No party has ever won a majority in Israel's Knesset
Israel's parliament has 120 seats, a number borrowed from an ancient assembly of sages. Since the first sitting in 1949, no party has won the 61 seats needed to govern alone; the closest was 56 in 1969. Every Israeli government has therefore been a coalition, stitched together from ten or more parties.
Knesset means gathering or assembly. The name and the membership of 120 echo the Great Assembly of Jewish tradition, a body of scribes, sages and prophets said to have met over roughly two centuries ending around 200 BCE. The resemblance stops there: the ancient assembly was religious and unelected, and there is no institutional line connecting the two. The modern chamber first met on 14 February 1949, after elections that January, replacing a provisional council that had served since independence in May 1948.
The voting system explains the fragmentation. The whole country forms a single constituency, and voters choose a party list rather than a candidate. Seats are shared out by the D'Hondt method of proportional representation. For decades the bar for entry was tiny: a party needed just 1 percent of the vote from 1949 to 1992, then 1.5 percent, then 2 percent. Since 2014 the threshold has been 3.25 percent, which in 2022 meant about 152,000 votes per seat.
Forming a government is therefore a negotiation. After each election the president consults every party that won seats and nominates the leader most likely to command a majority, not necessarily the head of the largest party. That person gets 42 days, often extended, to build a coalition and win a confidence vote. A quirk called the Norwegian Law lets members who become ministers give up their seats to the next name on the party list, then reclaim them if they leave the cabinet.
The chamber holds wide powers: it passes all laws, approves the cabinet, elects the president and can dissolve itself. Yet only once has a no-confidence vote actually toppled a government, when Yitzhak Shamir's fell on 15 March 1990 in a manoeuvre remembered as the dirty trick.
Source: Knesset
