Israel's newly elected 26th Knesset convened Tuesday for its opening session, and the anti-Netanyahu bloc wasted no time: four opposition parties fired off formal letters demanding an immediate vote to replace sitting Speaker Amir Ohana of Likud, according to Ynet. It's the opening skirmish in a messier fight over who actually controls the chamber after last month's deadlocked election.

The push is led by Gadi Eisenkot's Yashar! party, joined by Avigdor Liberman's Yisrael Beytenu, the Beyachad faction and the Democrats, with the Arab-majority Joint List expected to back a similar request. Eisenkot, a former IDF chief of staff, has made removing Ohana his explicit first priority — not as an end in itself, but as the opening move toward unwinding legislation he argues has eroded Israeli democracy.

"NOW IS THE TIME TO FORM A NATIONAL EMERGENCY GOVERNMENT."

Ohana, for his part, isn't digging in the way his predecessor once did. He has said he'll schedule an early vote within a week of getting 61 signatures — the bar set by a 2020 Israeli Supreme Court ruling that forces a speaker vote on demand from a majority of lawmakers, even before a new government is formed. That's a notable contrast with 2020, when then-Speaker Yuli Edelstein refused to schedule a vote on his own replacement and had to be ordered to do so by the court.

The Math Still Doesn't Work — Yet

The problem for Eisenkot's bloc is arithmetic. Netanyahu's bloc holds 53 seats after October's inconclusive election; the Eisenkot-aligned opposition controls 48. Neither side clears the 61-seat majority needed to actually win a speaker vote without the Joint List's support, support the opposition hasn't yet locked down. Compounding the problem, Al Jazeera reported that the bloc hadn't even settled on a consensus candidate to replace Ohana as of this weekend, with Yair Lapid floated as one possibility and Liberman among those pushing his name.

The speaker fight is really a proxy battle in the larger war over who runs the country. President Isaac Herzog passed over Netanyahu last week and handed Eisenkot the first shot at forming a government, after factions representing 67 of the Knesset's 120 seats recommended him over the 46 who backed Netanyahu. Eisenkot now has up to 42 days, factoring in a possible extension, to cobble together a coalition — and seizing the speaker's chair on day one would hand his bloc real procedural leverage while that clock runs.