Israel's 2026 election: The story so far...

On 27 October 2026, Israel will hold a general election.

The Knesset, Israel’s parliament, has completed its four-year term, something that very rarely happens — the only other time in the last 50 years was in 1988 — and it’s been an astonishingly turbulent four years. Briefly ousted, Benjamin Netanyahu returned to power in an election campaign where his flagship policy was “free childcare for under-3s”. He built a coalition entirely from parties to his own right and the Haredi (ultra-Orthodox Jewish) parties.

Then the Likud justice minister, Yariv Levin, launched a controversial “judicial reform” programme to heavily curtail the powers of the judiciary and civil service. The programme defined the first nine months of the Netanyahu government’s tenure, led to huge internal protests and warnings from the security heads that the country’s enemies were watching.

And then, on 7 October 2023, Hamas invaded Israel, killing around 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and abducting 251 people into Gaza.

The resultant war killed tens of thousands of Gazan Palestinians, destroyed most of Gaza’s buildings, and left Israel internationally isolated and historically unpopular. It did, eventually, bring home most of the hostages, alongside pressure from Joe Biden and Donald Trump. But it didn’t achieve its stated aim of removing Hamas as the government of Gaza. Hamas still rules the rubble, and the Netanyahu government spent years refusing to consider any alternative.

Everyone in power on 7 October has gone: the generals, the intelligence heads, the defence minister. Everyone except Benjamin Netanyahu, architect of the appeasement strategy that kept Hamas in power in Gaza in return for relative ‘quiet’.

Two more wars followed, both brief and seemingly decisive. Exploding pagers and leadership assassinations opened up a two-month campaign in Lebanon that seemed to leave Hezbollah deterred. A dramatic strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities, with eventual US participation, seemed to be another strategic victory. For a few months, Netanyahu was riding high, maybe believing he could still somehow regain his domestic popularity and decisively win the next election.

But then nemesis followed hubris: the 2026 US/Israel war against Iran was an act of strategic self-sabotage, strengthening Iran and exposing Hezbollah’s apparent defeat as a mirage. Iran still seems to have much of its ballistic missile stock intact, it still has its stash of enriched uranium and now it appears to control the Strait of Hormuz with tacit US permission.

With yet another Lebanon war and still occupying half of Gaza, Israel’s conscript and reservist military is at breaking point. But the government has spent most of its domestic political capital desperately trying to exempt the largest-growing pool of potential conscripts, Haredi youths, from the draft. More money, more legal status, even a law to stop the police arresting Haredi draft dodgers; all incredibly unpopular but demanded by Netanyahu’s Haredi partners and willingly paid by his coalition.

And that’s the backdrop to this election.

In Israel, you don’t have to ‘win’ an election to be prime minister, and you certainly don’t have to win to stay prime minister if you already occupy the office. As long as you can cobble together a coalition of 61 Knesset members, that’s enough to get you over the line. Despite Netanyahu’s precarious position, he has any number of routes to stay in power.

That doesn’t mean it’ll be easy.

This time his main challenger is former IDF Chief of Staff Gadi Eisenkot. Eisenkot emerged from a crowded field of opposition politicians to become the de facto leader of the anti-Netanyahu camp.

I wrote an introductory profile of Eisenkot for the Spectator explaining some of the racial and class dynamics at play:

Despite his Germanic-sounding surname, Eisenkot is Mizrachi, the son of working-class Moroccan immigrants; a marked contrast from Netanyahu, the nepo-baby son of a politically-connected Ashkenazi college professor. Eisenkot joined the traditionally Mizrachi Golani Brigade when he was drafted into the IDF, where he rose through the ranks (According to Max Hastings, a young Netanyahu once joked that Golani was “OK as long as they’re led by white officers.” Netanyahu denies this)

OK, that’s the story so far, in a very abridged fashion. What’s next?

In the ten weeks until the election, I plan to write a weekly Hat Tip on an Israeli election topic: the politics, the parties, the polls and some of the other dynamics at play.

The first newsletter will be about the party primaries.

Well, technically, the first one was this one. But the next one, also due out this week, will be look at the primaries as Likud members vote in their party’s internal election today.

Regular readers or followers of my content will know that I am no fan of the current Israeli government. I consistently criticised the Gaza war as far too brutal, too indiscriminate, too deadly while also lacking any real strategy. I opposed the pointless adventurism of this latest Iran fiasco, believe that the only stable solution involves self-determination for both Israelis and Palestinians, and hope that Netanyahu loses.

That won’t be enough for some people, but so be it.

I don’t want to write just horse-race coverage, but ultimately elections are fundamentally about who’s winning, who’s losing, who’s convincing and who's failing. Reporting that passes no moral judgments is empty, but reporting that centres them often fails in its basic duty to report. If I talk glibly about the Itamar Ben Gvir’s far right party, that doesn’t mean I’m treating it just the same as the more centrist parties, it just means the election itself is.

I’m going to be trying to keep up a better pace of posting here over the next few months, hopefully building the Hat Tip back into a publication that has something to say, and the election is a good place to start.

That means it’s also a good time to sign up. Click here to subscribe: