(JTA) — Yashar Party head Gadi Eisenkot inched closer to wresting the premiership from Benjamin Netanyahu on Thursday, as he secured the majority support of 67 out of 120 parliamentarians, but was not yet granted the mandate to form a government.

President Isaac Herzog said that Eisenkot had more backing than the 46’s parliamentarians who favor Netanyahu, after the president held two days of consultations with all the political parties that will be sworn in next week at the opening of the 26th Knesset.

Herzog, who is tasked with deciding which parliamentarian has the power to form a government, told the media he would not make a choice until Sunday.

“The results of the consultations may appear clear, but the authority vested in me by law is to determine who has the ability to form a government, and that is not entirely clear,” Herzog said, adding that he would continue to hold talks with the party leaders.

Eisenkot has the expected support of the Jewish-Israeli parties, B’Yachad, Israel Beytenu and the Democrats, which gives him a potential coalition of 48 parties. The Arab-Israeli party Ra’am, with eight seats, also recommended him, as did the Joint List, which has 11 seats. The Joint List is expected to support Eisenkot from outside the government. This means the party would vote with the government block to allow it to govern, but would not formally be part of its coalition.

This article originally appeared on JTA.org.

The post Eisenkot has backing of 67 seats, but not yet allowed to form Israeli government appeared first on The Forward.

Jewish voters overwhelmingly backed Democrats in Tuesday’s midterm elections, even as concerns about Israel and antisemitism played a growing role in their political decisions, according to a new exit poll published on Thursday.

The GBAO Strategies survey of 800 Jewish voters found that 72% of Jewish respondents supported Democratic candidates for Congress, compared with 24% who voted Republican. The poll, sponsored by J Street, a progressive pro-Israel, pro-peace advocacy group, was conducted via text message from Oct. 28 to Nov. 3 and had a reported margin of error of plus or minus 3.5 percentage points.

The Democratic share was slightly lower than in previous midterm elections, when Democrats received 74% of the Jewish vote in 2022 and 76% in 2018. In the 2020 presidential election, 77% of Jewish voters backed Joe Biden, according to GBAO’s polling. These findings differ from a national NBC News exit poll, which found that 68% of Jewish voters supported Democrats this year and 31% backed Republicans, compared with 78% who voted for Kamala Harris in 2024. (The national surveys used different methods, making it harder to say how preferences actually changed.)

Jim Gerstein, GBAO’s pollster and a Democratic campaign consultant, cautioned against reading too much into the change over time. “You’d have to squint really hard to try and see that that is a shift or anything really meaningful,” Gerstein told the Forward during a press briefing. He noted that Republican support also fell, from 25% in the 2022 midterms to 24% this year. Gerstein suggested that strong opposition to President Donald Trump during his first term, including during the COVID-19 pandemic, may help explain the higher Democratic numbers in 2018 and 2020.

He also noted that campaigns and outside groups have spent significantly more money targeting Jewish voters in the past two election cycles. “These are really negligible, and we don’t look at this as much shifting,” he said.

Even as Democrats regained control of both chambers of Congress, Republicans did appear to make gains among Jewish voters in some closely watched races amid a divide over U.S. support for Israel. Several outspoken critics of Israel won seats in the House, including five members of the Democratic Socialists of America. Abdul El-Sayed of Michigan and Troy Jackson of Maine, two new senators who made criticism of Israel a major part of their campaigns, also won highly contested races.

The exit poll suggests that disagreements over Israel have not fundamentally changed how American Jews vote.

The future of American democracy remained the top concern for Jewish voters, with 44% naming it as one of the two most important issues influencing their vote, followed by 34% who said the cost of living was among their leading concerns. But Israel and antisemitism became more important than in previous elections. Twenty-one percent named antisemitism as one of their top two issues, up from 11% in 2024. Israel ranked sixth, cited by 14% of voters, compared with just 4% in 2022.

Compared to previous elections, Israel and antisemitism moved up the list of priorities  — 21% identified antisemitism as one of their top two issues, up from 11% in 2024. Israel was ranked six with 14%, compared with just 4% in 2022.

Gerstein argued that rising antisemitism and the debates over support for Israel serve as a basic test for candidates rather than the deciding factor in most elections. “I think we see candidates in both parties passing that threshold quite easily,” Gerstein said.

Asked which positions expressed by candidates during the campaign they agreed with most, 30% chose unconditional support for Israel, while 39% favored support tied to Israel’s compliance with American interests and values. Another 31%, including 60% of voters between the ages of 18 and 34, agreed with the statement that Israel has committed genocide and should no longer receive U.S. aid.

Orthodox voters, representing 9% of the sample, voted Republican by a 63-34 margin.

A Jewish split on Israel 

The survey also found a Jewish electorate that itself is becoming more divided over Israel.

Thirty-nine percent said their sympathies in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict were primarily with Israelis, compared with 23% who sided with Palestinians. Another 38% sided with both. Among younger Jews, 49% said they sympathized more with Palestinians, compared with 20% who sided with Israelis.

A majority — 51% — said it supported continuing $3.8 billion in annual U.S. military assistance to Israel, while 49% opposed it. However, 44% also said arms sales should be conditioned on compliance with U.S. law.

Jewish voters showed greater agreement on how criticism of Israel should be treated and whether Israel’s policies directly impact them.

Sixty percent said Jewish organizations that label harsh criticism of Israel as antisemitic are using concerns about antisemitism to defend unpopular Israeli policies. About two-thirds said AIPAC’s spending against candidates critical of Israel increases antisemitism in the United States, while 80% said Israel’s actions in Gaza and the West Bank contribute to antisemitism. An overwhelming majority of 76% support sanctions against violent Israeli settlers.

The survey also found that 39% of Jewish voters, including 63% of those under 35, said that spending by AIPAC to defeat Israel critics this election cycle made them less likely to support candidates backed by the pro-Israel group.

Mamdani scores high 

One of the more striking findings was that New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani was more popular among Jewish voters nationwide than Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, despite his criticism of Israel and strained relationship with some Jewish organizations.

The poll found that 49% of respondents viewed Mamdani favorably, compared with 43% who viewed him unfavorably. Netanyahu received a favorable rating of just 20%, while 72% viewed him unfavorably. That marks a 12% decline in two years for the Israeli leader, who is struggling to form a government after the last Israeli election ended in deadlock.

In an interview with CNN Wednesday night, Mamdani pointed to his approach to governing as an example of how elected officials can represent Jewish voters even when they disagree with them on Israel.

“I represent the most Jewish city in the United States of America, and I know that there are some Jewish New Yorkers, for example, that may have a different set of opinions on Israel and Palestine as I do, and that doesn’t mean that I work any less hard to deliver for them across the board,” Mamdani said. “I think that’s the same truth for anyone who was elected last night.”

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I was walking to get a coffee on Election Day when a man screamed at me as he nearly ran me over with his bicycle. “Democratic Socialists aren’t Democrats!” he yelled.

After I regained my balance, I looked up. He turned back and called out to me a second time.

“It’s true, you know!” he said.

I scurried away. But his words  —  “true” and the assured “you know” — made me think about how language around American politics has come down to “truth” or “lies,” which leaves out a lot.

Maybe the simplicity of that thinking helped create a landslide.

Once it became clear that Democrats had triumphed, opinion writers frequently relied on the word “lie” to explain voters’ sudden seismic shift.

“Trump claims he kept more promises to American voters than he made. Like so many things he has said, that’s a lie, and voters punished him and his party for it,” Josh Barro wrote in The New York Times.

The problem with the theory that voters punished Trump for lying is that the man has been lying for decades, most famously about winning the 2020 election — which, of course, he lost.

He entered politics by lying about Barack Obama. So the real question is why Trump’s lies bothered people now.

Maybe a clue was in the language during the leadup to this election, and how it changed as the watershed results came in.

I don’t know about you, but I couldn’t help noticing that Israel was a hot topic that somehow disappeared on election night as journalists marveled that Mississippi was in play for a Senate seat while every kind of Democrat won — moderate, far-left, young, old.

But it didn’t seem that would happen a mere five days ago, in that other lifetime when former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, during a discussion with podcaster Donny Deutsch, categorized debate over Israel as a fight between ‘right’ and ‘wrong.’

Back then, Michigan felt crucial, not one in a pile of Democratic wins. It was news that the elegant former speaker used the word ‘wrong.’

“When you say Israel doesn’t have the right to be a Jewish state, that’s antisemitic as far as I’m concerned,” Deutsch said, in reference to statements made by New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani and then-Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed.

“It’s more than concerning,” Pelosi responded. “It’s wrong. It’s wrong. And it isn’t a reflection of the Democrats in the Congress of the United States.”

I flashed back to that one-syllable word — “wrong” — early Wednesday morning when, with El-Sayed’s victory, it seemed that, contrary to what Pelosi said, objecting to Israel’s existence as a Jewish state was apparently no longer viewed as categorically “wrong.”

Wrong vs. right

If objecting to Israel’s existence was “wrong,” then what was “right”?

Some Jewish politicians — like Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel — told Jews to put their own concerns aside for the “needs of the world.”

“We have a moral imperative to place the needs of the world above even our own self-interest and, yes, even our own survival,” Nessel said, acknowledging that Jews faced a “stark choice” due to some of the comments made by Democrats.

After the election, anti-Israel commentators mocked Jewish politicians — and journalists.

Mehdi Hassan, founder of media company Zeteo, taunted Representatives Josh Gottheimer and Debbie Wasserman Schultz, along with CNN anchor Dana Bash, all Jewish. “He won,” Hasan said, calling El-Sayed a “left-wing Muslim anti-Zionist.”

“And so for all of you, I have two words — two words — cry more.”

The dismissiveness is the point

What got me about Hasan’s comments wasn’t just the hatred; it was the dismissiveness — as if all the existential worry within the Jewish community didn’t matter at all.

As if Nessel, who tried to find the “right” thing to do in a time when lies from the leader of the free world — not to mention violence against immigrants, humiliating comments toward and threats against brave Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelenskyy, and fleecing the United States in one of the biggest cons in history — meant asking her fellow Jewish Democrats who worried about Israel and attacks on their own local synagogues to ignore their own inner voice.

In its post-midterms statement, the Anti-Defamation League used the word “dismissed”  with regard to Jewish Americans’ concerns — on a night when some candidates proved that ignoring Jews’ worries is not a barrier to electoral victory.

“Antisemitic rhetoric and scapegoating fuels hatred and can lead to harassment, threats and violence. In too many places, Jewish Americans’ concerns about this were overshadowed by competing priorities or dismissed outright,” the statement read.

Hmmm, I thought thinking about what that bicyclist had yelled at me: “You know it’s true.”

But I can’t help thinking that I don’t know what’s true; none of us know yet why so many voters finally dumped Trump.

I do, however, think that the framing given by the bicyclist, so convinced he knew what was and wasn’t true, and the dismissiveness problem, are related. That’s because the easiest way to dismiss another person’s thought process is to say “that’s a lie.”

I don’t know what’s worse — to be called a liar, or to be ignored — but amid all the celebration, I fear many in the Jewish community may soon find out.

In the months ahead, I’ll be listening for dismissiveness. I’ll be watching the distance between truth, lies, right, wrong, and “cry more.”

And I’ll notice when anyone — whether they’re a screaming bicyclist, journalist, or a politician — tells me I should already know what the truth is.

The post Now that the election is over, can we stop dismissing everyone we disagree with by calling them ‘wrong’ or a ‘liar?’ appeared first on The Forward.