The Long Brief: The Math Survives The Vote
Stop asking if the upcoming election will finally break Haredi power — it won't. Start asking which coalition members will get to control the ministries closes to your interests.
Shabbat shalom, friends.
Rabbi Dov Lando is ninety-five years old and the spiritual head of Degel HaTorah, the Lithuanian-Haredi faction of United Torah Judaism. On Monday afternoon he instructed his lawmakers to dissolve the Knesset. The sentence he sent through them: We no longer have any trust in Netanyahu. After that, the coalition whip Ofir Katz submitted the dissolution bill — cosponsored by every party that had been sitting in the coalition Lando had just walked out of.
So Israel is heading to an election — a little earlier than planned. Possibly September 1st, more probably September 15th, possibly the last viable Tuesday before October’s High Holidays close the window. The bill leaves the date to the Knesset House Committee, which is chaired by Katz himself, which means Netanyahu will pick when the question is finally put to voters. Likud is bleeding seats in every poll. Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid have merged Yamina and Yesh Atid into a single ticket that may finish ahead of Likud. The Israeli public is angrier at the Haredi draft exemption than at any point in the country’s history. Eighty-four percent of Israelis now support drafting eligible Haredim, up from sixty-seven percent at the start of the year before. The diaspora is watching this and noticing — for the first time in years — that someone other than Netanyahu may actually be in a position to fix something.
This brief is here to disappoint that read. Sorry.
The election will happen. The math will not move. The next coalition will give Shas and UTJ roughly what this coalition gave them, because the political arithmetic of proportional representation does not change between cycles and the mechanisms producing Haredi leverage are not on the ballot. Diaspora Jews who have been watching Israeli democracy through the lens of “will the public finally throw the bums out?” have been asking the wrong question for thirty years. The question that actually maps onto things the diaspora cares about — conversion recognition, civil marriage, Kotel access, “Who Is A Jew?” for diaspora kids — runs on coalition portfolios, on which specific MK gets which ministry after the agreement is signed. The election picks the bloc that gets to negotiate. The agreement decides the answers all of us actually must live with.
Israel’s Coalitions Collapse by Design
The Knesset that took office in late 2022 will be the seventh Israeli government in seven years to fail to serve a full four-year term. [Though it got pretty close!] The one before lasted twelve and a half months. The one before that fell apart twice — April 2019 to September 2019, then September 2019 to March 2020 — without ever producing a working coalition between elections. Going back to 1999, exactly one other Israeli government has come close to its statutory term, and even that one ended in dissolution rather than calendar.
The system is built to produce this. Israel runs nationwide proportional representation with a 3.25% threshold and no constructive vote of no confidence. The German Basic Law’s Article 67 requires the Bundestag to elect a successor by majority before removing the chancellor, which means a German coalition partner who walks out has to commit to a replacement. Israel has no such requirement. A Knesset majority can dissolve the government without naming what comes next. That changes the incentive on coalition partners at the margin. In Germany, walking out is a positive act. In Israel, it is a free option.
The free option gets exercised when the cost of staying inside exceeds the cost of going to the country. For Shas and UTJ the cost calculation broke this month.
The June 2024 High Court ruling — unanimous — held that the government must draft Haredi yeshiva students into the IDF, that the prior June 2023 cabinet decision instructing the army not to begin drafting was illegal, and that the state was engaged in “invalid selective enforcement, which represents a serious violation of the rule of law.” The coalition agreement Shas and UTJ signed in December 2022 promised them a legislative fix that would put a permanent exemption beyond the court’s reach. Nearly incalculable attempts have produced no such legislation, because any bill the coalition can pass will not survive judicial review and the bill that would survive judicial review the coalition cannot pass.
Netanyahu told the Haredi leaders in early May that he could not deliver before an election. Moshe Gafni refused to take his calls. Yitzhak Goldknopf, who leads UTJ’s Agudat Yisrael faction, said publicly that Netanyahu had never had any intention of honoring the agreement. Lando issued the directive to dissolve. Aryeh Deri of Shas — whose own party is now brokering the date question between Degel HaTorah (which wants September 1) and his own faction (which wants to vote during the High Holidays for maximum traditional turnout) — told the Shas paper:
We will not enter a coalition or government without regulating the status of Torah students.
The mechanism of collapse is the Haredi draft fix Netanyahu cannot legislate. The question the election will functionally ask is which coalition arithmetic best lets the next government continue to fail to legislate it. Corruption charges, Iran, Gaza, the Trump administration — those are atmospherics. The exemption legislation Lando broke the coalition over is what the next coalition must still grapple with. Frankly, the opposition needs to give up on some of its demands and partner with Likud if it wants the Haredim to serve. Ra’am is a nonstarter for a stable coalition, and the Haredi factions aren’t going to give up on their quest. [If you can’t have what you want, it’s still better to avoid the more distasteful options. But why would politicians commit to logic?]
The Israeli electoral cycle has two versions. The first — and the rarer one — runs the constitutional clock to roughly the four-year mark and dissolves at the deadline. That has not happened in twenty-seven years. The second — the actual baseline — collapses somewhere in years two or three, when a coalition partner concludes their leverage is worth more from the outside than from the inside. This election is the second kind more than the first. The next one, almost certainly, will also be the second kind.
What the Haredim Want, and Why Bibi Cannot Deliver It
The current Haredi demand is specific, and the specificity is what makes it impossible. Shas and UTJ are not asking for a yeshiva-stipend increase, though they want that too. They are not asking for a coalition fund allocation, though they will take one. They are asking for legislation that would permanently exempt full-time Torah students from military service in a form that would survive the next High Court challenge. That second clause is the one Netanyahu cannot satisfy.
The June 2024 ruling grounded its holding in the 1988 Rubinstein doctrine — that any dramatic policy harming the principle of equality, including a blanket Haredi exemption, must be legislated by the Knesset rather than effected by government decision. Because the legal-framework clauses of the Security Service Law expired in June 2023 without a replacement, the IDF was obligated to apply the universal draft. The court accepted an IDF starting target of 4,800 Haredi recruits by June 2025 as a minimum starting figure. Actual enrollment by late April 2025 ran to just over two thousand, with an optimistic projection of 2,500 to 2,700 by cycle end. Of 24,000 Haredi men sent draft notices in the year that followed the ruling, 1,212 began the enlistment process. That is five percent. The IDF estimates 71,000 people are evading service, of whom roughly eighty percent are Haredim. Of the first three thousand to receive call-ups, some 1,300+ had arrest warrants issued for failure to comply. Between January 2025 and January 2026, only some seventeen Haredi draft evaders were arrested via proactive Military Police operations. The Israel Police, IDF officials told the AG, are systematically blocking the army from arresting evaders in Haredi neighborhoods. [You may recall in a recent issue of the daily brief that we detailed Haredi groups distributing tasers, pepper spray, and the like for the group to use against police. Clearly, then, this is not an issue of being a pacifist. Pathetic.]
The legislative attempts since June 2024 have failed in instructive ways. Likud MK Yuli Edelstein, as chair of the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, drafted a bill in 2025 that imposed individual sanctions on draft evaders and aimed to significantly increase the IDF’s conscription base. UTJ left the government on July 14, 2025. Shas pulled its ministers on July 16. On July 23 the Likud faction voted 29-4 to remove Edelstein from his committee chair and replace him with Boaz Bismuth, with Communications Minister Karhi telling MKs that the move was aimed at repairing relations with the Haredi parties. The Bismuth-era replacement bill softened the sanctions and broadened the exemption pathways. Knesset legal counsel concluded in December 2025 that the new bill would not reduce inequality and would therefore not survive judicial review. AG Gali Baharav-Miara told the High Court the government is in violation of its order on Haredi conscription, calling the refusal “a real danger to Israel’s democracy.” She pans the coalition bill on the merits — its sanctions are too weak to disincentivize evasion, its exemption pathways are too broad. [For once, something I can agree with her on.] The bill the coalition will pass and the bill the court will accept are not the same bill, and they have not been the same bill at any point since the original ruling.
The theoretical pathway out of this is a Basic Law: Torah Study — constitutional-rank legislation enshrining Torah study as a foundational value and pre-empting equality-doctrine review. The current coalition’s agreement contemplated such a Basic Law in December 2022. It has not been advanced, and its passage is quite unlikely. The override clause Haredi parties pursued inside the 2023 judicial-overhaul package was meant to provide the same legal cover, and it died with the broader reform.
So the demand Shas and UTJ are charging Netanyahu for is a price he has no mechanism to pay. He cannot pass the bill that would satisfy the court, because the coalition is split on whether to actually conscript Haredim and the bill that would conscript them is the one Shas and UTJ walked out over. He cannot pass the Basic Law that would override the court, because he does not have the votes inside his own party. And he cannot defy the court directly. And due to a more general public resentment and because IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Eyal Zamir is on record warning the IDF could collapse without Haredi enlistment, the public isn’t going to stand for much more gamesmanship — they’re currently at eighty-four percent support for the underlying conscription. The coalition is paying for a fix that the system cannot produce. Yitzhak Goldknopf was right. Netanyahu never had a way to deliver it. He probably knew that in December 2022.
The War Changed Everything Except the Math
October 7 was thirty-one months ago. Reservist combat soldiers served on average 136 days in year one of the war. Combat commanders served 168. The pre-war comparator was twenty-five days every three years plus annual training. Forward projection, doesn’t look any better.
Forty-five percent of reservist commanders reported a ten-percent-or-greater drop in turnout, attributed directly to burnout. Fifteen thousand previously released reservists were re-called up amid the troop shortage. Seventy-three percent of self-employed reservist spouses reported economic harm. Twelve percent of pre-war self-employed reservists became salaried employees during the war. Eight percent became unemployed. Half of reservist spouses reported harm to their marriages. One in three reported that the harm had escalated to thoughts of separation. One in five couples had actively considered divorce.
This is the worst it has been since we started the brief.
The polling on Haredi draft has tracked the burden in lockstep. Public support for drafting eligible Haredim ran eighty-four and a half percent in November 2024 — up from sixty-seven percent in January of the same year — and has not retreated since. Sixty-eight percent of Israelis oppose any law exempting Haredim from military service even if rejecting it triggers government collapse and new elections. Eighty-five percent of non-Haredi Jewish Israelis support sanctions on draft evaders. Religious-Zionist support for Haredi enlistment more than doubled in a single year — from thirty-six percent to seventy-two percent. The Brothers and Sisters in Arms movement, founded in 2023 to oppose the judicial reform, resumed activity in mid-2024 and reoriented its program around Haredi conscription and new elections. A reservist told the Knesset committee debating the draft bill in August 2025 — speaking the line that has now become the canonical framing — We have prayer, we are serving, we are dying.
So the analytical question is whether thirty-one months of disproportionate burden are different in kind from the previous public-fed-up cycles, or just larger in degree. The case for “different in kind” is real.
The reserve burden has never been this sustained. The economic damage to reservist families has no precedent.
The Religious-Zionist sector, the IDF’s traditional officer corps, has shifted its position on Haredi conscription.
The IDF’s own chiefs are now publicly testifying that the coalition’s draft bill will not solve the manpower problem.
The Bank of Israel is on record saying the bill is insufficient to ease the burden on the economy.
Even the Likud aliyah minister has warned that pushing the exemption legislation could trigger a large shift in election results.
Every word of that is true, and every word of it has been true at some level in every prior cycle, and the math has not moved.
Public support for Haredi conscription stood at sixty-seven percent in some polls during the Bennett-Lapid period. The 2013 Yesh Atid platform was built on draft equality and the Haredi parties returned to coalition by 2015. The 1999 Barak election was supposed to mark the moment the public revolt against Haredi exemption would force the policy. Shas grew from ten seats to seventeen in that election — its all-time best result.
The Israeli electoral system absorbs cycles like this and metabolizes them into coalition agreements that nominally address the issue— though, in practice do not.
This Bismuth-era exemption bill is the metabolization in real time. Nineteen percent of Israelis back the coalition’s specific bill. Fifty-four percent believe it would not actually lead to Haredi service. [The other forty-odd percent haven’t read it.]
Public Fury Has Never Broken the Bloc
Haredi voters turn out at near-totality. The three majority-Haredi cities — Elad, Beitar Illit, Modi’in Illit, which the Israel Democracy Institute uses as the proxy for Haredi turnout because the Central Elections Committee does not break it out by sector — ran well above the 70.6% national rate in the November 2022 election.
The Haredi-party absolute vote rose nineteen percent over 2021 while overall national turnout rose only about three points. Haredi turnout exceeds the national average for the same reason Mormon turnout in Utah exceeds the American average — it is mediated by religious authority. The vote is treated as a halachic obligation, and the community votes as a bloc. The two-party Haredi consolidation, Shas and UTJ, runs to roughly zero wasted votes because both parties clear the 3.25% threshold comfortably and neither serves a public the other party is also serving. The bloc converts its turnout efficiency into seats.
The Haredi share of Israel’s population was 14.3% in 2025, per the Israel Democracy Institute’s annual statistical report drawing on Central Bureau of Statistics data. It was 8.6% in 2009. The community grew from 750,000 to roughly 1.45 million in sixteen years, at a per-year growth rate of about 4.2% — the highest of any population in the developed world. The CBS forecasts put Haredi share at 16% in 2030 and the Haredi population at two million in 2033. Fifty-seven percent of Haredim are under twenty, versus thirty-one percent for the general Israeli population. Total fertility runs 6.5 children per woman for Haredi women, against 2.2 for other Jewish women — a forty-three-year low for the Haredi rate, and still close to three times the non-Haredi rate. The trajectory is not slowing fast enough to matter for the next decade of elections.
The school-level indicator is sharper still. In the 2025 academic year, for the first time in Israeli history, religious first-graders (Haredi plus national-religious combined) outnumbered secular first-graders by thousands. Secular first-grade enrollment declined for two consecutive years. In Jerusalem, Haredi first-graders alone numbered 8,652 — nearly double the combined non-Haredi total of 4,643. The 2025 first-grade cohort is the 2037 draft pool. The Haredi share of that pool will substantially exceed the Haredi share of today’s adult electorate. Anyone telling you that the bloc’s demographic momentum is about to break is reading a chart someone drew with crayons during a bumpy car ride.
The secular and traditional Israeli majority that the public-fed-up theory imagines as a single political force has never been a single political force. The 2022 Knesset seated thirteen parties across the spectrum, from Otzma Yehudit on one end to Hadash-Ta’al on the other. The largest non-Haredi party — Likud — won 32 seats. The second-largest, Yesh Atid, won 24. Shas and UTJ combined won 18. Inside that asymmetry sits the actual game.
The Haredi bloc operates as one unit. The non-Haredi majority is split into roughly a dozen units, none of which can govern alone, all of which have to form a coalition with someone. And most of which find that the simplest available coalition partner is the bloc that votes together and accepts a stipend increase as the price of admission.
Every Israeli government since 1977 except the Rabin governments and the Bennett-Lapid government has included one or both Haredi parties. The Bennett-Lapid coalition lasted twelve and a half months.
The seat history compresses the same picture. Shas and UTJ ran 7 and 6 in 2015. 8 and 7 in April 2019. 9 and 7 in September 2019. 9 and 7 in March 2020. 9 and 7 in March 2021. 11 and 7 in November 2022. The bloc has never dropped below 13 seats in the modern era and is currently at 18. Its growth has been smooth, steady, and decoupled from the political weather. The 2022 result is the highest in Shas history. The Haredi vote share rose from 12.8% of the national vote in 2021 to 14.2% in 2022 — slightly exceeding the Haredi population share for the cycle, because of the turnout differential and the absence of wasted votes.
The Bennett-Lapid government is the natural experiment everyone reaches for, and the natural experiment cuts against the theory.
Eight parties spanning the full Israeli political spectrum including Mansour Abbas’s Ra’am, and the government still excluded both Haredi parties for the first time in Israeli history. Finance Minister Avigdor Liberman cut the childcare subsidy for kollel families. The expiring Netanyahu-era draft exemption framework was allowed to lapse. The Kotel implementation was announced. Twelve and a half months in, the government fell on internal coalition friction, Yamina defections to Likud, and standard coalition stress.
The replacement was the 37th Government, which gave Shas and UTJ NIS 13.7 billion in coalition discretionary funds, nearly doubled the kollel stipend from NIS 700 to NIS 1,300 per month at an annual taxpayer cost of NIS 1.5 billion, raised yeshiva-system funding thirty-one percent over the prior budget, and committed to the permanent exemption legislation we have just spent two sections explaining the system cannot pass.
The Bennett-Lapid coalition was the strongest anti-Haredi government in Israeli political history. It was not enough. Its lifespan was 376 days. Its successor was the largest Haredi concession package in the country’s history.
The bloc does not need a particular outcome on September 15. It will be there with enough seats that whoever forms the next government will give generous consideration to their price.
Anti-Bibi Math Doesn’t Solve the Haredi Problem
So what happens if the opposition wins. The polling through April and May 2026 is consistent enough to take seriously. Channel 12’s late-April reading — Bennett-Lapid’s “Together” alliance at 26, Likud at 25, Eisenkot’s Yashar at 15, the Democrats at 10, Shas at 9, Yisrael Beitenu at 9, Otzma Yehudit at 9, UTJ at 7, Hadash-Ta’al and Ra’am at 5 each. The Walla poll the same week put Likud at 28 and Together at 27. The bloc count Channel 12 has been running is Netanyahu’s bloc at 50, the Zionist opposition at 60, Arab factions at 10. Neither Jewish-only bloc clears 61.
To form a government without Shas and UTJ, the anti-Netanyahu coalition needs 61 Knesset seats. The polling math gives it 58 to 60. The gap is closed only by Ra’am, the Arab party led by Mansour Abbas that signed a January 2026 preliminary agreement to revive the Joint List as what Abbas called a “technical bloc,” allowing Ra’am to split off after the election and join a Jewish-led coalition. Inside the Arab caucus, Ra’am is the only party open to coalition entry. Hadash and Ta’al will support an anti-Netanyahu bloc from the opposition. Balad is opposed to any Zionist-led coalition.
Now look at what the Together alliance pledged when it formed on April 26. Bennett and Lapid committed to coalition only with Zionist parties — explicitly ruling out both Haredi and Arab parties. Liberman of Yisrael Beitenu, more categorical:
For me, there is no place for non-Zionist elements in the next government, not for the Arab parties and not for the haredi parties.
He isn’t wrong. [Read Gad Saad’s Suicidal Empathy if in doubt.] Yisrael Beitenu formalized this in a five-point pledge ahead of the campaign. Liberman in November said":
First, we will put all draft dodgers in prison, and then we will strip them of the right to vote.
So the opposition is running on a pledge that, taken literally, makes it mathematically impossible to form a government without Shas, UTJ, or the Arab parties.
Pick any two of those three and the bloc clears 61. Refuse all three and the bloc does not. The campaign promise is the campaign promise; the coalition arithmetic is what arrives the morning after the count.
They’re going to have to get over themselves and swallow their pride and join Likud if they want to get this done. Which, to be clear, is at extremely low odds.
So, what happens then runs along two branches. Branch one, the opposition holds the pledge. The Together-Yashar-Democrats-Yisrael Beitenu coalition forms somewhere around 60 seats, picks up a defector or two from elsewhere to get to 61, and governs without Haredim and without Arabs. The Bennett-Lapid 2021 to 2022 precedent applies directly.
That government formed at 60 plus Ra’am abstention, held for 376 days, and fell on Yamina defections, Judea and Samaria policy friction, and the budget cycle. The current Israeli budget cycle would put the first hard money fight in the spring of 2027. A coalition that thin cannot realistically survive that fight.
Branch two, the opposition breaks the pledge. The most plausible version is that Gantz — who has urged at points a hostage-redemption government including Netanyahu, and who has not categorically ruled out a coalition with Haredi parties the way Liberman has — takes a coalition agreement with Shas after Shas extracts a smaller-than-2022 but still material package of yeshiva-stipend protection and a quiet shelving of draft enforcement. The Haredi parties accept smaller concessions in exchange for getting back inside the room. The new coalition discovers, eight or twelve months in, that it cannot pass a budget without Shas’s votes, and the price was already negotiated.
Eisenkot has been clearer than Lapid or Bennett on the draft. The coalition bill, in his framing, is “dangerous for the security of the State of Israel” and “dismantles the framework of the people’s army.” The merged Yashar-Liberman bloc that has been forming in negotiations through April and May 2026 carries the hardest line in the opposition on Haredi conscription. They are the floor on what an anti-Netanyahu coalition could give Shas while still calling itself an anti-Haredi government. The ceiling is Gantz.
Yuli Edelstein, the Likud MK removed from his FADC chair for the draft bill that broke the coalition, responded to the Haredi push to dissolve the Knesset with three words. I told you so. The opposition is about to discover the same thing. Changing out the casting doesn’t change the arithmetic.
What an Election Cannot Touch
Three institutional facts will be on the next government’s desk whoever wins.
The first is the High Court, which has spent the last two years writing itself into the conscription question and shows no sign of retreating. The November 2025 ruling ordered the state to produce an effective enforcement policy within forty-five days, including economic sanctions on draft evaders. The subsequent ruling conditioned welfare benefits — first-time homebuyer discounts, daycare and after-school subsidies — on IDF enlistment, with the Israel Land Council and the Labor Ministry directed to comply within twenty-one days. The government has not adopted the economic-sanctions plan. The court has not blinked. The pattern of judicial assertiveness documented in our earlier long brief The Unfinished State — the High Court writing itself a veto on coalition policy and exercising it as a matter of doctrine — applies here in its hardest form: a question the Knesset cannot legislate around without a constitutional move the coalition does not have the votes to make. The next government inherits the court’s order regardless of which bloc wins — and will need to grapple with its own version of judicial reform.
The second institutional fact is the AG. Gali Baharav-Miara has aligned with the court against the government and stayed there. Her position on the coalition’s exemption bill is the position of the court’s legal counsel — that it will disincentivize enlistment rather than produce it. The AG is independent by appointment design. The next government could attempt to replace her, but the legal mechanism for doing so is contested and the political cost of doing so during a manpower crisis is high. A government that came in promising to enforce Haredi conscription would not be moving against her. A government that came in promising to satisfy Shas would be — and would face the same High Court that issued the November 2025 sanctions order.
The third institutional fact is the IDF Personnel Directorate, which is publicly split from the government on the conscription question. Brigadier General Shay Tayeb, head of Personnel Planning, told the Knesset the IDF can absorb 5,760 Haredi soldiers a year and “everything needed beyond that” with advance notice. Major General Dado Bar Kalifa, head of the directorate, said publicly that arrests of Haredi draft evaders are ineffective because they are blocked by “psychiatrists and an army of lawyers who arrange what is called ‘the exemption.’” The IDF’s stated need is 12,000 recruits urgently, with a broader 15,000-additional-personnel estimate including 7,000 to 8,000 combat positions. Eighty thousand Haredi men aged 18 to 24 are non-enlisting. One in five IDF fighters is now female — a compositional response the army has framed explicitly as compensating for the Haredi gap.
None of those three institutional facts is on the ballot. The court is not on the ballot. The AG is not on the ballot. The IDF Personnel Directorate is not on the ballot. The demographic curve underneath all three is not on the ballot. What is on the ballot is which coalition gets to fail to legislate around the court, fail to satisfy the manpower demand, and fail to bend the demographic curve.
This is what the diaspora has missed for thirty years. The electoral question is real, to be sure. But, the institutional questions are bigger.
Diaspora Stakes Live in the Coalition, Not the Vote
The question diaspora Jews should actually be asking in the run-up to September 15 is which coalition composition puts which minister in charge of which portfolio. The diaspora-relevant questions — conversion recognition, civil marriage, Kotel access, “Who Is A Jew” for the grandchildren of intermarried families making Aliyah — flow from those portfolios. Religious Affairs, Interior, the Conversion Authority, the Religious Services Ministry. Not from electoral mandate. Not from “Israeli democracy” as an abstraction. From which particular MK is sitting behind which desk after the coalition agreement is signed.
The natural experiment runs in both directions. The Bennett-Lapid government held the portfolios with Yamina, Yesh Atid, and Yisrael Beitenu. The Kotel implementation was announced. The kollel childcare subsidy was cut. The lapsed Haredi draft exemption was celebrated. The 2021 High Court ruling that Reform and Conservative conversions performed in Israel must be recognized for Law of Return purposes was operative and respected. The Conversion Authority’s leadership question stayed open but movable. The 37th Government took the same portfolios with Shas and UTJ. The Kotel bill cementing Orthodox-rabbinate control over the entire Western Wall — defining non-Orthodox worship at the Ezrat Israel section as “desecration” — passed preliminary reading. The Conversion Authority head appointment has been frozen by Netanyahu-Haredi deadlock since January 2023, leaving 1,200 to 1,400 of the roughly 560,000 Israeli citizens not formally recognized as Jewish in conversion limbo. Avi Maoz of the Noam Party proposed in May 2025 to amend the Law of Return’s grandchild clause, the 1970 amendment that allowed Soviet-era refuseniks and their descendants to make Aliyah, calling current practice “one of the greatest absurdities in the Israeli law book.” The Law of Return amendment debate was just reignited a few weeks ago.
The pattern is clear and the lesson is the same regardless of which framing you reach for.
Which government has Religious Affairs and Interior in 2026 will determine where conversion recognition sits in 2027 and 2028, the Kotel bill’s path in the Knesset, the Conversion Authority head appointment, the grandchild-clause amendment, and the civil-marriage legislation Yesh Atid presented in 2013 and 2015 and has not moved since.
The Reform movement’s URJ statement, co-signed by the Central Conference of American Rabbis, framed the grandchild-clause amendment threat as a rift-with-diaspora question — “deep concern about efforts to either revoke recognition of Reform, Conservative, and modern Orthodox conversions or abolish the Law of Return’s grandchild clause.”
The Rabbinical Assembly “unequivocally rejects” calls to end recognition of Masorti-Conservative and Reform conversions for Aliyah. These are real institutional positions. They are also positions that move or don’t move based on which Knesset committee chair is sitting on the relevant bill.
I have given some version of this explanation many times to people and groups throughout the diaspora, and the resistance is always to the granularity. The audience wants a political-team frame — “is your guy the good guy or the bad guy” — and the granularity is the part that requires actually reading the coalition agreement.
The audience that has been watching Israeli politics through “will democracy hold” is watching the wrong dial. Israeli democracy holds. Israeli democracy has held through every government that has formed and dissolved over the past twenty-seven years.
Israeli democracy is going to hold through whatever forms after September 15 too.
What is contested is the composition of the coalition the system produces. That composition is what determines whether a Reform-converted teenager born to an intermarried American family can make Aliyah, whether a non-Orthodox prayer group can hold a bat mitzvah at the Kotel without being defined by statute as desecrating the site, whether the Conversion Authority has a head who can move files.
These are the questions diaspora Jews live with. They flow from portfolios. They do not flow from electoral mandate.
The diaspora institutional class that prefers to operate on “democracy is on the ballot” framing has been doing so for thirty years and has the fundraising outcomes to show for it.
JFNA raised $683 million in its 2024 Israeli Emergency Campaign and $908 million total since October 7. Some of that money funded Brothers and Sisters in Arms.
None of it funded a serious public-affairs program on the coalition-portfolio question, because the coalition-portfolio question requires the diaspora institutional class to take a Knesset-level position and the institutional class has been resistant to that.
Reform and Conservative Jewish leadership have been the exceptions. Federation leadership and JAFI have not.
If you read the next Israeli coalition agreement to find your answer on conversion, civil marriage, Kotel, and Who Is A Jew, you will find your answer.
The agreement is public. It will be signed in October or November of 2026. Your portfolio answers will be the appendices.
Scenarios: Four Paths Out of the Knesset
The probability calibration that follows weights political friction, coalition fragility, and institutional inertia heavily. Israeli electoral systems metabolize public-fed-up energy into cosmetic adjustment. That bias dominates the assignment.
Netanyahu Survives and Buys Shas Off Again.
The polling has Likud bleeding seats, but the prior election cycle’s polling also had Likud below 30 and the November 2022 actual delivered 32 with Smotrich-Ben Gvir’s combined slate at 14. The 2026 coalition reconstitutes around Likud at 22-25, Religious Zionism plus Otzma Yehudit at 13-15, Shas at 9-11, UTJ at 6-8, possibly Yisrael Beitenu peeled off through portfolio offer. Cosmetic exemption language in the coalition agreement, yeshiva-stipend protection at current levels or slightly higher, a Basic Law: Torah Study reintroduced and stuck again. The Haredi parties get less than in 2022 because the war has shifted the baseline, but they get more than the 2021 floor.
Probability: roughly 40 to 45 percent. This is the highest-probability path because it is the path of least friction, and Israeli political systems default to least-friction outcomes.
Anti-Bibi Coalition Forms and Folds.
The Together-Yashar-Democrats-Yisrael Beitenu coalition forms at 60 to 62 seats with a Ra’am abstention or one or two defections from other blocs, holds the pledge against Shas, governs for eight to fourteen months, and falls on the budget cycle in spring 2027 or on internal Together-Yashar friction over Judea and Samaria policy. The Bennett-Lapid precedent applies directly. Twelve and a half months. This scenario is the cleanest version of the opposition’s promise and the version the campaign will be sold on. It is also the one the Israeli system has metabolized once already, and the second metabolization is faster than the first.
Probability: roughly 20 to 25 percent. The arithmetic supports it. The politics, almost certainly, do not survive it.
Anti-Bibi Coalition Forms and Brings the Haredim Back In.
The Together-led coalition forms at 58 to 60 seats, discovers in negotiation that it cannot pass a budget without Shas, breaks the pledge in stages — first by accepting Shas’s abstention on confidence votes, then by passing a yeshiva-stipend protection clause, then by quietly shelving draft enforcement in exchange for Shas joining the coalition formally. Gantz is the most likely vehicle for this move, because he has been the least categorical of the opposition leaders on Haredi exclusion. The resulting coalition gives Shas less than in 2022 but more than zero, gets a budget passed, and serves out a full or near-full term. The Religious Affairs and Interior portfolios are negotiated. Diaspora-relevant policy moves, partially.
Probability: roughly 25 to 30 percent. This is the path the Israeli system metabolizes most efficiently — opposition wins, opposition governs, opposition adopts the same compromises the prior coalition made because the math demanded them.
The Court Forces the Issue.
Whichever coalition forms continues to fail to deliver enforcement at the levels the High Court has demanded. The court, in late 2026 or early 2027, orders the IDF to stop deferring Haredi conscripts as a class. The AG aligns with the order. The IDF Personnel Directorate complies operationally. Haredi communities mobilize, demonstrate, possibly riot. A confrontation begins that no coalition is prepared to absorb, because Shas and UTJ would walk out of any government that complies and the secular middle would walk out of any government that doesn’t.
Probability: roughly 10 to 15 percent. This is the live scenario the Bismuth bill, the AG’s posture, and the November 2025 sanctions order make available. It is also the one the system has the strongest institutional resistance to, because every actor inside it — court, AG, IDF, coalition — prefers continued institutional standoff to direct confrontation. The court has been more assertive than the political system has been able to absorb at every step since June 2024. Whether it forces the next step depends on whether enough justices conclude that the political class is treating the existing orders as cosmetic and decide that judicial credibility now requires the harder move.
The diaspora overlay across the four: under scenarios 1 and 3, Religious Affairs and Interior stay with Haredi parties or are negotiated in Haredi-favorable terms, and conversion, civil marriage, Kotel, and Who Is A Jew do not materially move. Under scenario 2, the portfolios go to Together-aligned parties, the Conversion Authority head is appointed, the Kotel bill is dropped, and the 2022 grandchild-clause amendment threat lapses — for as long as the government holds. Under scenario 4, the diaspora-relevant questions become a footnote in a broader institutional crisis whose Knesset arithmetic is unpredictable.
September 15 is going to come. The Israeli public is going to vote. The bloc that comes out of the vote ahead is going to negotiate a coalition with the parties that survive the math of the system that produced this election in the first place.
— Uri Zehavi · Intelligence Editor, Israel Brief