Israeli Elections Explained: A Guide for Olim Who Are Confused and Slightly Overwhelmed

Welcome to Israeli democracy. You’re going to love it. You’re also going to find it deeply perplexing, occasionally maddening, and almost certainly unlike anything you’ve experienced before.

If you came from the United States, you grew up in a two-party system where the choices, whatever their merits, are at least straightforward. Democrat or Republican. Red or blue. You know the teams, you pick one, you go home. The whole thing happens every four years and involves one enormous national personality contest for president.

Israel has none of that. Israel has many parties, a parliament where no single party has ever won an outright majority in the country’s entire history, a prime minister chosen through coalition negotiation rather than direct election, and a political culture that treats debate not as something that happens during campaigns but as a continuous national activity conducted everywhere from the Knesset floor to the makolet counter.

Also, as of this writing, Israel’s next election is scheduled for October 27, 2026, the first election since October 7, 2023, and the first one since 1988 that is not being held early. Which itself tells you something about the pace at which things tend to change around here.

Let’s break down how this all works, because as a new Oleh, you’re going to be living inside this system, and understanding it beats simply absorbing it through osmosis and a lot of confused nodding.

The Knesset: 120 Seats and a Lot of Opinions

Israel’s parliament is called the Knesset, which means “assembly” in Hebrew. It has exactly 120 seats, a number said to echo the 120-member Great Assembly of ancient Jewish tradition, which is either a beautiful piece of historical continuity or a coincidence that became very good branding depending on your perspective.

The Knesset is unicameral, meaning there’s only one chamber. No senate, no house of representatives, no upper chamber making things complicated while the lower chamber does the actual work. Just 120 members of Knesset, known as MKs, in one room with many opinions and a surprisingly robust tradition of interrupting each other.

The Knesset has sole legislative power. It makes the laws, approves the budget, and most critically, it’s the body that must support a government for it to exist. If the Knesset withdraws confidence from a government, the government falls. This is not a theoretical mechanism. It happens regularly enough that it’s worth knowing.

How Israelis Actually Vote

Here’s where it gets genuinely different from what most Anglos are used to.

In Israeli elections, you don’t vote for a specific candidate. You vote for a party. Each party submits a ranked list of candidates before the election, and the number of seats they win determines how many names from the top of that list become MKs. If a party wins fifteen seats, the first fifteen people on their list go to the Knesset. Number sixteen stays home and tries not to take it personally.

This is called a closed-list proportional representation system, and it runs across a single nationwide constituency. There are no districts, no regional seats, no local representatives in the American congressional sense. Every Israeli citizen votes in the same election, the votes are counted nationally, and seats are distributed proportionally to the total.

What this means in practice: a party that wins ten percent of the national vote gets roughly twelve seats. A party that wins thirty percent gets roughly thirty-six seats. The math is relatively clean. The politics that follow are considerably less so.

The Electoral Threshold: Where Small Parties Go to Be Humbled

Not every party that fields candidates gets into the Knesset. To win seats, a party must cross the electoral threshold, which currently sits at 3.25 percent of the national vote.

Three and a quarter percent might sound trivially small, but in a country of roughly seven million eligible voters, it represents a meaningful number of actual humans. And because of how the math works in a 120-seat parliament, crossing the threshold generally translates to at least four seats.

Failing to cross the threshold means getting nothing. Not one seat. Not a partial seat. All the votes a party received below the threshold are simply excluded from the seat allocation calculation, which means they effectively disappear. This is why parties sometimes form electoral alliances, combining their lists to pool votes and ensure they jointly clear the threshold even if neither would have managed it separately.

The threshold has been raised several times over Israel’s history. It used to be one percent, then was raised to 1.5, then to 2, and finally to 3.25 in 2014. Each time it was raised, the explicit goal was to reduce the number of tiny parties cluttering the parliament and making coalition negotiations even more complicated than they already are. It has worked, modestly.

The President: Important but Not the Way You Think

Israel has a president. If you’ve been following Israeli news, you know the current president is Yitzhak Herzog. If you’re expecting this section to explain how to vote for the president, it’s going to surprise you: you don’t.

The Israeli president is elected by the Knesset, not by the general public. Members of the Knesset vote for the president in a separate internal process. The president serves a single seven-year term. The position is largely ceremonial, and the president is constitutionally expected to operate above party politics.

However, the president plays one genuinely critical role in the post-election process: after an election, the president consults with all parties, hears who they recommend as prime minister, and then formally tasks the person judged most likely to build a majority coalition with the job of forming a government. If that person fails within 28 days, the president can either grant an extension or task someone else with the attempt. This is the moment where the president’s judgment and political instincts have real practical consequences.

Coalition Building: The Part That Takes the Longest

No single party has ever won 61 or more seats in an Israeli election. Not once. Not in Israel’s entire history.

This means that after every single election, the party or bloc that wins the most seats still needs to negotiate with other parties to build a coalition large enough to control a majority of the Knesset. You need 61 seats to have a working majority. If you won forty seats in the election, which would be a strong result by Israeli standards, you still need to find partners who together contribute another 21 seats and who agree to join your government.

This negotiation process is called coalition building, and it can take weeks. The government formation process typically runs 30 to 45 days but can stretch longer. The parties that join a coalition negotiate not just agreement to cooperate but specific policy commitments, ministerial portfolios, and budget allocations for their priorities. Coalition agreements are lengthy documents. Coalition negotiations are lengthy processes. The whole thing would strike most Americans as absurdly complicated, except that it means smaller parties have genuine leverage to advance their specific agendas in ways that a two-party system simply doesn’t allow.

The outgoing government remains in office in a caretaker capacity until a new coalition is sworn in. This means Israel can sometimes spend months between an election result and an actual functioning new government, a period where major policy decisions are effectively on hold.

Why Israel Has So Many Parties

This is the question every newcomer asks, because it seems like there are an improbable number of parties for a country this small. Israel has parties on the right, the left, the center, the religious right, the secular right, the Arab parties, the immigrant parties, and parties that seem to have emerged specifically to represent the specific coalition of beliefs held by approximately one particular Israeli politician and his immediate supporters.

The answer lies in the proportional representation system itself. Because seats are allocated proportionally and the threshold is relatively low, smaller parties have a genuine reason to exist and a realistic path to representation. In a winner-take-all system like the US, a party that gets seven percent of the national vote wins nothing. In Israel, it gets about eight seats and meaningful political power.

This creates what political scientists call a fragmented party system, which is a polite way of saying there are a lot of parties and forming a government requires a lot of conversations. The flip side is that a much wider range of political views, communities, and interests have actual representation in the parliament. Arab citizens have Arab parties that hold seats. The ultra-Orthodox community has specifically religious parties that have consistently held enough seats to be coalition kingmakers. New immigrants from the former Soviet Union for many years had a party specifically representing their interests. The system is messy, but it’s genuinely pluralistic.

The Political Landscape As It Stands

Without endorsing any party or predicting any outcome, here is a neutral description of where Israeli politics currently sits as the October 2026 election approaches.

Israeli politics broadly organizes itself into blocs rather than individual parties, and the most significant organizing principle has been whether parties are willing to serve in a coalition led by the current long-serving Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu or are committed to not doing so. This bloc dynamic shapes Israeli political analysis more than any left-right ideological axis, though both dimensions exist simultaneously.

On one side sits Netanyahu’s Likud party, which is center-right and the largest single party in most recent polling, alongside its traditional coalition partners including Shas, which represents Mizrahi ultra-Orthodox voters, and United Torah Judaism, which represents Ashkenazi ultra-Orthodox voters, along with several right-wing and far-right parties.

On the other side sits a collection of opposition parties ranging from centrist to left-wing, including Yesh Atid led by former prime minister Yair Lapid, and newer parties including one formed by former IDF Chief of Staff Gadi Eisenkot. Naftali Bennett, who briefly served as prime minister in 2021 to 2022, has formed a joint list with Lapid called Together. Former defense minister Avigdor Lieberman leads Israel Beiteinu, which draws support primarily from the Russian-speaking immigrant community.

The 2026 election is, by general consensus, shaped significantly by the shadow of October 7, 2023, the Hamas attack that killed approximately 1,200 Israelis and triggered the war in Gaza. Questions of accountability, security policy, the treatment of hostage families, military service obligations, and the role of the ultra-Orthodox community in sharing national burdens all feature prominently in the campaign.

The election is scheduled for October 27, 2026, and notably it is the first election since 1988 being held at the end of a full term rather than triggered early by a coalition collapse.

Voting as an Oleh

If you are an Israeli citizen, and making Aliyah makes you one, you are entitled to vote in Israeli elections from the moment you arrive. There is no waiting period, no naturalization requirement, no additional registration process beyond being registered as a resident. Your teudat zehut makes you an eligible voter.

Voting in Israel involves going to your designated polling station, receiving a ballot envelope and the paper slips of all competing parties, selecting the slip with your chosen party’s name and placing it in the envelope, and depositing the envelope in the ballot box. No machines. No bubbles to fill in. Just a paper slip in an envelope, which is pleasingly analog for a country that otherwise runs on high technology.

Polling stations are typically open from seven in the morning until ten at night. The day of an Israeli election is a public holiday, meaning businesses close and the country collectively goes to vote. Turnout is generally higher than American elections, hovering around 67 to 70 percent in recent years.

Israeli elections are held on Tuesdays, because that is the tradition, and Israeli traditions are maintained even when nobody entirely remembers why.

What This Means for Daily Life

As a new Oleh, Israeli politics will enter your life in ways that are both more intense and more immediate than politics probably did back home.

Israelis discuss politics everywhere. The taxi driver, your ulpan classmates, the neighbor at the vaad bayit meeting, the colleague who stopped by your desk to ask about a spreadsheet and stayed forty-five minutes. There is no polite fiction that politics is a private matter. People hold strong views and share them freely, and the expectation that you have a view and are willing to share it is cultural.

This is either invigorating or exhausting depending on your temperament. Most long-term Olim report that it eventually becomes invigorating, though the first year of having opinions about Israeli politics while simultaneously not entirely understanding the system is its own particular experience.

What is genuinely worth knowing: Israeli political coalitions can collapse between elections when a coalition partner withdraws support, triggering early elections. This has happened five times between 2019 and 2022 alone. The stability of any given government cannot be assumed. Political news moves quickly. Situations change. And the ability to follow what’s happening, both in Hebrew and in the English-language Israeli press, is one of the quieter markers of integration that sneaks up on you over time.

A Final Note on Forming Your Own Views

This blog post has deliberately avoided recommending any party or candidate, because the political landscape is complex, contested, and deeply personal for the Israelis who live inside it, and because Olim who are newly arrived bring their own complicated set of prior political identities that don’t map neatly onto Israeli categories.

What we’d suggest is this: give yourself time. Read broadly. The Times of Israel, Haaretz, Jerusalem Post, and Ynet all offer English-language coverage from different perspectives. Talk to Israelis with different views, including ones that make you uncomfortable. Ask questions rather than importing conclusions. And when October 27 arrives, or whenever the next election after that arrives, because in Israel it’s always reasonable to wonder whether there will be another one sooner, vote on the basis of what you’ve actually learned rather than what feels most familiar.

This is your country now. Its politics are your politics. The noise and passion and complexity of Israeli democracy, frustrating as it can be to navigate, is one of the genuine signs that something real is happening here.

And after every election, whatever the result, someone in a café somewhere in Israel will explain to you confidently why it all went wrong and exactly what should have happened instead.

Welcome to Israeli democracy. You’re going to have opinions about it before you know it.

Olim Advisors helps new immigrants navigate every dimension of life in Israel, including the practical, financial, and civic aspects of building a life here. Since October 7th, our real estate guidance package is provided to clients at no charge. Reach out. We’re here to help you find your footing in your new home.