The public in Israel decided: no more

October 28, 2026

Even before the exit poll results were published, it seemed that the citizens of Israel, Jews and Arabs, had decided to stage a mass demonstration, unseen for decades, to determine their fate. The term “fate” is not a figure of speech.

This election was not merely about settling the agonizing score with a malicious government that turned most of its citizens into its enemies. The coalition led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu abandoned the Israeli people, betrayed its mission to protect them, and left them to their own devices. This election was the most important in the state’s history because a real sword hung over the necks of Israeli citizens.

It was not just the threat of a new war against Iran or the launching of new offensives to save the withered skin of a leader who had gone off the rails and dragged the country with him. For many citizens, the question was whether they could even continue to live in this country, a country that had been pulled out from under their feet at a terrible cost over the past three years.

Many of them looked as if they had just finished their military service or were first- or second-year university students. One could only wonder how many of them would remain here, and how many had already secured a foreign passport and planned to leave Israel.

And immediately, an even more difficult thought replaced it: What would be left for us? Those who perhaps wanted to join them but could not, and those who could but did not want to give up. Would there even be anyone left to fight with, to reclaim our normal lives, or at least what seemed normal just three years ago?

But a ray of light appeared that morning when the high voter turnout rates became known, proving that the public had not only decided to take its fate into its own hands, but, more importantly, believed it could alter the path of deterioration.

A desperate, beaten, shell-shocked and defeated public does not march en masse to cast a ballot out of a recognition of its power. It retreats into its own four cubits, choked by despair, and begins to calculate its end.

These were not the citizens who arrived en masse at the polling stations. These were citizens charged with bubbling hope, carrying on their backs mountains of memories of a country plundered from them by a gang of torch-bearing brigands who set fire to every good part of it; they voted and won.

Yousef Jabareen, third from left, celebrates the exit poll results with supporters and members of his Joint List pa… Credit: Daniel Rolider

Then the exit poll results arrived and allowed everyone to breathe a sigh of relief. True, nothing is final yet, but the path is already illuminated and gleaming. The public in Israel decided: no more. It kicked out the Netanyahu government, and no arrangement, kombina, a shady deal or scheme, or trick will help.

Likud may be the largest party, but it is swallowed by a cascade of votes that spew it out of power. The “chariot act,” a complex and intricate undertaking, will be complicated, and there is no certainty that Gadi Eisenkot and his partners will be able to form a functioning government. But he has enormous backing.

The 17-18 mandates of Arab citizens of Israel, representing 20 percent of Israel’s citizens, see eye to eye with Eisenkot’s bloc and its voters on the necessity of removing from power those who worked tirelessly to destroy the shared state. This partnership can and should be relied upon to form a minority government that will immediately begin to repay the debt it owes its voters and return their country to them.

Removing Netanyahu is only the first step. After that, the mechanisms of incitement and abandonment must be eradicated and dismantled, the rule of law and public accountability restored, security returned to citizens’ lives, and the partnership between Jews and Arabs rebuilt as the foundation upon which the state will exist.

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