Country before party: Israel’s opposition must not fail this moment

Israel stands at a historic crossroads. The government that emerges from this election will determine whether the country begins to repair its democracy and recover its moral bearings - or continues toward deeper division, international isolation, and the erosion of its founding promise.

For Israel's opposition, this is no ordinary coalition negotiation. It tests whether its leaders have the courage to put country before party, personal ambition, and ideological prejudice.

The parliamentary arithmetic offers an opening. The completed count gives parties opposed to Benjamin Netanyahu a combined 67 of the Knesset's 120 seats: 48 for the Jewish opposition parties and 19 for the Arab-led parties. Netanyahu's bloc holds 53. These numbers create an opportunity to replace him, not an agreement on how to govern.

A potential majority is not yet a government. It becomes one only when political leaders accept the responsibility that the moment demands.

Gadi Eisenkot and his prospective partners must move decisively to negotiate a governing agreement with the Arab parties. Refusing that partnership would squander the clearest available route to a government independent of Netanyahu.

Let there be no misunderstanding: Arab participation is not a concession that Jewish politicians magnanimously bestow. Arab citizens are citizens of Israel. Their votes carry the same democratic legitimacy as anyone else's, and their elected representatives have every right to participate in governing the country.

A democracy cannot ask a fifth of its population to accept its obligations while treating their representatives as permanently unfit to share political power. Arab citizens account for approximately that share of Israel's population; their parties' electoral gains make this contradiction impossible to evade.

Their inclusion is therefore more than a parliamentary necessity. It is an opportunity to begin repairing the relationship between Jewish and Arab citizens and demonstrate that equal citizenship can become a governing principle rather than an unfulfilled promise.

Such a partnership would not erase profound disagreements. Nor would it, by itself, resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But it could establish something indispensable to both: the recognition that neither people can build a secure future through the permanent exclusion or subordination of the other.

After the trauma of October 7 and the devastation of Gaza, Israel needs leadership capable of confronting suffering without turning it into a permanent justification for more suffering, and begin the healing process in the wake of this tragic development.

Israel needs a government prepared to protect its citizens while recognizing Palestinian humanity, rejecting vengeance as a political program, and pursuing a credible path toward coexistence.

That work must begin at home.