Eisenkot leads again in Channel 12 poll, and again neither bloc reaches 61 without the Arab parties

Channel 12 published a Knesset seat poll on Tuesday evening, 22 September, which Haaretz wrote up on Wednesday morning: Gadi Eisenkot’s Yashar remains the largest party on 23 seats, Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud takes 20, and Naftali Bennett’s Beyahad 13. Eisenkot’s bloc reaches 54 against 50 for the current coalition, with the Arab parties on 12. No pollster, field dates or sample size appeared in the material available to this desk, so no margin of error should be attached to those numbers. The trend across the broadcasters is genuinely volatile: on 8 September a Channel 12 poll gave the Eisenkot bloc 57 to Netanyahu’s 52 with Yashar on 25; on 14 September a Kan 11 survey produced a 52–52 tie as Yoaz Hendel’s list crossed the threshold; on 17 September Channel 13 put the pro-Netanyahu bloc ahead at 54 with Likud down to 18, a low.

What has not changed across any of those surveys is the arithmetic that decides who forms a government on 27 October. The Jerusalem Post’s breakdown of the 17 September Channel 13 poll spelled it out: the anti-Netanyahu bloc totalled 66 seats, of which 54 were Zionist parties and 12 Arab parties. Wednesday’s numbers reproduce the same structure. On every retrieved poll since 8 September, the non-Arab opposition cannot reach 61 without the Arab lists, and the coalition cannot reach it at all. Netanyahu has been working that fact as a campaign asset rather than a problem; Haaretz reported on 17 September that he seized on a Channel 12 report that Eisenkot had promised Bedouin leaders he would include the United Arab List in a coalition. That is Haaretz commentary, not reporting, and should be read as such.

The right flank is the second moving part. Haaretz reported on 17 September that Netanyahu is seeking to shift roughly seven seats from the opposition bloc to Likud while Itamar Ben-Gvir, whose party is falling in the polls, tries to grow by drawing voters from within the right. The threshold is the third: an earlier Jerusalem Post aggregate of five post-list-closure polls put Hendel and Yaron Zelekha’s Reservists and Economic parties at an average of about 2.7 percent, and a Zman Yisrael poll on 17 September showed Ofer Winter’s People of Israel failing to cross, which would take the pro-Netanyahu bloc down to 51. Winter said on 2 September he will only join a Netanyahu government if a conscription law passes first.

Assessment: Read these polls for the structure, not the lead. A four-seat swing between broadcasters in a fortnight tells you mostly about house effects and turnout models; the constant across all of them — that 61 is unreachable for either side inside the Zionist parties alone — is the part that has held through four surveys and three publishers. That constant is what makes the Arab-party question the central axis of the campaign rather than a side argument, and it is why Eisenkot’s answer to it is more consequential than his top line. Two cautions: without field dates or sample size, Wednesday’s numbers are a data point, not a measurement. And with Winter’s list and two others hovering at the threshold, a single percentage point of wasted vote is worth more than any leader’s week.