First polls after the slates closed leave both blocs short, and the answer is the Arab parties

Party lists closed on Tuesday 8 September, which makes the polls published the following night the first measured against final slates for the 27 October election to the 26th Knesset. Channel 12 gave the Eisenkot bloc 57 and Netanyahu’s 52, with Arab parties on 11; Channel 13 had both blocs on 53 with Arab parties on 14; Kan 11 found a tie. i24NEWS — owned by Patrick Drahi and right-leaning — was the outlier, putting Likud first by a significant margin and Netanyahu’s bloc strengthening significantly. The Jerusalem Post’s five-poll average, published 11 September, lands at 53.6 for the Netanyahu bloc including Ofer Winter and 53.4 for the Zionist opposition, with Bennett’s B’Yachad on 12.4, the Democrats on 9.4, Yisrael Beytenu on 8, United Torah Judaism 7.8, Otzma Yehudit 7.4, the Joint List 7.2 and Shas 7. Winter’s People of Israel averages 4.2 and crosses threshold in all five polls — a new right-wing entrant already load-bearing for Netanyahu’s arithmetic.

The convergent finding is the one no candidate will speak aloud: Haaretz’s framing is that the Eisenkot bloc “will not succeed in achieving a Knesset majority if it boycotts the Arab parties.” Trend, from a single pollster with a stable house effect: Channel 12 had Likud on 25 and Eisenkot on 14 on 17 April; by 7 September it had Eisenkot’s Yashar on 25 and Likud on 21. Haaretz’s Noa Shpigel reported on 8 September that there will be no centrist merger, with Eisenkot running separately from Bennett and Lapid. On the issue mix, the Israel Democracy Institute — cited in ToI’s 9 September liveblog — notes that before the 2022 election only 11% of its respondents ranked security and foreign affairs as their top concern; among Jewish respondents in IDI’s December 2025 chapter the figure is 20%, against 49% of Arab respondents naming cost of living as the single biggest influence on their vote.

Assessment: A 0.2-seat gap in a five-poll average is not a lead, it is noise, and the honest read is a tied race in which the deciding variable is a question of legitimacy rather than a question of votes. The opposition’s path to 61 runs through parties it has spent a decade refusing to sit with; until a named leader says on the record that he would govern with Arab-party support, every poll showing 57 is showing a number that cannot be cashed. Two things to distrust: the i24NEWS outlier, which should be named as such rather than averaged in silently, and Winter’s 4.2, a threshold-hugging figure carrying disproportionate weight in the coalition maths.