The Change Bloc Hits Sixty Only With a Party That Missed the Threshold Last Week

Channel 13’s survey, aired on the evening of 12 August and relayed by the Times of Israel, has Gadi Eisenkot’s Yashar largest at 23 seats, Likud at 21 and the Lapid–Bennett B’Yachad list at 12, with the change bloc reaching 60 only once Zionist Home — the new right-wing party of Yoaz Hendel and Chili Tropper — is counted inside it. Sample 1,240, margin of error ±3.9 per cent. The same channel’s poll of 5–6 August, written up by Haaretz, had the opposition at 69 with Arab parties and 58 without, on the standing assumption that Jewish parties keep boycotting them; coalition 51, Arab parties 11, Yashar 23, Likud 22 — and Zionist Home below the threshold. Channel 12’s Midgam poll of 3 August had the opposition at 60, Likud and Yashar tied at 23, the coalition at 50, and Arab parties at 10.

Every one of these numbers sits inside its own error bar, and the gap that matters is not between them but between them and Channel 14. JNS notes that the pro-Netanyahu channel’s polls have shown the coalition crossing 60 and reaching as many as 65 — a spread of more than a dozen seats against the Center for Israel Education’s read of late-June and July surveys, which put the Likud, ultra-Orthodox and far-right bloc at 49 to 52, and against Reuters on 29 July reading the accumulated polling as predicting a clear Netanyahu defeat. Haaretz’s live tracker averages Channels 11, 12 and 13 and keeps 14, 15 and Maariv in separate columns. Its bloc labels now read “Netanyahu bloc / Arab parties / Eisenkot bloc.” Polling day is 27 October.

Assessment: The recurring 58-to-60 ceiling is not arithmetic, it is a convention: it exists because Jewish parties will not sit with Arab lists holding ten or eleven seats, and the tables encode that refusal as a separate column. Anyone reporting the ceiling as a mathematical fact is reporting an alliance choice. Two other things to hold onto. Zionist Home’s movement across the threshold, not any shift in Likud, is doing the work between the two Channel 13 runs — a rounding-scale party deciding a bloc. And Haaretz retitling the opposition after Eisenkot rather than Lapid or Bennett is a finding about editorial judgement, published before a vote is cast.