Israeli pollsters agree the blocs are tied and disagree about almost everything else

Party slates closed on Tuesday 8 September, and the first post-slate polls landed the following day. Channel 12 found the anti-Netanyahu bloc on 57 seats to the prime minister’s 52, with Arab-majority parties holding the remaining 11 of the Knesset’s 120; Channel 13 and Kan both found the blocs tied, at 53 and 52 seats each. All three had Gadi Eisenkot’s Yashar first — 25, 22 and 24 seats — ahead of Likud on 21, 19 and 21. B’Yachad, the joint Naftali Bennett–Yair Lapid slate, held at 13, 13 and 12; the Democrats took 9-10 and Yisrael Beytenu 7-9. Kan’s full table also put United Torah Judaism on 8, Shas, Otzma Yehudit and the Joint List on 7 each, and Kachol Lavan on zero.

A Maariv aggregation of five post-slate polls, written up by the Jerusalem Post on 11 September, produced the cleanest number of the cycle: Netanyahu’s bloc including Winter averaging 53.6 seats against 53.4 for the Zionist opposition, with Arab parties on 12.2 — a gap of two-tenths of a seat. The average conceals a wide spread. An i24NEWS/Direct Polls survey was alone in putting Likud first, on 27 seats to Yashar’s 22, yielding 60 seats for Netanyahu’s bloc against 48 for the opposition. Kan’s poll in the same wave had Yashar 25, Likud 21, and the opposition bloc at 58 to Netanyahu’s 50. Channel 13 had Eisenkot 22, Likud 19, Bennett 13. Haaretz reported a further Kan poll on Monday 14 September showing the blocs level at 52 as Yoaz Hendel’s non-aligned party crossed the threshold.

Yashar led in four of the five polls in the weekend wave, which is the arithmetic behind Netanyahu’s demand that Eisenkot break with Yair Golan and the Democrats. In the polls where the Democrats sit at 9-10 seats, no anti-Netanyahu majority is assembled without them — and, in every published table, none is assembled without the Arab-majority parties either, whose 11 to 14 seats neither bloc’s headline count includes.

Assessment: Treat the 0.2-seat average as an artefact, not a finding. It is the mean of surveys whose bloc totals diverge by twelve seats on the same question in the same week, which points to house effects and turnout modelling rather than to a knife-edge electorate; i24NEWS/Direct Polls is the single house producing a Netanyahu majority, and readers should watch whether it converges or stays out alone. The more durable structure is the one the seat tables bury in a footnote: the arithmetic of both blocs runs through parties each declines to count. That, not the weekly Eisenkot-Likud swing, decides whether 27 October produces a government.