Preliminary vote tallies from Israel’s Tuesday national elections, with 86% of ballots processed by Wednesday morning, have set the stage for a seismic political shakeup that could unseat long-serving Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu after a four-year tenure defined by devastating military campaigns in Gaza and accelerating dispossession and displacement of Palestinian communities across the occupied West Bank. Netanyahu’s far-right religious governing bloc is projected to lose 11 Knesset seats, landing at just 53 seats — eight short of the 61-seat threshold required to form a governing majority. The centrist Jewish opposition faction, led by former Yashar party chief Gadi Eisenkot, is on track to secure 48 seats, putting it in prime position to claim control of the 120-seat parliament, but only if it can lock in support from the newly empowered Arab minority parties, which won a historic 19 seats on the back of record voter participation. Arab voters defied a sustained campaign of racist incitement from Netanyahu’s electoral camp and widespread ballot access suppression efforts to turn out in unprecedented numbers, a milestone analysts are framing as a transformative moment for Israeli politics. Ameer Fakhoury, a researcher at Jerusalem’s Van Leer Jerusalem Institute think tank, called the mobilization of Palestinian citizens of Israel a “truly historic development,” noting that voters turned out en masse to reject a government they hold responsible for widespread devastation in Gaza, de facto ethnic cleansing operations in the West Bank, and decades of systemic persecution and intimidation targeting their communities. “History has placed Palestinian citizens of Israel in an extraordinary position,” Fakhoury told Middle East Eye. “Having mobilized first and foremost to protect their own people, they may now also help rescue Jewish Israelis from their country’s destructive trajectory.” The newfound leverage held by Arab parties has sparked fierce negotiations and deep rifts across the Israeli political spectrum, with a tight legal deadline to form a new government before a fresh round of elections is automatically triggered. The leader of the smaller Arab faction Ra’am, Mansour Abbas, signaled his willingness to compromise shortly after preliminary results were released, stating his core priority was to oust Netanyahu, far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, and extremist National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir in this electoral cycle. Ra’am previously backed a narrow right-wing coalition led by former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett in 2021, but its 7 projected seats alone are insufficient to push the opposition bloc across the 61-seat majority line. The larger left-wing Arab alliance, the Joint List, has also offered to back an Eisenkot-led government, but its parliamentary leader Ahmad Tibi has laid out a clear set of non-negotiable demands: targeted action to curb soaring violent crime in Arab-majority communities, an immediate end to state-ordered home demolitions disproportionately targeting Arab families (most of whom are denied construction permits under systemic discriminatory policies), a crackdown on state-sanctioned racist incitement against Arab citizens, and a formal policy roadmap to advance Palestinian self-determination. Tibi summed up the historic choice facing Israeli voters with the widely circulated catchphrase “either Bibi or Tibi.” Eisenkot, who has framed forcing Netanyahu’s full retirement from political life as a core campaign goal, has attempted to court skeptical right-leaning Jewish voters who hold hostile views of Arab political participation by imposing preconditions for formal cooperation with Arab parties: that they formally recognize Israel as an explicitly Jewish state, support mandatory military conscription for Palestinian citizens of Israel, and publicly designate Hamas as a terrorist organization. The socialist Hadash party, the largest faction within the Joint List, has rejected these terms outright. “Laying down conditions won’t work with the Joint List,” said Amjad Shbita, Hadash’s general secretary. “We will negotiate as equals because we need each other.” Deep internal fractures are also roiling Eisenkot’s own opposition bloc. Former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett and ex-Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman have both rejected any government that relies on explicit support or even abstention from Arab parties to secure a majority. Liberman has gone so far as to urge disaffected hardline members of Netanyahu’s Likud party to defect to the opposition to form a “true right-wing government,” with the most promising opening centered on peeling away Likud lawmakers who oppose Netanyahu’s longstanding concessions to ultra-Orthodox parties, most notably the controversial draft exemptions for seminary (yeshiva) students. On the opposite end of the opposition spectrum, Yair Golan, leader of the left-wing Democrats party, has pushed Eisenkot to embrace a full partnership with Arab parties to permanently oust Netanyahu. In a widely shared social media post Wednesday, Golan wrote, “Netanyahu lost. I know how to count to 120. Sixty-five is more than 55. That’s how Israeli democracy works. Period. The reality must teach us one resounding lesson: We have no future here if we don’t stop being afraid. And if we don’t stop with the racism. We must no longer accept Netanyahu’s racist division between Jewish votes and Arab votes. Anyone who tries to erase the voices of Arab citizens is surrendering to Netanyahu and giving up on Israel.” Another possible outcome being floated by insiders is a so-called “national unity government” that would see the Eisenkot and Netanyahu factions strike a power-sharing deal that completely excludes Arab parties from any governing role. Eitan Tzelgov, a leading expert on Israeli populism and democratic backsliding at the United Kingdom’s University of East Anglia, framed the choice facing Eisenkot’s change bloc as a stark binary: “govern with the Arab parties, or with Netanyahu.” “Israel is a tribal society, with cohesive right-wing tribes and a shrinking liberal tribe that will need to make a decision,” Tzelgov explained in a note to Common Dreams. “Over the years, Netanyahu and the far right have built an ideological firewall around the Arab parties by presenting any Jewish-Arab collaboration as support for terrorism. The leaders of the change bloc, representing Israel’s liberal camp, now must decide if they are willing to break it. That is the only way to bring about a U-turn from the current government’s policies in Gaza and the West Bank.” Tzelgov cautioned that he was not optimistic the liberal bloc would have the political will to take that step, noting that “a more likely outcome at the moment is a split within the change bloc and collaboration of some of its components with Netanyahu, a result US President Donald Trump reportedly supports.” Joint List chair Yousef Jabareen emphasized the existential stakes of the negotiations, stating, “Anyone who wants to offer a substantive and genuine alternative to Netanyahu’s blood-soaked government will have to talk to us. It’s either the continuation of racism, the continuation of exclusion, and the continuation of supremacy, or a genuine Jewish-Arab partnership.”