Joint List Ready to Help Oust Netanyahu Government

Joint List chairman Yousef Jabareen declared on Wednesday that his party stands ready to "pave the way for the ousting of the Netanyahu government." Democrats chairman Yair Golan claimed a 65-seat anti-Netanyahu majority once the Arab parties are counted, The Jerusalem Post reported. Both spoke the morning after Israelis voted for the 26th Knesset.

Jabareen set out his position on X. "Against a government of bloodshed, against a politics of supremacy, racism, and exclusion, we offer a completely different alternative," he wrote. "The change comes through Jewish-Arab partnership, a true and equal partnership. No less than that, and no more than that."

A governing majority requires 61 of the Knesset's 120 seats. "Netanyahu lost. I know how to count to 120. Sixty-five is more than 55. That's how Israeli democracy works. Period," Golan wrote on Wednesday morning.

Golan also took aim at the makeup of Netanyahu's camp. If the prime minister wants to build a Zionist bloc, Golan said, he should "subtract from his own bloc the 16 Knesset members from the non-Zionist Haredi parties." He added: "We have an opportunity to form a government of change in partnership with Israel's Arab citizens. A government that will serve all Israeli citizens."

Joint List faction chairman MK Ahmad Tibi of Hadash-Ta'al also indicated he is willing to sit with the opposition. "The opposition bloc will be able to form a government if it has the courage. We are extending a hand and are ready to help," Tibi said in an interview with Army Radio.

Democrats MK Gilad Kariv said Israel had woken up to a "different political reality." "The fully right-wing coalition has lost quite a few seats. It will most likely be unable to form a government in a similar configuration," he wrote on X. He said the opposition had grown in its representation of both the liberal Jewish public and the Arab public. "A substantial majority, by a margin of hundreds of thousands of votes, voted against Benjamin Netanyahu," he added.

Kariv concluded that Netanyahu and his partners "must not be allowed to continue leading our country down the destructive path they have taken over the past four years."

Projections from the Central Elections Committee, the body responsible for the official count, give the Joint List 11 seats. They give six seats to Ra'am, the Arab party led by Mansour Abbas. The opposition bloc is projected to enter the Knesset with 49 seats. That bloc is made up of Gadi Eisenkot's Yashar, Naftali Bennett's B'Yachad, Yisrael Beytenu and the Democrats, with eight of the 49 seats belonging to Golan's Democrats.

An earlier partial official count gave a different breakdown. Arutz Sheva reported that count, updated at 5:03 a.m. Wednesday with 31.2% of votes tallied. It gave Netanyahu's bloc 59 seats, the change bloc 46 and the Arab parties 15. It put Ra'am on four seats and the Democrats on seven, with United Torah Judaism on nine and Shas on seven.