Five days out: what to watch on Israel's election night

Israel votes on Tuesday 27 October. For once, Yonit Levi and Jonathan Freedland recorded in the same room: Jonathan flew into Tel Aviv for the final stretch, and the two of them spent the episode on what will actually decide the night, what Netanyahu is doing in the closing days, and what Jonathan saw at a Gadi Eisenkot rally in Modi'in the evening before. Unholy goes live on YouTube at 21:55 Israel time on election night, five minutes before the exit poll, with Jonathan, Ruth Margalit, Matti Friedman and Anshel Pfeffer. Yonit will be anchoring Channel 12's coverage.

This is the analysis, in the hosts' own words where it matters, with the timecodes for the full episode below.

The vote nobody can poll

Jonathan's El Al flight from London was, by his count, mostly Israelis flying home to vote, trading stories in the queue about what it cost them. He put the fare one passenger quoted at 3,000 dollars for a single ballot. The profile was unusual too: the London flight is often majority Haredi, and this one was secular and liberal.

"They feel it's crucial and important and there was a real mood on that plane. There was some joy in it, but also a sense that this was a solemn duty."

Yonit added the number behind it. The Central Bureau of Statistics puts the Israeli population abroad at around 810,000, and a Knesset seat cost roughly 36,000 votes last time. Nobody can poll the people on those planes, and both hosts suspect they lean against Netanyahu, on the pattern Dahlia Scheindlin described on the show: the anti-Netanyahu camp feels the stakes as existential, the pro-Netanyahu camp takes a possible loss in its stride.

"maybe it's one seat, two seats, three seats, who knows? It could be a significant factor in this election."

Netanyahu on the defensive

The week's two headline stories from the Netanyahu camp were, for Yonit, signs of worry rather than strength. The prime minister gave an interview to an ultra-Orthodox radio station calling the arrests of draft evaders unacceptable and hoping to pass the Haredi exemption bill before a new government is even sworn in, a position that angers much of his own base.

"I think the answer to that is he's actually worried that the ultra Orthodox might not show up."

Jonathan read it, together with the Yinon Magal affair, in which Netanyahu's Channel 14 ally used a racist slur about Eisenkot that the hosts condemned on Tuesday, as a campaign forced to explain itself at exactly the moment it would rather be attacking.

"it's so unusual for the right to be on the defensive. They are so good at setting the terms of debate, forcing the anti-Netanyahu parties to explain themselves."

The exception is Donald Trump's endorsement, which came a week after Trump had answered a question about trusting Netanyahu by saying he trusts nobody. Jonathan's caution is Hungary.

"this is one of the few places in the world where a Trump endorsement is a plus. In a lot of places, it would be a negative. But it's not the decisive thing, I think, that it once might have been."

The Trump administration campaigned for Viktor Orbán, JD Vance went to Budapest, and Orbán lost badly.

Yonit's second worry for Netanyahu is organisational. In 2022 his bloc was tight and the other side lost two parties under the threshold. This time Itamar Ben-Gvir has no surplus-vote agreement, which means he can lose a seat, and Ofer Winter, whom Yonit describes as Smotrich's ideology in a fancy wrapping, is under immense pressure to quit the race and shows no sign of doing so. Winter has said he would make Netanyahu prime minister, so a vote for him does not help the opposition either. It can simply burn right-wing votes below the threshold.

What Jonathan saw in Modi'in

Jonathan went to Eisenkot's rally in Modi'in the night before recording. The hall was packed, there was a standing ovation and rhythmic clapping, and the crowd was overwhelmingly secular. His reservation was about the speech.

"he was not prosecuting a case, is what I felt."

Rather than reminding the room what it felt in the days after 7 October and arguing that this government is unfit for another term, Eisenkot drifted into what Jonathan called process questions about coalition partners and conditions. What carried him instead was the room.

"One stood over me said, write down the word integrity."

Yonit, who has known Eisenkot for years, agreed on the character and on the problem.

"it isn't Mr. Charisma, but it's definitely the responsible adult walking in the room."

He ranks highest among coalition voters asked whom they could accept, higher than Lieberman or Bennett. But he has not unified the bloc around himself. Bennett is climbing again, Lieberman ruled out a minority government and added a fourth condition for partners, that they regard Hamas as a terror organisation to be destroyed, a hurdle Mansour Abbas and Ra'am will struggle to clear even though the bloc may well need them. Jonathan's verdict on the disarray was double-edged.

"come next week, we may say that was inspired because everybody got to vote for their favored flavor of anti-Bibi. But if they fall short, we'll say it's because they did not consolidate behind a single message or a single candidate."

One more thing from the hall, for anyone watching from abroad who thinks the only question is Israel and the Palestinians: every time Eisenkot said something that could be read as left, he tacked right. He denounced settler violence and promised to return administrative detention to the military, then said the people who suffer most are the law-abiding settlers.

"He uses the language of Judea and Samaria, not the West Bank. He's trying to say, you can come with me."

What to watch at 10pm

Yonit's guide for election night starts with one number, and it is not 61.

Look at the gap between Likud and Eisenkot's party. The polls have Likud at 19 and Eisenkot at around 23. In every one of the recent cycles the two biggest parties were effectively tied, even when Benny Gantz nearly toppled Netanyahu at 33 seats to 32. A large gap, something like 19 to 27, would signal that the head of the biggest party in Israel is Gadi Eisenkot, and Yonit thinks that would end Netanyahu's prospects however the blocs line up. The last time Likud lost by a wide margin was 2006, when Kadima took 30 seats to Likud's 12.

Then the blocs. Neither side is on course for 61, so the question becomes who is bigger. On one side Eisenkot, the Bennett-Lapid list, Lieberman and Yair Golan's Democrats. On the other Likud, Ben-Gvir, Smotrich and the Haredi parties. If it is something like 55 to 52, Yonit expects the president to give the first mandate to the bloc with the better chance of forming a government, by tradition.

Then the thresholds, and the Bennett effect. Bennett fell in the polls after joining up with Lapid and has climbed back from 12 seats to 14 or 15. If Bennett and Lieberman together outpoll Eisenkot, expect a fight for the crown inside the anti-Netanyahu camp.

Jonathan's point is that this arithmetic is itself a problem for the opposition. The morning-after questions, who sits with whom, who might peel away, who might join Netanyahu, crowd out the simple case that it is time for the government to go, and leave voters unsure which ballot actually removes him.

The scandal that is too big to land

Yonit set out the Jonathan Urich story as plainly as she could: by Channel 12's reporting, it is now clear that Netanyahu's closest adviser was receiving payments from Qatar in 2024, in the middle of the war against Hamas, and Likud members ask behind closed doors why he has not been fired. Jonathan found himself wondering whether the problem for the opposition is that there is too much of it.

"It sort of helps Netanyahu that it's kind of scattershot, rather than there being this single disqualifying scandal that everyone would of focus on."

Qatar, the draft exemption, 7 October on his watch: each dilutes the other, and nobody is prosecuting one case.

The Gantz warning

Benny Gantz left politics this week, and Yonit used the moment to explain where the confusion about joining Netanyahu comes from. Gantz entered politics in 2018 as the great hope of the centre-left, was seen as the next Rabin, and in 2020 agreed a rotation with Netanyahu that was due to make him prime minister in September 2021. The agreement had a loophole: no budget, no rotation. Israel did not pass a budget.

"Benny Gantz never got to be prime minister."

The lesson Yonit drew is that nobody will agree to be number two in a rotation with Netanyahu again, whatever he offers after the vote. Jonathan's version was shorter.

"There's Lapid still around because he didn't go in and Gantz is out of it because he did"

Yonit's caveat is the scenario that would test it: a war with Iran straight after the election, no clear winner, and a caretaker prime minister asking Eisenkot to join him to save the country. Eisenkot did answer that call after 7 October, and left over the hostages.

Two elections, one calendar

The New York Times reported on the morning of the recording that the US and Israel are drawing up plans for renewed strikes on Iran after the election. Jonathan's reading of the Trump endorsement runs through that: Trump faces midterms on 3 November, his base wants no more Middle East wars, and an endorsement from him rarely comes without something promised in return.

"after the elections, Netanyahu is the acting prime minister. And that is a role he's been in before and he likes."

An emergency during the coalition talks would, in Jonathan's words, all but void the result, and give Netanyahu the leverage to press parts of the anti-Netanyahu bloc into a national unity arrangement. Both hosts agree the game does not end when the exit poll lands. It begins.

Michigan

The other election the show is watching is the Michigan Senate race, where Jewish Democrats are torn over Abdul El-Sayed, who beat Haley Stevens in the primary, made AIPAC his main enemy, declines to say Israel has a right to exist as a Jewish state, and responded to an armed attack on a Detroit-area synagogue while its kindergarten was in session with the phrase hurt people hurt people. They do not want to hand a blue seat to Mike Rogers in an election that could decide the Senate. Yonit's bet is that El-Sayed loses, and that his focus on the West Bank rather than west Detroit is hurting him with Black voters too. Jonathan says it depends on the size of the blue wave. He is sitting out his first American election cycle since 1992 to be in Israel for this one.

The choice

The recording fell on the official memorial day for Yitzhak Rabin, 31 years on, the day after Netanyahu's 77th birthday. Yonit put the election in those terms.

"it has to do with a country having to decide where it is heading."

"It's a very stark decision, it's a very clear one, and Israelis will be making it in five days from now."

Jonathan's Mensch of the Week went to the crowd at the InDNegev festival, who closed it, as the festival always does, with Shir LaShalom, the song found in Rabin's pocket the night he was killed, and sang it like an anthem rather than a relic. Most of them are about to start, or have just started, their military service.

"It's real for them, this desire for peace. It means it isn't just something of the past."

The full episode is on YouTube, Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Unholy's election-night livecast starts at 21:55 Israel time, 19:55 in London and 15:55 in New York, on YouTube, and there will be a special episode in the early hours of Wednesday.