Eisenkot gets the mandate and closes the door that elected him
The four principles Gadi Eisenkot set for coalition partners decide who holds a ministry, and the 19 seats that made him the nominee will stay outside the cabinet. Their votes can keep him in office from the floor while the war stays with a caretaker prime minister.
Isaac Herzog formally gave Gadi Eisenkot the first chance to form Israel’s next government on Sunday evening, Nov. 8, 2026, at the President’s Residence in Jerusalem, with up to six weeks to assemble a coalition from a parliament where no bloc holds a majority. In his consultations with the parties, Herzog said, a majority of the Knesset’s 120 members had supported giving the task to the former army chief. Eisenkot answered with the sentence that has organized his campaign and now organizes the negotiations: “If you are prepared to sign on to the four principles I have set out, you are potential partners in a national emergency government under my leadership.”
The four conditions Eisenkot set for coalition partners are the entry price. A party that wants a ministry from an Eisenkot government must recognize Israel as a Jewish and democratic state; accept the values of the Declaration of Independence, the 1948 text that promises complete equality of social and political rights to all its citizens; accept mandatory service for all—military, national or civilian; and recognize Hamas as a terrorist organization, with a commitment to dismantle its military and governing power.
The list measures two constituencies at once. Defining Israel as a Jewish state is what the Joint List has refused for years, and universal service is the obligation successive ultra-Orthodox parties have resisted; the condition on Hamas is the one the United Arab List (Ra’am) and the Joint List have so far refused to endorse in public. When Herzog pressed Mansour Abbas on it during the consultations on Nov. 8, the Ra’am leader gave the answer he has repeated since:
“I have an unequivocal answer, but leave me space to be a bridge. To also influence the other side.”
Abbas has said the refusal rests on concern for his own safety and on his party’s ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, to which Hamas is affiliated. Members of the Joint List argue that labeling Hamas a terrorist organization would delegitimize Palestinian political aspirations as a whole.
The arithmetic outside the cabinet
No bloc in the new Knesset holds 61 seats. Benjamin Netanyahu’s alliance has 53, the four-party opposition bloc 48, and the two Arab-led lists 19—11 for the Joint List and eight for Ra’am. Six of those parties recommended Eisenkot to the president, which gave him 67 against 46 for Netanyahu after United Torah Judaism’s seven lawmakers declined to recommend anyone. On Nov. 5, 2026, the Joint List’s three factions, Hadash, Balad and Ta’al, decided unanimously to recommend him, citing public demand to keep Netanyahu and his government from returning to power.
Seats and recommendations part ways at the cabinet door. The four “Zionist parties” Eisenkot named as the core of his government hold 48; Ra’am’s eight bring an Eisenkot-led bloc to 56, five short of a majority. Dahlia Scheindlin, an Israeli political analyst and pollster, wrote on Nov. 7, 2026, that at least three of those four parties are unwilling to sit with Arab lawmakers, and Avigdor Lieberman’s Yisrael Beytenu has made the refusal explicit: it would leave any coalition that seated the Arab parties. What remains is a minority government, a cabinet of the four “Zionist parties” kept standing by lawmakers who vote with it from the floor and never enter it.
On the day of the ceremony, a source in Ra’am told Haaretz that the party’s eight lawmakers would support an Eisenkot government even if no coalition agreement were signed, partly to keep the bloc from leaning instead on United Torah Judaism. The same report had the Joint List declining to vote in favor of such a government without an agreement and declining to work for its fall.
That places the Joint List between two positions at once. It endorsed Eisenkot to end Netanyahu’s rule, and it will not accept the terms for joining the government that would do it. Scheindlin’s reading is that the conditions do not reach the parties that stay outside: “They don’t have to agree to those things to support from the outside.” Its chairman, Yousef Jabareen, gave the harder version of the same position to The Guardian: “As long as the occupation of our people in the West Bank continues, we cannot be part of a government.”
The other clock
The Knesset chosen on Oct. 27, 2026 takes its seats on Nov. 10, 2026, at 9 a.m. Eastern Time (4 p.m. Jerusalem time), in an inaugural session attended by the president. From that moment the chamber legislates on its own clock: the anti-Netanyahu bloc has already asked the speaker, Amir Ohana, to schedule a vote on replacing Ohana as speaker on the day the new members are sworn in, and Ohana has said he will hold it within a week if 61 members sign the request. The bloc’s leaders treat the speakership as a maneuver separate from forming a government, which lets them work with Ra’am and the Joint List on the Knesset’s agenda while the coalition talks remain closed to both.
The executive runs on the other clock. Until a new government is sworn in, Netanyahu’s cabinet stays in office as a caretaker, with its powers intact and a duty of restraint in matters where there is no particular need or urgency. A caretaker government is not barred from going to war, and Section 40 of the Basic Law: The Government requires a decision by the government or the Security Cabinet to start one, so the prime minister cannot order it alone. Restraint has not stopped caretaker cabinets before: Guardian of the Walls in 2021 and Breaking Dawn in 2022 were both launched by governments in transition, and both stayed limited in scope. Underneath the legal question sits the political one the same analysis names, whether a war could be used to shape the composition of the government that follows. The backdrop is a possible renewed campaign against Iran.
By Nov. 10 the Knesset will hold 120 members with full powers and no government of its own, and the government it was elected to replace will still command the army. Eisenkot’s four principles set the price of a ministry. The 19 seats that made him the nominee would keep such a government standing from the floor, with votes and no portfolios, while the war stays in a cabinet those conditions keep closed to them and in the hands of a prime minister whose alliance lost its majority on Oct. 27.