By Tawfiq Al-Ghussein
29 Oct 2026
Likud says Arab voters stole the election. Trump says his endorsement turned the tide. Both men are reaching for the same escape, while a Prime Minister stays on trial and five women’s accusations follow a President into the midterms.
Benjamin Netanyahu and Donald Trump in the Oval Office, 7 July 2025. Photo: Daniel Torok / The White House
Nine days before Israelis voted on 27 Oct, Donald Trump endorsed Benjamin Netanyahu. When the count left Netanyahu’s bloc on 53 seats, eight short of a majority, Trump claimed the credit anyway. “When the endorsement went out, it helped him a lot,” he told reporters. On his Truth Social site he went further: “When President Trump endorsed Bibi Netanyahu, the whole tide turned.” A tie, he said, could “sort of be considered a win.”
Likud has its own explanation for the shortfall. Arab citizens turned out, and the Joint List and Ra’am won 19 seats between them, enough to decide who governs. On 28 Oct, Likud declared that Arab parties had “stolen” the election and demanded an investigation into widespread fraud. The party had prepared that line before a single ballot was cast. On the eve of polling, Channel 12 and Haaretz reported that Likud was drawing up challenges to results from Arab towns, planning to question fully veiled women at the ballot box, and sending about 2,000 activists with Religious Zionism to watch Arab polling stations.
A source close to Netanyahu told Haaretz the discussions included a “stolen and rigged” campaign on the model of Trump’s 2020 claims against Joe Biden. The Central Elections Committee’s Director General, Dean Livne, has said there is no evidence of widespread fraud in Israeli elections.
So the fraud story was written in advance, for use if the result went the wrong way. Its purpose is to establish a rule: Palestinian citizens of Israel may vote, but if their votes change the outcome, the outcome is illegitimate. Netanyahu stated the rule himself during the campaign when he warned against a “dangerous government” that might rest on Arab-led parties. About a fifth of Israel’s citizens are Palestinian. Likud is telling them their ballots are acceptable so long as they change nothing.
Trump’s priority is an Israel–Saudi normalisation pact—and BS and IB-G are making it difficult
Washington is now weighing whether to step in. Channel 13 and Kan, citing unnamed sources, report that the United States Administration wants Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir kept out of the next government and is considering support for a Netanyahu-led unity coalition. A US official told the Times of Israel those reports were “false and premature”. Asked about a unity government, Trump said: “I will take a look.”
Trump has no quarrel with what Smotrich and Ben-Gvir want. His difficulty is that they say it out loud. A Finance Minister who publishes plans to annex the West Bank and a Police Minister who leads prayers on the Haram al-Sharif make it harder for Riyadh to sign anything. Trump wants a Saudi normalisation deal and a ceremony on the White House lawn, and a Netanyahu Cabinet without its two loudest settlers would be easier to sell in the Gulf.
Remove them and nothing on the ground changes. Smotrich’s 2017 “Decisive Plan” called for full Israeli sovereignty over the West Bank and offered Palestinians three choices: live there without national rights, emigrate or resist and be crushed by the army. Avi-ram Tzoreff argued in +972 Magazine this month that much of Israel’s liberal opposition objects to Smotrich’s manners while accepting his map.
Reuters notes that Gadi Eisenkot, who leads the opposition bloc, rejects a Palestinian state as firmly as Netanyahu does. The two men may differ over the pace of settlement building but neither proposes to stop it, and a government of Netanyahu and Eisenkot could be expected to keep the settlements, the checkpoints, the military courts and Israel’s grip on every crossing into Gaza. The difference is that Western foreign ministers could shake its hand without embarrassment.
Americans vote in the midterms on 3 Nov. No Israeli coalition will be built in six days, so Trump’s real calculation concerns what follows. If Democrats take the House, he faces committees with subpoena power and two sets of questions he would rather not answer.
The first concerns his son-in-law. Matthew Cole’s Princes and Thieves, published this month, alleges that Gulf rulers and Israel arranged hidden accounts worth at least $2bn connected to Jared Kushner while he was running American policy in the region, some of it, Cole says, to pay for foreign-policy projects outside Washington’s oversight and some for Kushner’s personal benefit.
Cole relies mostly on anonymous sources and does not reproduce the bank records. Kushner says the accounts do not exist and has threatened to sue. The documented record is damning enough without them. In October 2024 Senator Ron Wyden and Congressman Jamie Raskin asked the Justice Department to appoint a special counsel, pointing to records showing that Saudi Arabia’s sovereign fund had paid Kushner’s firm, Affinity Partners, about $87m in fees while the firm returned nothing to its investors. No special counsel was appointed. Kushner is back as Trump’s envoy and has spent this year presenting plans for Gaza’s reconstruction. The governments that pay his fees sit across the table from him in every negotiation he conducts.
The second concerns Jeffrey Epstein. On 26 Oct, Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee published a staff report drawing on the accounts of 11 women. Five of them accuse Trump directly of rape or sexual assault in Epstein’s company or presence. Raskin, the committee’s ranking Democrat, says the Justice Department “deliberately withheld evidence” and “appears to be covering up these crimes to protect the president.” The White House says “none of these allegations are true” and calls the report a “desperate attempt by crazed Democrats”. The report itself observes that there is little reason to expect Trump’s Justice Department to appoint the special counsel the Democrats are demanding. The women are owed an investigation that this Justice Department will not carry out. A Democratic House could compel one and Trumps knows it.
Trump and Netanyahu each call justice systems obstacles and scrutiny persecution
Netanyahu went on trial for bribery, fraud and breach of trust in 2020, and denies the charges. The trial is still running. Trump wrote to Israel’s president, Isaac Herzog, urging him to pardon Netanyahu, Netanyahu then applied for a pardon himself, and when Herzog hesitated Trump attacked him in public. Each man treats prosecutors, judges and now voters as obstacles to be got round. Each calls scrutiny persecution. Trump lends Netanyahu American protection, Netanyahu lends Trump a stage on which to play peacemaker, and neither has to answer for anything while the arrangement holds.
Nobody in these negotiations is asking Palestinians anything. Washington is counting Knesset seats. Netanyahu is counting coalition partners. The Gulf rulers are counting their investment returns. In Gaza, the Health Ministry’s count of the dead has passed 72,000, and in the West Bank this autumn’s olive harvest has been met with settler arson and beatings that no Israeli Government, of any composition, has stopped.
If the unity Government comes, it will be greeted in Washington and the Gulf as a return to sanity. It will have been formed to keep a man on trial for corruption in the Prime Minister’s office and to keep Arab parties out of power, with the blessing of a President who wants to be photographed as a peacemaker while Democrats campaign for the power to subpoena him. Palestinians will get the same occupation run by a cabinet with better manners. Arab citizens of Israel will have learned that their votes are welcome until they count.
Tawfiq al-Ghussein is a writer and researcher focusing on international law, geopolitical strategy and Middle Eastern political economy.