority. Israel then held a series of elections, culminating in the March 2021 vote, when Netanyahu’s bloc was ousted by a center-left alliance led by Bennett and Lapid. The November 2022 election returned Netanyahu to power.
“I don’t really know what the path forward is now,” said Gideon Rahat, a political scientist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
“If we were talking 10 years ago, I would say that something else might happen – a unity government or a different solution perhaps,” he said. But given the entrenched political camps at this point, another round of elections might be where the country is headed.
On the other hand, given the unpredictable nature of Israel’s political scene, Plesner noted that it could be a “time for politicians to get creative.”
“I wouldn’t be surprised if all sorts of ideas that we haven’t thought of before come up in the upcoming few weeks,” he said, adding that he believed that, with so much uncertainty, it could “take weeks and perhaps months” before the next prime minister is determined.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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Netanyahu may have won Israel. He’s losing America.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu may have just won over Israelis. Now comes something harder: winning Americans.
Israel’s election results aren’t final, and there is still a long way to go before a government is formed, but Netanyahu outperformed the expectations of almost all the polls and pundits.
I get why. Security is Israelis’ primary concern, and under Netanyahu, the IDF has set back Iran’s nuclear program, quieted rockets from Hezbollah in the north and devastated, if not fully defeated, Hamas in the south.
Israeli voters overlooked or dismissed Netanyahu’s accountability for Oct. 7, focusing instead on the country’s strong economy, the Abraham Accords, or his willingness to accommodate the demands of the religious parties.
But what is working at home for Netanyahu is not working abroad. Specifically, in America, support for Israel under Netanyahu has cratered, and yesterday’s election is unlikely to boost it back up.
The percentage of Americans holding an unfavorable view of Israel has gone from 42% in 2022 to 60% in 2026, according to Pew research.
For the first time since 2001, according to Gallup, more Americans sympathize with Palestinians (41%) than Israelis (36%).
Among Democrats, 8 in 10 have an unfavorable view of Israel — up from 69% last year. Among Republicans, the future looks the same: 57% of Republicans 18 to 49 now have an unfavorable opinion of Israel, up from 50% last year.
Tucker Carlson and Vice President JD Vance, both of whom have accused Israel of dragging America into war with Iran, are more likely the party’s future than its past.
American Jews used to boast of a bipartisan consensus in favor of Israel. They worked for decades to help forge it. Now that bipartisan consensus is moving in the opposite direction.
Under these circumstances, any new Israeli prime minister would be facing the world’s shortest honeymoon with Israel’s strongest partner.
Netanyahu’s will be even shorter if he prevails. Israelis may not be tired of Netanyahu, but Americans are. A Pew survey this year found 59% of Americans had little or no confidence in him. Among American Jews it was 56%.
Those numbers should frighten anyone who cares about Israel. The American-Israel relationship is not about popularity. It’s about survival.
No matter who was elected, America’s foreign aid allocation to Israel, a political liability, should phase out, something Netanyahu himself proposed when the current aid bill expires in 2028.
But Israel will still need to buy weapons from somewhere when its stockpiles run low during a war. It will need to share and coordinate intelligence, or join forces to eliminate nuclear or other common threats. America is still the best address for that.
A strong bilateral relationship — “even close to the strength that we’ve known it for the past couple of decades” — will depend on a new government’s behavior, Rachel Brandenburg, a senior policy analyst at the Israel Policy Forum, said in a call with journalists before the election.
‘Repairing a relationship’
That begs the question: Can Netanyahu change?
After almost two decades in power, is it at all possible that he will recognize the cost to Israel’s standing in America if he continues down the same path his current government has followed?
If he wants a reset with Democrats and Republicans, will he actually reach out to Democrats? Will he rein in the Jewish terrorists on the West Bank who have wreaked havoc on Palestinians, including American citizens? Will he exclude these terrorists’ supporters from his cabinet? Will he include Arab parliamentarians in his government, and address Arab concerns, after their historic showing in this election?
Finally, will he open up a diplomatic horizon with the Palestinians that will, in the end, be the only way to consolidate the military and diplomatic gains he has made?
These steps would go a long way to repairing a relationship whose rupture would be devastating, but not symmetrical.
“Israel will not be alone unless it decides to go alone,” President Lyndon Johnson warned the Israeli prime minister on the eve of the 1967 Six-Day War.
It’s a warning I pray the next Israeli prime minister abides.
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Israel’s opposition has the numbers to defeat Netanyahu. Will it let him survive anyway?
According to exit polls, Israel’s opposition appears to have achieved something remarkable: a parliamentary majority of up to 70 seats, including the Arab parties, over Benjamin Netanyahu and his allies. In almost any other parliamentary democracy, such a result would be understood as a decisive victory for the forces seeking a change of government. Yet Israel may be heading toward the extraordinary spectacle of an opposition that wins a commanding majority and nevertheless allows the incumbent to remain in power.
The reason is a political taboo: several opposition leaders have promised not to form a government dependent on the support of Arab parties, even though virtually every plausible path to replacing Netanyahu requires precisely that.
And if the exit polls are right, those Arab parties have almost doubled their Knesset representation, to perhaps 18 seats in the 120-seat Knesset. This happened because of a huge increase in voter turnout among the 20 percent of Israelis who are Arabs.
In past elections, almost half the Arabs stayed home on election day, compared to participation levels of around 80 percent among Jews. The surge appears to have been driven by despair over the perceived hostility of the Netanyahu government, and anger over ultranationalist National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, who has displayed inaction and indifference about the lawlessness that bedevils the Arab sector.
The two Arab parties – Ra’am and the United Arab List – have already offered to back Gadi Eisenkot, the former military chief who heads the largest opposition party, Yashar.
This landscape presents the wider opposition with a real dilemma. Its leaders may end up breaking their most important promise to voters — to remove Netanyahu from office — in order to honor a secondary promise not to form a governing coalition with Arab parties and depend on the safety net they offer. That promise should have been no more than a white lie to reassure wavering Jewish voters who in the past supported the right. Sticking to it would be a spectacular case of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.
In his speech to supporters after polls closed Tuesday, Eisenkot promised to use the results to set up a government. “The Israeli public voted to end Netanyahu’s rule as the prime minister of Israel,” he said. “It’s my personal duty to do everything to bring about the will of the people.”
If Eisenkot and the rest of the opposition now show resolve, a minority government supported from outside by Arab lawmakers is one possibility. A coalition that includes at least Ra’am, the pragmatic Islamist party that participated in Israel’s 2021 governing coalition, is another. Defections from the right could also help assemble a government. These also should be considered, as long as those joining it are not given the power to block essential reforms or perpetuate the policies that voters sought to reject.
None of the options are clean and simple. But the notion that Arab parliamentary support renders a government illegitimate is neither a democratic principle nor a reflection of Israel’s political history.
Indeed, a look at that history reveals something that Netanyahu’s long dominance has helped obscure. Since the political upheaval of 1977, Likud victories have generally depended on ultra-Orthodox support, while victories by the non-Likud camp have repeatedly depended on Arab votes.
In 1984, Shimon Peres managed to force a parliamentary tie with the help of six seats held by Arab parties. In 1992, Yitzhak Rabin’s victory yielded a majority of 61 seats only when five Arab lawmakers were counted. In 1999, Ehud Barak won a landslide in the direct election for prime minister, but his reliable parliamentary bloc numbered only 60 seats, including 10 Arab lawmakers. The addition of right wing parties enabled him to govern.
The pattern continued in 2006, when Kadima’s victory was widely perceived as decisive, even though its assured parliamentary bloc numbered just 60 seats without additional Arab support. And in 2021, Yair Lapid’s success in assembling a government that ended Netanyahu’s 12 consecutive years in power depended on a parliamentary alignment of 61 lawmakers opposed to Netanyahu, including 10 Arab representatives.
With the notable exception of Ra’am in 2021, Arab parties generally did not become formal coalition partners. Peres formed a national unity government with Likud – and Rabin, his majority secured via the Arab parties, formally brought in the religious party Shas. In all these cases the Arabs’ parliamentary support for the opposition helped prevent Likud from forming a government and made alternative coalitions possible. In some cases, Arab lawmakers then supported the government from outside, while politicians from the traditional right-wing camp eventually crossed political lines to join the governing arrangement.
Against that historical background, the 2026 result should be understood as an extraordinary opportunity for Israel’s liberal and anti-Netanyahu forces. The central question is whether their leaders will recognize it or miss the opportunity.
Netanyahu remains the prime minister under whose watch the catastrophe of Oct. 7 occurred. His government has resisted the establishment of a state commission of inquiry into the failures surrounding the attack. His coalition has advanced measures widely criticized as threats to democratic institutions, while presiding over an increasingly polarized society.
Another term for Netanyahu and his present allies could deepen Israel’s institutional deterioration, social divisions and strategic vulnerability. For critics who believe the country is already approaching a dangerous democratic and societal crossroads, the stakes are difficult to overstate.
There is also a striking inconsistency in the argument that relying on Arab support is somehow beyond the bounds of legitimate politics.
Netanyahu himself explored the possibility of forming a government with the support of Mansour Abbas, the leader of Ra’am, in 2021. That possibility collapsed largely because Bezalel Smotrich, now one of Netanyahu’s most prominent far-right partners, refused to accept it.
The time has come for Israel to show some appreciation for its Arab citizens, who constitute roughly one-fifth of Israel’s population. They work, study, pay taxes and participate in the country’s civic and economic life. They vote in national elections and elect representatives to the Knesset. There is no coherent democratic justification for treating those representatives’ mandates as inherently less legitimate than those of Jewish lawmakers.
To be sure, Arab political parties hold positions, particularly on the Palestinian question, that many Jewish Israelis find deeply objectionable. Some of those disagreements are profound, and coalition negotiations involving Arab parties inevitably raise difficult questions about national identity, security and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
But ultra-Orthodox parties also hold positions that many secular Israelis regard as fundamentally incompatible with their vision of the country, including on religious authority, military service and civil liberties. Far-right parties in Netanyahu’s coalition have promoted policies that critics see as far more damaging to democratic norms than anything the Arabs might do.
There will undoubtedly be pressure for a national unity government, possibly from Washington. President Donald Trump, who endorsed Netanyahu, seems likely to pressure Eisenkot to agree. The machinations might include restarting the war with Iran. Eisenkot should resist it all.
Israel’s declaration of independence promised equality. Israel’s opposition has a golden opportunity to keep that promise.
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