The Man Who Could Defeat Netanyahu 

KARMIEL, Israel — It was a gunshot to the head of a Palestinian militant that first exposed the gulf between Gadi Eisenkot and Benjamin Netanyahu.

In March 2016, two Palestinians armed with knives attacked Israeli soldiers in the West Bank, wounding one of them. The soldiers opened fire, killing one attacker and leaving the other wounded on the ground. Several minutes later, a 19-year-old Israeli soldier named Elor Azaria cocked his rifle, aimed at the wounded attacker’s head and pulled the trigger. Azaria said he had felt threatened.

The question of whether the soldier should face a military trial divided the country. To some Israelis, Azaria was no criminal but a soldier who had killed a terrorist. To others, Azaria had carried out an extrajudicial killing or even murder. He was eventually convicted of manslaughter by a military court.

Eisenkot, then chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces, defended the decision to prosecute Azaria, arguing that shooting an attacker who had already been incapacitated was incompatible with the values of the Israeli military. Netanyahu sided with the soldier and called for him to be pardoned.

A decade later, the dispute still reverberates. 

A former member of Netanyahu’s war cabinet, Eisenkot has seemingly overnight emerged as the prime minister’s most formidable challenger ahead of Israel’s parliamentary election on Oct. 27. His centrist Yashar! party — which he founded last year — was born out of rising discontent with Netanyahu’s response to the attack by Hamas on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023 and the war in Gaza that followed.

In several nationwide polls, Yashar! — a name that can be translated as “Straight!” or “Honest!” — has already overtaken Netanyahu’s ruling Likud party. Eisenkot’s supporters point to the Azaria case as evidence of their candidate’s high moral standards. Netanyahu’s allies, meanwhile, have revived it to portray the former military chief as too soft and too far to the left.

Rarely has an Israeli election been watched abroad with such anticipation. For much of the past 30 years, Netanyahu’s mix of right-wing nationalism and hardline stance on Israel’s relationship with the Palestinians and its neighbors has dominated Israeli politics. Eisenkot is promising his supporters that he can wrest the country in a new direction. 

“There are moments in history when, after a very charismatic and dominant leader, people deliberately choose someone less charismatic because they simply want peace and quiet,” said Shai Bazak, an Israeli former diplomat and communications figure who served Netanyahu as an adviser during his first term as prime minister. “They do not want all the drama anymore.”

“Eisenkot is a very nice person,” Bazak added. “He is not extreme. He is not particularly divisive. That makes it easier for people who traditionally vote for the right to move toward him.”

Whoever wins will have to navigate a radically different foreign-policy landscape.

Since Hamas killed about 1,200 people and took 251 hostages on Oct. 7, 2023, Israel’s position on the world stage has fundamentally changed. The largest mass murder of Jews since the Holocaust drew a wave of international solidarity that receded in the following months and years as Israel responded with a war in Gaza. According to the Hamas-run Health Ministry in Gaza, more than 73,000 Palestinians have been killed, both civilians and combatants — a figure widely considered reliable by the Associated Press, U.N. agencies and independent experts. Israeli military officials indicated at the beginning of this year that they agree that the overall Gaza death toll was around 70,000; in 2025 the IDF said it had killed more than 22,000 militants in Gaza and acknowledges that while it has tried to minimize civilian casualties, two to three civilians have died for every militant killed.

In several European countries, most notably Spain and France, criticism has grown as Netanyahu’s government has responded to attacks by Hamas and Hezbollah with what critics consider excessive military force, devastating large parts of Gaza and seizing a large swath of southern Lebanon.

Relations between Netanyahu’s government and the European Union have deteriorated to such an extent that Israel’s foreign minister no longer speaks to the EU’s top diplomat. On June 18, 2026, Gideon Sa’ar announced that he was severing all contact with Kaja Kallas after it emerged that during a visit to Mexico in May, Kallas had compared Israel’s treatment of Palestinians to South Africa’s apartheid system.

Israel’s traditionally close relationship with the United States has also come under strain. Netanyahu and U.S. President Donald Trump did agree to jointly conduct military strikes against Iran aimed at preventing the Islamist regime in Tehran from acquiring a nuclear weapon. Iran has declared the destruction of Israel to be one of its overriding goals.

Yet Trump has also occasionally criticized Netanyahu. “What the fuck are you doing?” Trump reportedly asked the Israeli prime minister in June, referring to his offensive against Hezbollah in Lebanon. Trump has so far stopped short of publicly endorsing Netanyahu for reelection.

Meanwhile, the conflict in Gaza and the war in Iran have driven down U.S. support for Israel, especially on the left wing of the Democratic Party and among parts of Trump’s MAGA coalition, making the debate over Israel a live political issue for both parties as they head toward midterm elections.

As Netanyahu comes under growing pressure from Eisenkot, he is fighting back hard, seeking to turn the former army chief’s greatest strength, his security credentials, against him. “Eisenkot wanted to surrender. Netanyahu is fighting!” the prime minister declared in a recent campaign video.

“The campaign against me has begun,” Eisenkot told supporters at a campaign event earlier this month in the northern Israeli city of Karmiel. Speaking in a slightly hoarse voice, he launched his counterattack. “Netanyahu attacks his opponents in the same way every time, claiming: Only Netanyahu can provide security.”

Then he added pointedly: “We saw how that worked out on October 7.”

Eisenkot is demanding an independent state commission of inquiry into the failures of the military, intelligence services and political leadership surrounding the 2023 Hamas attack. In doing so, he also wants the prime minister himself to be held accountable. Netanyahu’s government has so far resisted establishing such a commission.

“If there is no commission of inquiry, it will hang over Israeli society like a curse,” Eisenkot said. He delivered his attacks on Netanyahu calmly, almost monotonously. Eisenkot is stocky, with the air of a chef who has been persuaded to leave his kitchen to greet an enthusiastic dining room. 

He is neither a charismatic nor a gifted speaker in the mold of Netanyahu. But he projects something that could become the most valuable currency in this election: trustworthiness. While Netanyahu carries the burden of an ongoing corruption trial, his challenger is widely regarded as a man of exceptional integrity.

An Israeli retiree named Josef Benjamin listened intently to Eisenkot’s speech in Karmiel, watching him with a critical eye. He had come to make up his own mind about the man who has suddenly become the talk of the country. “Eisenkot is a man of the people, a good man,” Benjamin said. “Netanyahu, on the other hand, rules like a king. He is no longer good for Israel and should step down.”

It is no coincidence that Eisenkot chose Karmiel. The city is predominantly home to lower- and middle-income Israelis and is a stronghold of Netanyahu’s Likud party. Over the course of just a few days, Eisenkot was making 15 appearances here in northern Israel.

The rally was a display of confidence: He wants to win over the prime minister’s voters. Among the roughly 300 people gathered in Karmiel’s municipal auditorium, there was plenty of gray hair, along with hearing aids and walking sticks. Young faces were rare.

Eisenkot has something of a paternal charm. He projects the experience of a man who has known both a remarkable rise and profound loss. He comes from modest circumstances. The son of Jewish immigrants from Morocco, he was born in the city of Tiberias on the Sea of Galilee, far from Israel’s major metropolises. He grew up in Eilat, a Red Sea resort town on the country’s southern tip. 

In the military, he rose from an ordinary infantryman in the storied Golani Brigade to chief of staff of the IDF — appointed by Netanyahu, himself a product of intellectual circles and elite American universities. In one campaign ad, Likud mocks Eisenkot’s less-than-perfect English. Yet his popularity continues to rise.

Majd Yassin, an Arab Israeli in his 40s, likes the prospect of Eisenkot becoming Israel’s first prime minister with Moroccan Jewish roots. “I really appreciate that he addressed the problems facing Arab society. No one is really showing much interest in solving the problems we face in Israel’s Arab community, as Israeli citizens,” Yassin says. “I think Gadi Eisenkot recognizes these issues, and he has the ability to address them.”

It is not only Eisenkot’s story of social mobility that makes him relatable to many Israelis, but also his family’s tragedy.

On Dec. 7, 2023, Eisenkot’s son Gal Meir was taking part in an operation to recover the bodies of two Israelis who had been abducted into Gaza on Oct. 7 and killed. As the soldier approached an open tunnel shaft, an explosive device detonated. The 25-year-old was critically wounded and later died in hospital.

Two of Eisenkot’s nephews were also killed in Gaza. Eisenkot does not make his loss a campaign issue, but most Israelis know exactly what his family has sacrificed. Netanyahu’s son Yair, by contrast, remained in Florida as Israel mobilized some 360,000 reservists in the aftermath of the Hamas attack, drawing criticism from Israelis who returned from abroad to serve. Netanyahu defended his son, saying Yair was volunteering in the United States and helping procure equipment for the military and emergency services.

Eisenkot now embodies Israel’s grief for its fallen sons and daughters — and the hope that the man whose profession was war might be the one to end it.

His popularity also reflects a yearning among many Israelis to once again place the country in the hands of a benevolent father figure, as Yitzhak Rabin once was. Rabin, too, had served as IDF chief of staff before entering politics, commanding Israel’s military during its victory in the Six-Day War. Until his assassination in 1995, he was the great hope for peace in the Middle East.

Does Eisenkot have what it takes to inherit Rabin’s mantle? Many highly decorated former military commanders have tried before him. According to an analysis by the Israel Democracy Institute, roughly two-thirds of former IDF chiefs of staff later entered national politics. Most failed. Ehud Barak did become prime minister, but his coalition collapsed after just 20 months. More recently, former IDF chief Benny Gantz, a centrist who once emerged as Netanyahu’s most formidable political rival, saw his party’s support collapse and is now likely to fail to make it back into the Knesset.

The military and politics ultimately operate according to very different rules. The armed forces are hierarchical; politics demands compromise — and therefore a particular ability to deal with people. 

Those are soft skills the military does not necessarily teach, said Danny Orbach, a military historian at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. “In the army, Ehud Barak — an extreme example of a failed politician with a military background — could shout at his subordinates if they didn’t obey him,” Orbach added. “In politics, people simply walk away.” 

Orbach, however, considers Eisenkot a different kind of figure: “Eisenkot is very conscientious and deeply patriotic,” he said. “He means well. Without Netanyahu’s baggage, he may be able to rebuild relations with the EU and with certain segments of the Democratic Party in the United States.”

The military historian is more skeptical about Eisenkot’s lack of political experience. Eisenkot entered parliament only four years ago. He is also critical of positions Eisenkot took as a member of Netanyahu’s war cabinet after Oct. 7.

“Had it been up to Eisenkot, he would have given in to pressure from the families of the hostages and ended the war,” Orbach said. “We would now be without the achievements we have made: 60 percent of Gaza under our control, and Hamas weakened and isolated.”

Eisenkot has argued that this presents a false choice: Israel could have struck a deal to bring the hostages home and resumed its campaign against Hamas later.

Generally, Eisenkot and his campaign team are trying to overcome such criticism with a promise of a better future. Even the choice of music at his campaign rallies makes the point.

An old Israeli peace song comes over the speakers: “Everything will be alright.”

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