As Israel heads into a fiercely contested general election on October 27, former military chief Gadi Eisenkot has emerged as the principal challenger to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. <\/p>\n
Eisenkot’s rise comes at a pivotal moment in Israeli politics, with the election widely viewed as a referendum on the long-serving premier’s leadership in the violent aftermath of Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attack on Israel. <\/p>\n
A recent Channel 12 poll put Eisenkot’s new party, Yashar (Hebrew for “Straight” or “Upright”), ahead of Netanyahu’s Likud, projecting 23 seats to Likud’s 22 in the 120-member Knesset. <\/p>\n
The same survey found that 43 percent of respondents considered Eisenkot, 66, the most suitable candidate for prime minister, compared with 34 percent for Netanyahu. <\/p>\n
Eisenkot — who has dismissed calls for a future Palestinian state as irrelevant after the October 7 attacks and pioneered Israel’s strategy of disproportionate military responses in Lebanon — has built his campaign around a 10-point platform that he says will restore Israel’s security, unity and democratic institutions. <\/p>\n
Chief of staff of the Israeli military between 2015 and 2019, Eisenkot was among those credited with developing the “Dahieh Doctrine”, named after Beirut’s southern suburbs that is a Hezbollah stronghold. <\/p>\n
Advanced on the premise that Hezbollah conceals fighters and weapons among civilian homes and infrastructure, the doctrine calls for a devastating Israeli response against enemy population centers when Israeli communities come under long-range attack. <\/p>\n
At the top of his civilian manifesto is a pledge to establish a state commission of inquiry into Hamas’s bloody 2023 cross-border attack, which triggered the Gaza war and quickly expanded into a broader regional conflict, and which led to Netanyahu’s government being accused of overseeing an intelligence failure. <\/p>\n
Tens of thousands of Israelis have repeatedly demonstrated in support of such an inquiry, but Netanyahu’s coalition has instead proposed a commission whose members would be chosen by politicians. <\/p>\n
Eisenkot also promises a “new long-term national security doctrine” aimed at strengthening the military and reinforcing Israel’s borders. <\/p>\n
A central plank of this is a “universal national service law” that would extend compulsory service to ultra-Orthodox Jews and Arab citizens. <\/p>\n
He has also pledged to “protect judicial independence, the rule of law, minority rights and a free press.” <\/p>\n
“Through these steps, we will ensure that Israel is a Jewish, democratic, powerful, advanced and secure state,” Eisenkot’s campaign says. <\/p>\n
His overall position on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, however, remains less clearly defined. <\/p>\n
“The only signal that he sent was that Israel should be a state of law,” said Tal Elovits, a researcher at Israeli think tank Molad. “Therefore, illegal settlements and settlers’ violence will be dealt with.” <\/p>\n
Relatively new to politics, Eisenkot has attracted widespread public sympathy after his son, Gal, and two nephews were killed fighting in Gaza. <\/p>\n
Eisenkot’s call for universal military service has become a defining issue of his campaign, putting him at the forefront of opposition to Netanyahu’s alliance with ultra-Orthodox parties. <\/p>\n
Eisenkot has repeatedly attacked Netanyahu’s agreement with his coalition partners to advance legislation exempting many Haredi men from military service. <\/p>\n
“This is a government that chooses to weaken the army in the midst of a brutal war, while the finest sons and daughters of this nation are deployed across all fronts,” he wrote, in a social media post. <\/p>\n
– ‘Different generation’ – <\/p>\n
Unlike Netanyahu, who comes from one of Israel’s elite families, Eisenkot is the son of Moroccan immigrants and grew up on the country’s geographic periphery. <\/p>\n
“In a political universe full of Netanyahu wannabes … Eisenkot reads as a man of a different generation, far more connected to the traditional security narratives of Zionism,” columnist Nadav Eyal wrote in a recent blog. <\/p>\n
Eisenkot’s understated style could prove to be one of his strongest political assets, said Elovits. <\/p>\n
“The middle class and upper middle class… look for someone that will look responsible, boring, and I think that Eisenkot has that appeal,” he said. <\/p>\n
Although opposition leaders Yair Lapid and Naftali Bennett remain in contention, current polling suggests neither is as well positioned as Eisenkot to defeat Netanyahu. <\/p>\n
Lapid and Bennett governed together between 2021 and 2022 in a coalition that included an Arab party. <\/p>\n
– Strategic option – <\/p>\n
According to Elovits, many disillusioned right-wing voters still see that alliance as a “betrayal”, making them unlikely to return to Bennett. <\/p>\n
“Many voters of the right wing who do not like what Netanyahu is doing… are looking for a home. And a reasonable house for them today is Gadi Eisenkot,” said Gayil Talshir, a political science professor at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. <\/p>\n
For liberal centrist voters, Eisenkot increasingly represents the opposition candidate with the strongest chance of unseating Netanyahu. <\/p>\n
“Once Eisenkot began to rise above Bennett in the polls, the strategic voters of the liberal camp went with Eisenkot,” Talshir said. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"As Israel heads into a fiercely contested general election on October 27, former military chief Gadi Eisenkot has…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":561403,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[85,46,43],"class_list":["post-561402","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-israel","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/561402","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=561402"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/561402\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/561403"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=561402"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=561402"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=561402"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}