Now the caveat that a Likud voter and a Yashar voter both deserve to read. A recommendation is not a coalition. The Jerusalem Post notes that the Arab parties' recommendations do not commit them to joining anything. Set their 19 seats aside and the change bloc holds 48; Netanyahu's bloc holds 53. Nobody is at 61. Herzog said so himself on Thursday: the results "seem clear," but who can actually form a government "is not entirely clear in light of the cross-vetoes between the blocs and within the blocs themselves."
What Eisenkot is offering is an "emergency government" built on four principles every partner must sign, per The Times of Israel: Israel as a Jewish and democratic state; the values of the Declaration of Independence; service for all, military, national or civilian; and recognition of Hamas as a terrorist organization, with a commitment to dismantling its military and governing power. His colleague Yoram Cohen described the method at Herzog's residence: build "the core of the government, then expand it."
And here is the part that matters most to anyone who fears Israel tearing itself apart. On Saturday night, for the first time since the vote, Netanyahu went on video to call for a national unity government. "Citizens of Israel, this is the time for unity," he said, asking for a government of "all the parties of the national camp and all the Zionist parties." Yashar's reply, as reported by Ynet, was sharp: it called the video "hysterical" and set its own terms, Likud accepting the four principles and serving under Eisenkot. Beyahad's Merav Cohen put it bluntly: "You don't do business with scorpions."
Beyahad's Merav Cohen put it bluntly: "You don't do business with scorpions."
Read past the insults, because the substance is striking. The two men competing for the prime minister's chair are now competing on the same promise. One calls it unity, the other calls it emergency; both describe a broad wartime government anchored in Zionism that does not rest on parties hostile to the Jewish state. Even the sharpest dispute, whether to lean on Arab parties, is narrower than the shouting suggests. Raam's Mansour Abbas told The Jerusalem Post he backs the full disarmament of Hamas, one of Eisenkot's four conditions, and called Arab society "a bridge." The Joint List, as analysts have noted, does not recognize Israel as a Jewish state, which is precisely what Eisenkot's first principle rules out.
So the question for the next 28 days is not whether Israel gets a unity government. It is who leads it and who writes its terms. That is a real fight, and a healthy one: two years into a war, with the new Knesset sworn in Tuesday and a caretaker prime minister still in office, the leaders of both camps have been forced to say, out loud and in the same week, that unity is the price of power. From Bnei Brak to Tel Aviv to the Upper West Side, that is a sentence we can all sign.
