Israel's Parliament Deadlocked After Record Voter Turnout and Failed Coalition Talks

Israel’s parliament is stuck. After one of the highest voter turnouts in decades, neither Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition nor the self-styled Zionist opposition alliance secured the 61 seats needed for a majority in the October 27 polls. The deadlock persists.

Netanyahu’s camp took the top spot with 53 seats, edging out the main opposition bloc by five. Arab parties surged to a record 19 seats, yet they have been relegated to merely observing coalition negotiations from the sidelines. Viewed from a distance, the results might seem startling.

The judicial reforms launched at the start of Netanyahu’s current term in 2022 sparked the largest street protests in Israel’s history. The prime minister himself remains embroiled in a corruption trial dating back to 2019. Alleged failures ahead of the Hamas-led attacks on October 7, 2023, still demand accountability, despite overwhelming public pressure. Those failures triggered Israel’s genocidal war against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.

The conflict has driven growing international isolation and provided the pretext for multiple attacks on countries across the region. The latest, undertaken with the United States on Iran in February, continues to roil energy markets worldwide. And yet, roughly 2.38 million Israelis voted for Netanyahu’s Likud-led coalition on Tuesday. Some 2.21 million cast their ballots for the opposition alliance.

Between these two blocs, little space was left to examine the multiple war crimes Israel stands accused of in Gaza. Israeli attacks have killed more than 74,500 people and left much of the strip in ruins. Government complicity in surging violence and pogroms in the occupied West Bank remains a critical issue. A United Nations commission of inquiry stated on Monday that Israel has been committing crimes against humanity, including extermination, torture, and rape.

Gaza did not make the ballot.

Analysts note that neither Gaza nor the West Bank served as deciding factors because both alliances already held broad agreement on those fronts. The election was fought on internal issues instead: the power of Israel’s courts, whether ultra-Orthodox minority members should be exempted from military service, and whether the government’s alleged culpability in missing warnings of the October 2023 attack should be examined.

Leading Israeli sociologist Yehouda Shenhav-Shahrabani said these issues were pitched to the public along lines similar to those used by the politicians enacting them.

“I don’t think the problem is simply that people are uninformed or disengaged,” he told Al Jazeera.

“Many Israelis know that Gaza has been devastated, even though they are exposed to a very selective representation of that devastation.”

Shenhav-Shahrabani offered a stark explanation for the empathy gap many Israelis display when confronted with the widespread suffering of Palestinians in Gaza. Knowing facts and recognizing their moral or political weight are entirely separate acts. He noted that ordinary people, those who cherish their families, value their friends, and view themselves as decent human beings, can still participate in or simply acquiesce to a political order that inflicts immense pain on others. A powerful mechanism of denial is at work here. It is not necessarily a refusal to accept the facts themselves, but rather a rejection of what those facts actually mean.

For Netanyahu’s base, however, this detachment feels less like abstract psychology and more like tribal loyalty. Ahron Bregman, a senior teaching fellow at King’s College London, described the Likud party as a tribe, or perhaps a cult, where Dear Leader is always right. This electorate has sustained the prime minister’s rule for a cumulative 19 years, roughly a quarter of Israel’s entire existence. To them, the enemy is the left, right after the Arabs, and they will vote for Netanyahu regardless of his faults.

The vote was less a judgment on government conduct than a choice between competing claims to political legitimacy. Roi Zur, an expert on voter behavior at Essex University, framed it as a contest over the heart and soul of democracy and the future of Jewish and Israeli identity. He argued that the most important driver for turnout among Netanyahu’s supporters is the belief that any alternative coalition would be weaker on security. Netanyahu has been particularly successful in crafting a campaign of fear. He has instilled the conviction that he is the only prime minister strong enough to deal with the situation, the only leader capable of guiding Israel through the recent times and the post-October 7 war.

War and occupation were not choices to be made on the ballot paper. Instead, they became the prism through which Israelis had viewed security, citizenship, and the very meaning of democracy over decades. That is why replacing Netanyahu, important as it may be, would not by itself resolve the deeper problem.