Five politicians from Israel's opposition, each carrying a degree of weight within the country's Zionist bloc, formalised a pact of mutual restraint on 26 September, with the 27 October vote and the shared aim of displacing sitting Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu setting the conditions under which the arrangement took shape.
At Yair Lapid's Tel Aviv residence, the opposition leader convened with four political figures: Naftali Bennett, his former co-premier now heading Beyachad; Gadi Eisenkot, the former military chief of staff who now leads the newly formed Yashar party; Yair Golan, at the helm of the Democrats party; and Avigdor Liberman, who chairs Yisrael Beiteinu.
The joint statement released after the extended meeting conveyed that the participating leaders viewed the establishment of a Zionist, statesman-like government oriented toward repair and reconstruction as their collective primary objective, notwithstanding the ideological divergences between them — though all but Golan hold positions broadly aligned with the political right on questions facing Israel.
Both major parties have stopped short of pledging to create a Palestinian state, with Democrats treating the prospect as a long-term aspiration rather than a concrete policy commitment. Golan and the others named hold the position that neither a genocide designation nor war-crimes findings apply to the military campaign in Gaza, where Palestinian death tolls have surpassed 74,000.
None of the opposition figures named — Bennett, Liberman, or Eisenkot — had challenged the military operations carried out against Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, Qatar, and Iran, with their objections directed instead at how those operations had shaped perceptions of the country abroad. Ahron Bregman, an Israeli analyst and senior teaching fellow at King's College London, noted that these opposition leaders held right-wing political positions and had not engaged with the Palestinian question — specifically Palestinian aspirations toward self-determination — which he described as the underlying issue at the centre of the broader debate. Bregman drew a parallel between them and Netanyahu while observing that they lacked the corruption allegations and the associations with figures such as National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, and added that the country's political landscape as a whole leaned to the right.
Eisenkot, who led the Israeli military from 2015 to 2019, is credited in some accounts with having articulated, around 2008, a military approach that called for applying force at a scale disproportionate to immediate threats and targeting civilian infrastructure when engaging armed groups such as Hezbollah and Hamas — a concept that became known as the Dahiyeh Doctrine.
Entering politics through Benny Gantz's National Unity alliance in 2022, Eisenkot — then aged 65 — subsequently took a seat in the war cabinet Netanyahu assembled following the Hamas-led attacks on communities in southern Israel on 7 October 2023. That December, his son Gal, aged 25, along with two of his nephews lost their lives during military operations in Gaza. His departure from the war cabinet in June 2024, taken alongside Gantz, came with a public assertion that Netanyahu had no clear plan for bringing the conflict to a close.
A year after the events of October 7, Eisenkot established Yashar — a party positioning itself at the political centre, with its platform resting on three pillars: governance driven by expertise rather than ideology, mandatory military service extended to include ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities, and an officially sanctioned investigation into the intelligence and security lapses that allowed those attacks to occur. That same month, he also took a public stance against US limits on what Israel could do militarily in Lebanon, while earlier describing the US-brokered talks with Iran as an arrangement being shaped at a remove from the region and without regard for Israeli priorities.
Eisenkot has indicated that the United Arab List — also known as Ra'am — would not be brought into any coalition formed after the next election. During a broadcast interview on 26 September, he stated that none of the Arab parties would agree to his terms, among them a demand that Israel be recognised as a Jewish state.
Announced in April 2026, Beyachad brought together two politicians who had each previously led the country — Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid — under a joint electoral banner, their earlier tenures in office having together spanned roughly 18 months across the 2021–2022 period that fell between two Netanyahu-led governments. Atop the rankings sits Bennett, whose long-held advocacy for settlement expansion in the West Bank has defined much of his political identity, while Lapid — who founded the centrist Yesh Atid party and is now 62 — occupies the second position; Bennett himself is 54.
Lapid described his coalition partner as right-leaning yet trustworthy, though neither figure has placed the question of Palestinian statehood at the centre of their political agenda. Ra'am's inclusion in the 2021 governing arrangement sat uneasily alongside Bennett's own stated position during the election campaign, when he had told voters he would not pursue such a partnership. Lapid has spoken openly about how the international community views those military campaigns, even as questions about their underlying justification have drawn little comment from him.
Bennett extended praise to the military and security services after an operation in September 2025 targeted Doha — Qatar's capital — with the declared objective of killing senior Hamas figures. One Qatari security officer lost their life in the incident, which prompted responses of disapproval from governments and organisations throughout the region and further afield.
The proposed governing alliance would draw only from parties that identify as Zionist, leaving Arab parties without a place at the table.
Founded by Avigdor Liberman in 1999, Yisrael Beiteinu drew its early identity from Russian-speaking immigrants who leaned toward the political right — a movement Liberman has continued to lead into his late sixties, currently aged 68. Participation in a Netanyahu-led government is off the table for him, as are coalitions that draw on ultra-Orthodox parties or depend on Arab party support. A minority government arrangement was also something he set aside as an option.
Returning to the Karem Abu Salem crossing in February, Liberman contended that Netanyahu's administration was effectively channelling funds to Hamas by permitting only minimal humanitarian aid through — a position that echoed the view he had first put publicly in 2018, when he stated that no residents of Gaza could be considered civilians, a claim he restated in November 2023. That same month in 2025, he took issue with Netanyahu over an apology extended to Doha at Washington's behest, contending that any such acknowledgement was properly owed to the Israeli people rather than a foreign government.
In a March interview with the Jerusalem Post, Liberman described any approach limited to a border manoeuvre or a security zone as a path toward folly rather than resolution. Separately, Shaiel Ben-Ephraim, an analyst at Atlas Global Strategies, put forward the view that Liberman's placement within that political bloc was difficult to justify, pointing to Liberman's opposition to Netanyahu as the underlying driver of his positioning. Ben-Ephraim described Liberman as holding a dependable constituency and retaining an established presence within Israeli political life.
Yair Golan leads the Democrats — a left-leaning party that took shape in 2024 when Labor joined with the secular, social-democratic Meretz. At 64, Golan — who rose through the ranks to retire as a major-general and deputy chief of staff — is described within the bloc as the one politician willing to pursue working arrangements with Palestinian parties.
Speaking at a press conference in May 2025, Golan put forward the position that a nation exercising sound judgment would not direct harm toward infants, and further contended that some ministers had publicly expressed support for withholding food from children in the Palestinian territory. Those remarks were later revised following a wave of criticism from within Israel.
At a party meeting in October, Golan described the killing of Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei as a miscalculation — not on moral grounds, he clarified, but on the basis that it ran against Israel's national interests. That position sat alongside his earlier stated openness to cooperation with Palestinian political parties. Separately, his September vote to disqualify Balad party leader Sami Abu Shehadeh from standing, linked to an article relating to the October 7 attacks, drew objections from the Joint List and a number of political commentators.
According to Roi Zur, an Israeli politics researcher at the University of Essex, any viable governing coalition would need to include both Golan and Liberman — two figures who share opposition to Netanyahu, back moves toward secularisation, and hold firm positions against military service exemptions for ultra-Orthodox Jews.
