{"id":557078,"date":"2026-07-24T08:21:18","date_gmt":"2026-07-24T08:21:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/557078\/"},"modified":"2026-07-24T08:21:18","modified_gmt":"2026-07-24T08:21:18","slug":"losing-ground-to-nemesis-eisenkot-a-desperate-netanyahu-plumbs-new-depths","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/557078\/","title":{"rendered":"Losing ground to nemesis Eisenkot, a desperate Netanyahu plumbs new depths"},"content":{"rendered":"

This Editor\u2019s Note was sent out earlier Wednesday in ToI\u2019s weekly update email to members of the Times of Israel Community. To receive these Editor\u2019s Notes as they\u2019re released, join the ToI Community here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The Knesset only dispersed last week, the election campaign has barely started, and already Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has sunk to another low.<\/p>\n

On Tuesday, his office produced, and he posted, a campaign video<\/a> showing his main rival, Gadi Eisenkot, in a sunlit meadow, running past a handsome young man in a T-shirt emblazoned \u201cIsraeli unity\u201d into the embrace of the Arab Ra\u2019am party leader Mansour Abbas. The unsubtle message: Eisenkot will do anything to win power, including forsaking a unified Jewish Israel and joining forces with Israel\u2019s purported internal enemies.<\/p>\n

But that calumny wasn\u2019t the worst thing about the ad. This was an AI-generated clip<\/a>. The prime minister and his campaign team could have chosen any nonexistent young man or woman for Eisenkot to ignore in his faked rush to join forces with the Arabs. But they generated, in their fake heavenly flower-filled field, a fake bearded man in his mid-20s who looks like Eisenkot\u2019s own son Gal \u2014 an IDF reservist who was killed at age 25<\/a> while fighting in Gaza in December 2023. In other words, Netanyahu had his purportedly dastardly rival ignoring a beyond-the-grave Israel-unifying plea from his own fallen child.<\/p>\n

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\n\t\tLeft: Gal Eisenkot (IDF). Right: A young man depicted wearing a \u2018Unity of Israel\u2019 shirt in an AI-generated ad, shared by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, against Gadi Eisenkot, on July 21, 2026. (Screenshot via X)<\/p>\n

Eisenkot\u2019s campaign responded with a compilation of (genuine) clips showing how Netanyahu and his colleagues tried and failed to woo Abbas into their own coalition \u2014 inevitably giving the original toxic ad more resonance. And Netanyahu\u2019s under-indictment top adviser Jonatan Urich<\/a> then issued a follow-up ad, this time putting the \u201cIsraeli unity\u201d T-shirt on an AI-generated woman.<\/p>\n

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\u05d2\u05d3\u05d9, \u05d6\u05d4 \u05dc\u05d0 \u05d9\u05e9\u05e8 pic.twitter.com\/awy47dINmq<\/a><\/p>\n

\u2014 Benjamin Netanyahu \u2013 \u05d1\u05e0\u05d9\u05de\u05d9\u05df \u05e0\u05ea\u05e0\u05d9\u05d4\u05d5 (@netanyahu) July 20, 2026<\/a><\/p>\n

Needless to say, no apology has been forthcoming from Netanyahu for the despicable original ad.<\/p>\n

Needless to say, even me writing about it here will generate further viewing. I\u2019ll pay that price to make the following points:<\/p>\n

Netanyahu wants to focus the October 27, 2026, election on the ostensible unsuitability of anyone but him to lead Israel. In fact, he has, tragically for this country, proved himself to be just about the last person who should run Israel. Having held power almost uninterrupted since 2009, and encouraged Qatar to help fund Hamas\u2019s growing strength in Gaza, he failed to thwart the October 7, 2023, Hamas invasion and massacre. He refused to take responsibility for that failure by stepping down. And he has steadfastly blocked the establishment of an essential state commission of inquiry into the failures surrounding that invasion, the better to ensure that nothing like it will happen again, because he knows such an inquiry would recommend his immediate departure from public office.<\/p>\n

Worse, through almost three years of ongoing multifront war, he has survived in power by indulging the immoral and untenable demand by the leaders of the ultra-Orthodox community for the exemption from military or national service of their young men. This same sector of the populace is increasingly subsidized by the diminishing proportion of Orthodox, traditional and secular Israelis who do perform mandatory national service and seemingly endless reserve duty while somehow holding family life and work life together. The final paroxysms of the Netanyahu coalition\u2019s Knesset term last week included the passage of legislation designed to render legal, by force of corrupted executive will, the patently illegal exemption of ultra-Orthodox Jews from national service.<\/p>\n

The ultra-Orthodox leaders\u2019 extortion, and Netanyahu\u2019s readiness to be blackmailed, have heightened dreadful divisions in Israeli society \u2014 which are now at the fore even as the Jewish people on Wednesday-Thursday mark Tisha B\u2019Av, the date on which it is believed both Biblical temples were destroyed by enemy forces profiting from internal Jewish hatreds.<\/p>\n

\t\"\"<\/a>
\n\t\tThe leader of the Gur Hasidic dynasty joins thousands of ultra-Orthodox men at a protest outside an IDF Military Prison near Kfar Yona, central Israel, July 20, 2026. (Tal Gal\/Flash90)<\/p>\n

The refusal of the ultra-Orthodox leadership to allow its constituency to share in the responsibility to defend the state is exacerbated by that leadership\u2019s refusal to allow its constituency to gain an adequate education \u2014 keeping their youngsters in sectoral schools, again lavishly funded by the Israeli workforce, that do not teach the most basic skills.<\/p>\n

\t\"\"<\/a>
\n\t\tProf. Dan Ben-David, the head of the Shoresh Institution for Socioeconomic Research. (Courtesy Shoresh Institution for Socioeconomic Research)<\/p>\n

As Prof. Dan Ben-David, the academic economist who heads the Shoresh Institution for Socioeconomic Research, underlined to me this week, the ultra-Orthodox community, at 14% of the populace and growing much faster than any other sector, does not cut itself off from the benefits of modernity and development. \u201cWhen they get sick, they go to the doctor, not the rabbi,\u201d he noted. \u201cThey don\u2019t want to live in tents. They live in homes, designed by architects and engineers.\u201d<\/p>\n

But their leadership, terrified of \u201closing\u201d their constituency, God forbid, to an Orthodox, traditional or secular lifestyle, a working lifestyle, a participatory, responsible lifestyle, has insistently deprived successive young generations of the opportunity to make a choice, and cynically closed them off from the educational tools that could enable them to join a first-world workforce.<\/p>\n

\t\"\"<\/a>
\n\t\tData from the Shoresh Institution for Socioeconomic Research show Israeli students overall place 31st out of 36 countries in the OECD\u2019s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) for the years 2006-2022. (Courtesy Dan Ben-David\/Shoresh Institution for Socioeconomic Research)<\/p>\n

Not only is Israel\u2019s fastest-growing community therefore being strategically stunted, Ben-David pointed out, but so, too, by extension is all of Israel. Nationwide education standards have been gradually collapsing, to the point where Israel, in its school-system entirety, today ranks in surveys below almost the entire developed world. And a country with a third-world education system, as Israel\u2019s is fast-becoming, cannot maintain a first-world economy, a first-world health system\u2026 or a first-world army.<\/p>\n

This is the cost that Netanyahu has been prepared to have Israel pay for his political survival, most egregiously in the wake of his October 7, 2023, failures: skewing a country in which an ever-greater burden falls on the workforce, in which many of the best and the brightest are increasingly inclined to leave, and those who remain are ever-less capable of sustaining a thriving Israel and an Israel capable of protecting itself against its salivating enemies.<\/p>\n

\t\"\"<\/a>
\n\t\tIn an address to the nation, President Isaac Herzog warns against violence surrounding the upcoming elections, July 21, 2026. (Kobi Gideon \/ GPO)<\/p>\n

We still have almost 100 days before we go to the polls \u2014 almost 100 days, as President Isaac Herzog warned<\/a> in a plaintive televised address on Tuesday night, with \u201cdangerous violence\u201d already \u201crearing its head across the country,\u201d and documented \u201cthreats to the integrity of the elections.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI turn to elected representatives, activists, and all candidates from all parties, and demand that you do not cross red lines!\u201d Herzog implored. \u201cDo not turn rivals into enemies!\u201d<\/p>\n

\t\"\"<\/a>
\n\t\tThen-opposition leader Benjamin Netanyahu overlooks a right-wing rally against the newly ratified Oslo Accords, marked by shouts of \u201cDeath to Rabin\u201d in the crowd, in Jerusalem\u2019s Zion Square in October, 1995 (video screenshot)<\/p>\n

Netanyahu, the opposition leader who stirred up vicious opposition to prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, is manifestly not listening to presidential entreaties and has evidently learned nothing from the sequence of terrible events that played out here 31 years ago. His pet Channel 14 TV station, his social media loyalists, and his thuggish activists spread incessant toxin. And the man who oversaw the Eisenkot attack ad \u2014 Israel\u2019s most schemingly divisive politician brazenly and baselessly accusing an opponent of eschewing national unity \u2014 no longer even bothers to appear above the fray.<\/p>\n

\t\"\"<\/a>
\n\t\tGadi Eisenkot speaks with Rabbi Binyamin Kalmanzon during a march in support of the conscription of ultra-Orthodox Jews into the IDF, from the entrance of Jerusalem to the Knesset, January 15, 2026. (Yonatan Sindel\/Flash90)<\/p>\n

Eisenkot has risen inexorably in the polls, personally preferred as prime minister and his Yashar party neck-and-neck with Likud, because he is perceived as the very opposite of Netanyahu \u2014 as a would-be good-faith advancer of Israel\u2019s vital and genuine national interests. Not slick, superficial, or cynical. And not indelibly stained by the worst leadership failure in Israeli history.<\/p>\n

It is, dismally, no surprise that the shameless Netanyahu will sink to any depths in a desperate bid to besmirch the bereaved former IDF chief of staff who wants to put this country back together again. Worse is doubtless yet to come. Hopefully, just maybe, enough of the electorate can still see where our vital interests lie and, 97 days from now, Israel\u2019s national direction will start to change for the better.<\/p>\n

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