Benjamin Netanyahu's bloc has lost the first vote of the new Knesset. On Wednesday, a day after the 26th Knesset was sworn in, the plenum voted 63 to 50 to approve the opposition's plan for the Arrangements Committee — the temporary panel that runs parliament while Israel has no government — defeating a rival Likud proposal and handing control of the chamber's machinery to the camp of Gadi Eisenkot, the former army chief who holds the mandate to form Israel's next government. The committee will be chaired by Roy Folkman of Eisenkot's Yashar party — by law, the chair comes from the faction of the lawmaker the president tasked with forming the government.
The vote was procedural, but the power is real. The Arrangements Committee sets the Knesset's agenda, decides the makeup of its standing committees and can appoint temporary committees in the meantime — and it moved at once, installing Avigdor Liberman, the former defense minister who leads Yisrael Beytenu, as temporary chair of the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, the panel that oversees the military and will handle the fight over drafting ultra-Orthodox men into it, and giving the temporary Finance Committee to Liran Avisar Ben-Horin of the Bennett–Lapid B'Yachad list. Inside the 22-member Arrangements Committee itself the two blocs sit nine against nine, with the four members from the Arab parties, the Joint List and Ra'am, holding the balance. The Eisenkot bloc has also agreed to set up committees aimed at repealing five of the judicial-overhaul laws passed under Netanyahu, and the parties have already filed duelling bills on military service.
Likud fought the vote on the ground it has chosen for this whole contest — the Arab parties. Its own proposal, presented by MK Ofir Katz, would have given Netanyahu's bloc the edge and reduced the Arab parties' representation on the committee, and it was voted down. Likud then accused the Eisenkot, Bennett and Liberman parties of voting with "supporters of terrorism": "It has begun. The parties of Eisenkot, Liberman and Bennett voted today alongside Tibi and Abbas in the Knesset plenum," the party said, calling on the three leaders to "cease your cooperation with supporters of terrorism who boycott the national anthem" and join a unity government instead. Katz said Likud had offered a fair compromise and been refused. Folkman answered that he had tried to reach an understanding with Likud before the vote.
Netanyahu answered the defeat the way he answered the swearing-in a day earlier: by insisting a national unity government is still the answer. "Today I want to say why it's possible," he said on Wednesday, renewing the pitch he made in the chamber on Tuesday. But the arithmetic now runs the Knesset whatever happens in the coalition talks: Eisenkot's four parties hold 48 seats and Netanyahu's bloc 53, and only the Arab parties' 19 seats take the anti-Netanyahu side to 67 — a majority its leaders say they will use to run parliament but not, for now, to sit in a government. Netanyahu remains prime minister of a caretaker government; the parliament that government must answer to is no longer his. The next test is already set: 67 lawmakers have signed the demand for a plenum vote to replace the speaker, Likud's Amir Ohana, with Yashar's Matan Kahana, and that vote is set for next Tuesday.
For Washington, this is the machinery behind the question that matters most to Americans: who will be sitting across the table. The government that finally emerges in Jerusalem will negotiate the new American military-aid arrangement the Trump administration wants reshaped, face Iran alongside the United States and decide how Israel fights and settles its wars — and Wednesday's vote means that partnership will be debated in a Knesset whose agenda, defense committee and finance committee are already run by the camp trying to replace Netanyahu, even before it has the votes to replace him. For ordinary Israelis, the committees the opposition has seized steer the state budget, oversight of the army and the draft — the decisions that set household costs and decide who serves — while Eisenkot's mandate runs into December and the coalition talks grind on.
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