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Israel’s Right Fights Over Who Gets To Rule The Jewish State

SCHEERPOST, October 22, 2026, Mohammad Al-Ayoubi, The Cradle.

Regardless of who becomes prime minister.

With a week to go before Israel’s 27 October election, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his principal challenger, Gadi Eisenkot, are competing for the authority to govern a state whose Jewish identity neither contests. Their camps remain short of a parliamentary majority. Yet the political deadlock is already prompting discussion of arrangements both sides had presented to voters as unacceptable.

Recent polls put the prime minister’s bloc and the Zionist opposition close to a tie, with neither securing the 61 seats needed for a majority in the 120-member Knesset. Another election remains possible, especially while opposition leaders reject governing partnerships with Palestinian parties.

The struggle over who can assemble a coalition is sharpening a more fundamental competition: who can best defend Jewish security and administer the Jewish state.

Understanding that contest requires looking at the transformation of Israeli society, Suleiman Bisharat, director of the Yabous Center, tells The Cradle.

That shift toward the right took hold roughly a decade ago, rather than emerging only during the past two or three years. The electorate has continued moving toward the right and far right, narrowing the political ground on which the main contenders compete.

For Bisharat, the claim that Netanyahu represents the right while Eisenkot stands outside it misreads this transformation. Netanyahu represents the far right or extreme right; Eisenkot also belongs to the right and far right. Their rivalry concerns who can take a harder line on Jewish identity and the principles underpinning the state.

The right competes with itself

The campaign revolves around the identity of the state, enshrined in the 2018 Nation-State Law, and its religious-national character. These questions concern the future organization of a Jewish religious nation-state, including the relationship between its military, religious institutions, and political leadership.

Bisharat argues that Netanyahu and Eisenkot are competing to make their respective right-wing visions more convincing to far-right parties. Netanyahu brought extremist National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir into his governing coalition after the previous election and is trying to work with the same electoral logic again. The two candidates’ rhetoric, despite their rivalry, remains within the same ideological orbit.

Dr Saad Nimr, a political science professor at Birzeit University, offers a similar assessment. These elections pit the right against the right, he tells The Cradle, with both contenders operating within the right and far right. He sees little substantive disagreement over the nature of the state: both invoke a Jewish and democratic nation-state.

Their dispute centers on its management. Eisenkot regards Netanyahu as an overbearing leader with whom he cannot work, Nimr says. But both pursue broadly the same direction and share the same general ideas.

Opposition to Netanyahu has brought together politicians whose disagreements over coalition partners exceed their differences over the state they seek to govern.

Netanyahu bargains for survival

Netanyahu enters the election under legal and political pressure, while remaining the dominant figure in his camp. His campaign turns the vote into a referendum on national security and the Jewish identity of the state, presenting him as the indispensable guarantor of both. His emphasis on the multi-front “War of Redemption” also serves to minimize his responsibility for the intelligence failures exposed by Operation Al-Aqsa Flood.

Appealing to his religious and nationalist base, Netanyahu uses the unfinished war to deflect scrutiny of his corruption trial and responsibility for 7 October, casting his removal as a threat to the state’s security and Jewish identity.

At the same time, Netanyahu has begun putting distance between himself and Ben Gvir. Likud signed a surplus-vote agreement with Religious Zionism, leaving Ben Gvir’s Jewish Power outside that arrangement. Netanyahu has also said Likud would retain the defense, national security, and justice portfolios, rejecting Ben Gvir’s ministerial demands.

Culture Minister Miki Zohar has gone further, publicly proposing a rotation government with Eisenkot, with Netanyahu serving first. President Isaac Herzog has also pledged to work to prevent another election. These signals leave open the possibility that Netanyahu’s pressure on Ben Gvir serves a second purpose: making room for an agreement with Eisenkot after the vote.

Nimr says Netanyahu may dispense with Ben Gvir if a broader political arrangement offers a better route to power. Much will depend on Likud’s seat count. With divisions running through the prospective coalitions, Netanyahu will calculate how many partners he needs and what he must concede to secure them.

If his bloc falls short, he will try to gather the necessary votes despite his partners’ conditions, including those of the religious parties. Nimr argues that Netanyahu’s overriding objective is a government he heads, even when the price conflicts with the preferences of his own party.

Eisenkot’s security alternative

Eisenkot has emerged as Netanyahu’s strongest challenger. A 16 October Maariv poll put him ahead on suitability for the premiership, with 48 percent support to Netanyahu’s 41 percent, and projected his Yashar party to win 21 seats against Likud’s 18. Other surveys differ in their margins, but repeatedly leave both camps without a governing majority.

Drawing on his tenure as military chief of staff between 2015 and 2019, Eisenkot presents himself as the candidate of security and unity. His program includes a state commission of inquiry into the October failures, a new national security doctrine, and a comprehensive service law covering Haredim and Palestinians with Israeli citizenship. For the Palestinians, the proposed obligation includes national civilian service, rather than universal military enlistment.

His alternative remains firmly within the state’s Zionist framework. He has made recognition of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state, adherence to the Declaration of Independence, and acceptance of service obligations conditions for coalition partners. He has excluded Palestinian parties on that basis.

Netanyahu and Eisenkot agree on preserving the Jewish state and its security doctrine. They disagree over who should lead it, which parties should share power, and who must serve in its armed forces.

The Haredi price of power

Shas and United Torah Judaism, polling at roughly 14–16 seats between them, sit at the sharpest point of disagreement. They remain central to Netanyahu’s coalition calculations, while their opposition to compulsory military service clashes with Eisenkot’s platform.

Their parliamentary weight makes any settlement over conscription inseparable from negotiations over the next government. Netanyahu has repeatedly sought to shield their constituency from the draft to preserve their support.

The legal basis for blanket Haredi exemptions was struck down in 2024. By October 2026, Israeli reporting put the total number of people classified as evading military service at around 110,000, approximately 80 percent of them Haredim.

The widening pool of draft evaders has made the religious parties’ exemptions increasingly difficult to separate from the burdens imposed on serving soldiers and reservists………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. https://scheerpost.com/2026/10/22/israels-right-fights-over-who-gets-to-rule-the-jewish-state/

October 26, 2026 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | Israel, politics