Why Polymarket Is Wrong About Israel's Elections

Also, the other country caught in a time loop, and the ancient temple’s hidden splendor revealed.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu attends an event of the Netzah Yehuda Association at the Western Wall, September 11, 2025. (Chaim Goldberg/Flash90)

It’s Wednesday, August 5, and in a recent interview with Polymarket, I sat down to break down the odds, numbers, and political dynamics shaping Israel’s upcoming election.

Q. Benjamin Netanyahu has dissolved parliament ahead of the October 27 election. Polymarket has Netanyahu, the ultimate political survivor, at just one-in-three to be prime minister after the election. Does that surprise you?

Unlike in the U.S. or U.K., an Israeli election might end in a draw. It can also end in a rotation government, one figure serving as prime minister for two years and another for the next two. Or in an outright majority.

Here’s the thing. Netanyahu, as the incumbent, can enjoy a hung parliament. If there is no clear winner, he stays in office in what we call a transition government. So any chance of a draw adds chances for Netanyahu, the only outcome that can come of it. And if a rotation government is possible, that also increases Netanyahu’s odds, as he’s the leader of the right wing.

I look at Polymarket every day, and I’m quite surprised by Netanyahu’s low chances, and by the very low chances given to Avigdor Lieberman.

In Israel, the decision on the next prime minister is in the hands of the parliament, not the people. It is neither a beauty contest nor a popularity contest. In 2021, Naftali Bennett became prime minister with 5 percent of the popular vote. The lesson is that in Israel, kingmakers can become the kings themselves.

Q. How could Lieberman become prime minister?

Gadi Eisenkot is the front-runner in the opposition, leading every poll since April or May.

But Lieberman can make his way to the prime minister’s office, because he is not a natural part of the opposition. He is a settler living in a settlement. He is not exposed to pressure from center-left news outlets. His political base is Russian immigrants. He is a maverick.

Second: he is 68, so he knows this is his last round. And third, he’s a kingmaker. He belongs to the right on diplomacy and the Palestinian question, but to the opposition on domestic issues, liberalism, the economy. So he can come to Eisenkot the day after the election and say, “I’m one of only three people in Israel ever to serve as defense minister, treasury minister, and minister of foreign affairs. Give me the chance to be prime minister first.” What can Eisenkot do? The only guy you have to convince after the election, if not the voters, is Lieberman himself.

So I think Lieberman is heavily underrated and written off. He is somewhere around 4 percent, 4.7 percent on Polymarket. I would give him something like 20 percent.

Also: we have two types of polls. In the mainstream media, Netanyahu is heading toward his worst defeat in 20 years, 51-52 seats for his bloc out of 120. But according to Channel 14 and Channel 24, more affiliated with the right wing, he is heading toward the best victory of his career. Statistics cannot explain that gap. Margins explain 3 percent or 4 percent, not 12 percent or 13 percent.

And I want to give you the magic number: 55. We have 10 Arab Knesset members who do not take part in coalitions: They do not sympathize with the Zionist state, and the Zionist parties do not want them. Post-October 7, there is almost no legitimacy, especially in the center, to base a coalition on non-Zionist, sometimes anti-Zionist, Arab parties. So if Netanyahu gets 55 seats, he does not lose to Eisenkot in terms of Zionist seats.

The average of the polls has Netanyahu around 52 and a half, and we know the shy voter phenomenon, the inability to really poll right-wing voters, from the U.S., U.K. and Israel. So even trusting the mainstream polls, Netanyahu is two and a half seats short of ending this election without Eisenkot being able to form a stable coalition. That leaves two options: a new election, meaning Netanyahu stays prime minister, or a rotation government, in which Netanyahu most likely goes first.

Remember: 61 seats are enough for a victory speech, but 59 does not force you to concede. That’s what Americans fail to understand about Israeli politics. One can get away with 52, 53, 55, 57 seats. The sitting prime minister deserves a premium simply for sitting as prime minister.

So I would give Netanyahu 45 percent, Eisenkot 35 percent, and Lieberman 20 percent. Netanyahu is still under 50 percent because of some 100 consecutive very bad polls. Eisenkot is still the one with the best chances in the center-left. But Lieberman is there, and Netanyahu has a higher chance than on Polymarket now.

Q. As we record this, the U.S. headlines say “Netanyahu visits DC amid tensions with Donald Trump.” Are they really tense? Or is this a media invention?

Tension did exist. But as a general rule, the relationship is always better than meets the eye in the press. It is based on four to seven people from the two sides of the pond: Netanyahu, Ron Dermer, Trump, Jared Kushner, Steve Witkoff, and maybe Susie Wiles. Seven out of seven belong to the right, while most of the media covers it from a center-left point of view. That means lack of information, and a natural bias toward saying the situation is worse.

The relationship has cooled a bit since March, for two reasons. The war was less successful than hoped, and this administration has become more closed, with decisions taken by fewer people, so it’s harder for the Israelis to penetrate. But I would not write off Netanyahu’s chances to talk Trump into something.

Click here to read the full transcript and dive deeper into our discussion on Iran.

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Israeli and Lebanese flags at the South Lebanon Army (SLA) Memorial near Metula following the signing of an agreement between Israel and Lebanon, June 28, 2026. (Ayal Margolin/FLASH90)

The most recent time Trump declared a ceasefire at the last minute before a major strike, the dominant feeling recalled Bill Murray’s character in Groundhog Day. But Iran isn’t the only country trapped in one long time loop.

Negotiators are gathering in Rome for the seventh round of U.S.-brokered Israel-Lebanon talks to discuss moving forward with Hezbollah disarmament. We have been here before. In 2024, after Israeli operations decimated Hezbollah’s leadership, there was a real window of opportunity. The systematic searches of homes, the clearing of tunnels, the confiscation of weapons—all with IDF help—were to be finished in 2025. Had everything gone to schedule, Israel would have withdrawn from Lebanon entirely by the start of this year.

Instead, over two years of the “disarmament process,” the LAF raided exactly two tunnel sites—one of them confirmed to have been emptied beforehand—a remarkable feat given that Hezbollah’s infrastructure plan was labeled “Land of Tunnels.” Mostly, the LAF ran a quick scan, declared the area clear, and looked the other way while Hezbollah rebuilt behind them. That is when the soldiers show up at all. On any given day, 4,000 of the 8,000 deployed to the south were and continue to be missing, busy working second jobs as taxi drivers because military salaries cannot feed their families.

The newest round of negotiations assumes the Lebanese state is serious about disarming Hezbollah. The ground reality shows the opposite. The army still cannot search homes for weapons, blocked by a judiciary allied with Hezbollah, while its own officers continue to coordinate with the group.

Lebanon cannot do this alone. It is time for the United States to hunt Hezbollah the way it hunted ISIS. Remove compromised LAF officers immediately—political backlash be damned. Bypass the judiciary and authorize home searches by executive order. Pay soldiers reliably, a relatively small cost of $500 million to $1 billion annually for five to 10 years. Embed American advisers at battalion level to watch officer behavior and enforce compliance. Provide the air support, artillery, and intelligence to hunt Hezbollah down. Operation Inherent Resolve took three to four years in Iraq. By the end of it, the caliphate was rubble. It is one of the few military campaigns the U.S. in the Middle East that achieved its strategic objectives. The truth is that, however bad Iraq was then, it was more institutionally intact than Lebanon is now. The Rome timeline of 18 months is fantasy.

We may be trapped in an endless cycle with Iran, but it does not have to be so in Lebanon. Israel’s attempt to decapitate the octopus in one fell swoop has failed—but severing one of its tentacles will still cause enormous pain. And nothing would make the regime look weaker than watching its crown jewel crushed once and for all.

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Mosaic patterns from the Jewish Temple. (Temple Mount Sifting Project)

Since 2016, archaeologists have been reconstructing the opus sectile floors—intricate mosaics of colored stone—that once adorned the Temple Mount. These geometric tile patterns, made from marble and other stones, challenge what we thought we knew about ancient Jewish grandeur and help explain why Herod’s Temple was the most lavish structure in the Roman Empire.

Dr. Assaf Avraham first identified the tile fragments in sifting work, proposing they matched Josephus’s description of the Temple Mount courtyard: “paved entirely with stones of various types and colors.” Rabbinic sources corroborate this account, describing the floor as resembling “waves of the sea.” Initially, scholars dismissed the idea—opus sectile was thought too expensive and too late for the Second Temple period.

Frankie Schneider, a mathematician-turned-archaeologist, took the research to unprecedented depth. Over years of painstaking work, she reconstructed seven complete floor patterns from thousands of fragmented tiles. Her findings reveal that the Temple Mount featured the most extensive use of opus sectile flooring anywhere in the Roman world—a technique normally reserved for small elite spaces.

The explanation is not that Judea was wealthy. Rather, all the Jewish world’s taxation flowed to a single destination: the Temple. While Roman cities distributed public resources among dozens of temples, Jews everywhere sent their tithes and pilgrim offerings to Jerusalem. This concentration of resources toward one monumental project created something unprecedented—a sacred precinct larger than any in the Roman Empire, with flooring more luxurious than anything Rome itself produced.

Recent 3D reconstructions by Scripture Central visualize this vanished splendor in vivid detail, though researchers caution that major questions remain unsettled.

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English Editor: Ari Tatarka

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