Show Notes
Israel voted on 27 October — and by Wednesday afternoon, with 85 percent of the ballots counted, Benjamin Netanyahu had lost his majority and nobody could remove him. The bloc against him stands at 67 seats in a Knesset of 120, and still every route to a government looks blocked: unity with Gadi Eisenkot, a minority government resting on the Arab parties, or another election. Yonit, straight off anchoring Channel 12's election night, and Jonathan talk through the three scenarios and the stranger ones underneath them — a Trump-guaranteed rotation, a united-bloc offer Netanyahu would have to refuse — plus the record Arab turnout and what drove it, why Shas and Ben-Gvir shrank while Likud grew, and what a parliamentary majority can do while nobody can form a government
More from Unholy: Two Jews on the News
Two days after Israel voted, Yonit and Jonathan are in the same room in Tel Aviv, working out an election Jonathan calls a win within a loss for Netanyahu and a loss within a win for Gadi Eisenkot — a coalition shrunk from 64 to 53, and still no path to a government without him. Yonit, after her eleventh election night as anchor, on why the exit polls got it wrong and the ten-week clock that starts once the president hands out the mandate. Then the question diaspora callers keep putting to Jonathan: how, three years after 7 October, is Netanyahu still there? The answer runs through Benny Gantz, 11 October 2023 and Neville Chamberlain. Plus the Qatar turnout allegation, the oak in whose shade nothing grows, a Chutzpah from the Michigan Senate race and a Mensch awarded to a few million people at once.
Join us on Unholy Live on YouTube the moment the polls close: https://youtube.com/live/EUhNvryZQSo?feature=share
Reunited in the same studio in Tel Aviv just five days before Israelis head to the polls, Yonit and Jonathan dive into the high-stakes homestretch of an election that feels less like routine politics and more like a referendum on the country’s soul. Jonathan reports from the ground—from the packed, expat-heavy El Al flight from London to a campaign rally with Gadi Eisenkot—while Yonit parses the razor-thin bloc arithmetic, the damaging fallout from the Yonatan Urich Qatari funding investigation, and the electoral tightrope Benjamin Netanyahu is walking with ultra-Orthodox draft evasion.
With just a week to go, Israel’s election campaign caught fire at the weekend, thanks to an incendiary intervention by one of Benjamin Netanyahu’s most ardent media supporters. Channel 14’s Yinon Magal re-opened a deep racial divide when he repeatedly referred to Netanyahu’s prime challenger, Gadi Eisenkot - whose family roots are in Morocco - as a “monkey”.
Twelve days before Israel votes, Yonit observes that the national mood is neither Britain in 1997 nor America in 2008 - a nation certain that it’s on the brink of change - but one of pure tension on both sides. In the final stretch, Binyamin Netanyahu is on an interview blitz, making no secret of his plans to maintain his current coalition while insisting Itamar Ben-Gvir will not be defense minister—a denial Jonathan reads as an outright forecast.