Does the Israeli non-right have a chance?

Is Netanyahu a secret Muslim? According to F.W. Burleigh at The American Thinker, proposing to prove that noted upward-pointer Barack Obama is a Muslim, "The extended finger is symbolic of the one-God concept of Muhammad and is understood by all believers to be a symbolic shahada, the Muslim affirmation of faith: There is but one God and Muhammad is his messenger. Thus when believers stick their index finger in the air, they demonstrate they are partisans of Muhammad’s God concept."

Mondoweiss (citing Daniel Levy at the European Council on Foreign Relations) is claiming the likeliest outcome of Tuesday's vote in Israel is that Likud loses to the so-called Zionist Union of Labor and Kadima and so on, but Netanyahu returns as prime minister in spite of losing, in a "grand coalition": because if the election is as close as appears likely the Zionist Union won't have enough seats in the new Knesset to form a government unless in coalition with the new Joint Arab List (which brings together the Arab parties in a unified front and is likely to do extremely well, with 13 to 15 seats of its own, with a substantial number of votes from leftist Jews fed up with the usual parties)—and since they will never ask the Arab List into the government, "traditionally deemed unworthy coalition partners", they'll have nowhere to go but Likud, which will demand that Netanyahu stay in office (at least for half the term in alternation with Herzog) as the price of participation.

I obviously haven't got anything like their deep knowledge of the situation, but sometimes an ignorant person can see things that are too eccentric for the experts to notice, and I think there are two fundamental things wrong with this scenario:

1. I'm afraid both Weiss and Levy have failed to note that there is an Arab point of view on this question, which Ayman Odeh has announced quite clearly: It will not join any coalition if invited, thanks very much for the thought, but it will give its support to any government that gets rid of Netanyahu. So the question of whether Herzog and Livni invite them are not doesn't arise.

2. A party doesn't need to be in the government, i.e. to have members serving as cabinet ministers, to make up part of the governing majority. It merely has to vote with the government on questions of confidence, whether in a formal alliance with the ruling parties, or by agreement. Normally parties demand ministries in return for support, especially in Israel, where the dickering can get pretty unseemly, but it's not necessary. Voting with the government while remaining outside it for reasons of principle can be very attractive for parties that care about principle, which the Arab parties show every sign of doing.

In this way Herzog and Livni can't ask the Arab List to join the government, not because it is "unworthy" but because it will turn them down; but it can ask for their support, which is more or less guaranteed since the Arabs' central demand is to get rid of Netanyahu and Likud. So there's a great deal of hope that something like this could actually occur, especially given that two of the most obnoxious tiny rightist parties, Yachad and Avigdor Lieberman's Yisrael Beiteinu, may well fail to get past the needed vote threshold and get no seats at all, along with poor Meretz on the left, though Meretz has a secret weapon in comedian Sarah Silverman—her sister, Rabbi Susan Silverman, is an Israeli citizen and Meretz candidate.

.@SarahKSilverman tweets 'Vote for Meretz' http://t.co/yKPxRUn4SJ @meretzparty http://t.co/PT57C9yQsv
— Jewish Daily Forward (@jdforward) March 11, 2015