The recriminations inside Israel's opposition are escalating a day after the 2026 elections: senior figures in Avigdor Liberman's Israel Beiteinu are furious at their partners in the change bloc, accusing Gadi Eisenkot of the Yashar party and Yair Golan of the Democrats of handing seven to eight Knesset seats back to Binyamin Netanyahu and the Likud.
Liberman has not spoken to any of the bloc's leaders since the polls closed and does not intend to until the final results are in from the double-envelope count, according to a report on the Maariv website.
Israel Beiteinu officials are directing sharp criticism at the strategy pursued by the bloc's leaders in the decisive final weeks of the campaign. "Eisenkot ran an egotistical campaign that badly damaged the entire change bloc," sources in the party said.
As an example, party sources described a meeting Liberman held the day before the election with a large group of Likud voters who had been planning to vote Israel Beiteinu. At that meeting, the participants made clear they were not prepared to accept Eisenkot as prime minister. According to the sources, the talk of forming a minority government drove away many voters who had already crossed the lines and sent them straight back to Netanyahu's camp.
