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
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.
Two weeks before Israel votes, the polls seem to be telling two different stories — Channel 14 has the Netanyahu bloc at 63 seats, Channel 12 has it at 49. Dahlia Scheindlin, pollster and senior analyst at Haaretz, who has advised nine Israeli election campaigns, tells Yonit and Jonathan the picture is far less wild than it looks. Why do six of eight pollsters agree while two keep drifting? Who is actually still undecided, and does the much-discussed wave of expats flying in to vote amount to anything? Why have October 7 and everything since barely moved an electorate that has been shifting one way for fifteen years? And what is the iron rule that lets a pollster name your vote before you know it yourself — in an election whose result, she argues, now rests in the minds of six men.