Israel’s parliament dissolved in the early hours of Friday morning after a frantic, marathon session of last-minute legislating, formally closing the books on a four-year Knesset term and setting the country on a collision course toward an Oct. 27 election. The upcoming polls will test whether Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu can survive nearly three years of war, upheaval and mounting political fatigue.
The dissolution, confirmed by the Knesset speaker in the pre-dawn hours, means lawmakers will not return to the chamber before voters go to the polls, closing out one of the most consequential and turbulent legislative sessions in the country’s history.
A coalition racing the clock
In the days before the recess, Netanyahu’s governing coalition pushed through a string of contentious bills in back-to-back marathon sessions, using its final hours in session to lock in policy priorities before facing voters.
Among the most significant were two measures that effectively halt the enlistment of ultra-Orthodox men in the military, a long-simmering flashpoint in Israeli politics that Netanyahu appears to be counting on to keep ultra-Orthodox parties inside his coalition tent in the next government.
Lawmakers also advanced a cluster of bills tied to Netanyahu’s broader push to overhaul the judiciary, including measures that would tighten government control over broadcast media and curtail the powers of the attorney general. Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara, who has repeatedly clashed with Netanyahu and become a frequent target of criticism from the Israeli right, has openly opposed the overhaul effort.
Speaker marks a rare full term
Announcing the dissolution, Knesset Speaker Amir Ohana struck a note of accomplishment rather than crisis, telling lawmakers the chamber had defied Israel’s turbulent political norms by seeing out its full mandate. “We are completing a four-year term, we passed nine budgets and hundreds of bills,” Ohana said, thanking colleagues for the trust that allowed the government to hold together for its entire term.
That milestone is far rarer than it might sound. Israel has not completed a full four-year parliamentary term without triggering early elections since 1988, and even Netanyahu, the longest-serving prime minister in the country’s history, has rarely presided over a full term without collapse. Between 2019 and 2022 alone, Israelis were called to the ballot box five times, part of a broader pattern that has left the country holding elections on average every 2.4 years, the second-shortest interval in the OECD, a statistic the Israel Democracy Institute has flagged as a marker of chronic political instability.
Netanyahu enters the race on shaky ground
The dissolution arrives at a precarious moment for Netanyahu, who is fighting to hold on to power as Israel approaches the third anniversary of the Oct. 7 attack that plunged the country into nearly three years of war. Recent polling points to rising momentum for opposition parties, led by former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett alongside a popular centrist former military chief, suggesting the coalition’s late legislative sprint may do little to blunt a shifting political tide.
With the Knesset now dissolved and lawmakers barred from reconvening before Election Day, the campaign that unfolds over the next three months is likely to center on the same fault lines that dominated the chamber’s final days in session: the war’s toll, the future of ultra-Orthodox military exemptions, and the fight over the independence of Israel’s judiciary and its attorney general.
