Israel forms a government that will oust Netanyahu.

Shortly after Tuesday’s stunning U.S. midterm elections, Israelis form a new government that looks difficult Less surprising: a governing body of the Jewish state that includes Israeli Arabs.

Israel held its own national elections last week, but they ended in deadlock. Neither of the two main coalitions – one led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the other by opposition leader Gadi Eisenkot – won a majority of seats in parliament. Thus, neither was able to form a government.

But there was an intriguing result in the vote count: two Arab parties together won 19 seats, almost twice as many as the 10 seats they had won in previous elections. If Netanyahu or Eisenkot invited the Arabs to join his coalition, he would have enough seats to win.

Netanyahu was not ready to side with the Arabs; if he did so, at least an equal number of his far-right partners would likely resign, leaving him still short of a majority. Eisenkot, a former Israeli army chief, considered inviting the Arabs but also appears to have decided against it.

Then, on Thursday, Eisenkot and the two Arab leaders – Mansour Abbas of the Joint List and Yousef Jabareen of the Joint List – announced that they would finally join forces. If they don’t change their minds in the coming days, it will give the opposition coalition enough seats to oust Netanyahu and his far-right partners from power.

To form a government in Israel, a party or coalition must win 61 of the 120 seats in Parliament. Netanyahu’s and Eisenkot’s coalitions won 53 and 48, respectively. Today, with Arab support, Eisenkot has won 67 – a comfortable majority, allowing them to cling to power even if a handful of Arab members drop out at any given time.

Arab leaders want to avoid giving the impression of being co-opted by the Jewish state’s government: Jabareen has said he would not seek a government position, preferring to support it in parliament, while Abbas has not said whether he wants a position. However, they are united in their desire to overthrow Netanyahu. The Arabs are even more eager to fire two of Netanyahu’s ministers, Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, who actively encouraged Jewish settler violence in the West Bank.

The new government is unlikely to last long. Many issues divide not only Eisenkot from the two Arabs, but also the two Arabs from each other. Although Jabareen approved the disarmament of Hamas as a condition for peace in Gaza, he refused, for political reasons, to declare Hamas a “terrorist group.” That alarmed many of Israel’s Jewish leaders and citizens and reinforced fears about letting Arabs join a government, even though there are 2 million of them — about 20 percent of Israel’s population — and have, at least formally, equal rights. (These figures do not include the 5 million Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, who are barred from voting in Israeli elections.)

Eisenkot shares this fear of letting the Arabs enter the government, but he fears even more a new mandate for Netanyahu in power. This latter fear is reinforced by the results of this week’s midterm elections in the United States.

To the extent that Netanyahu still has appeal in Israel, despite the many controversies he has provoked, it comes from his friendship with President Donald Trump, whose support for Israel is seen as vital to the Jewish state’s security. After Tuesday, that friendship suddenly seems both questionable and irrelevant. Doubtful because, the day before the election, Trump announced that he would stop sending Israel $4 billion in military aid. This is irrelevant, because the Democrats’ landslide victory discredited Netanyahu’s strategy of settling for the Republicans.

The US election also highlights, under the bright neon lights, Israel’s growing isolation, even within the United States, its most important ally. Israel’s excessive violence in Gaza, the West Bank, southern Lebanon and Iran has prompted prominent international organizations to accuse the state of war crimes and genocide. Opinion polls show that a majority of Americans sympathize more with the Palestinians than with the Israelis, even despite the deadly Hamas invasion on October 7, 2023. The current Congress has all but banned arms aid to Israel, and the next Congress, with Senator Abdul El-Sayed among its elected representatives, may well do so. The fact that Trump now endorses this decision gives conservatives cover to take the same position without being accused of anti-Semitism. It’s also worth noting that on Wednesday, Vice President JD Vance said Republicans lost because of the war in Iran and “our relationship with Israel.”

In this context, a security politician like retired General Eisenkot sees it as vital to oust Netanyahu, who is seen by many Americans as the face of Israel’s dark side. The problem is that on the issues that concern Americans and other foreigners, there is not much difference between Netanyahu and Eisenkot. Both oppose the withdrawal from Gaza. Both are in favor of continuing the occupation of the West Bank. There are, however, some differences: Eisenkot is not in favor of annexation of the West Bank, nor the tolerance of murderous violence on the part of Jewish settlers. He also considers “regime change” in Iran a pipe dream and prefers to resolve the conflict with the Islamic State through diplomacy.

For these reasons, Eisenkot hopes Netanyahu’s trip could ease growing hostility toward Israel in the United States and other Western countries. He also clearly hopes that taking the truly remarkable step of forming a coalition government with Israeli Arabs could soften the view of Israel as an apartheid state. Refusing to form such a coalition, even if it meant giving up a secure path to the premiership, would have reinforced this view.

It would not be the first time that Arabs entered an Israeli government. Deborah Amos, a former Middle East reporter for NPR and ABC, recalled in a recent Substack that a similar coalition had already seized power once. In 2021, opposition leader Naftali Bennett won a majority of seats, thanks to the inclusion of an Israeli Arab party called Raam. As is the case today, the Arabs’ motivation in joining the government, and Bennett’s motivation in recruiting them, was to displace the longtime prime minister, whose name was…Benjamin Netanyahu.

The resulting government, with Bennett as prime minister, lasted barely a year, mainly due to internal tensions, before Netanyahu won the next election, his third victory since 1996. This victory gave birth to the far-right coalition still in power today – which Eisenkot now hopes to topple.

This government may not last long either, but it will last long enough to topple Netanyahu. For Israel, this is the important thing now, especially after Trump’s party was also criticized..