Gadi Eisenkot’s campaign-launching speech on 30 June set high stakes for Israel’s upcoming elections . “Twice, there was a sovereign Jewish kingdom here in the land of Israel,” the ex-army chief of staff and fledgling politician said, referring to the Hasmonean Kingdom and the older, historically vague House of David.
“Twice, it collapsed and fell apart in the eighth decade of its existence. Once again, we stand at a fateful point.”
To avoid the looming dissolution, he insists, Israelis must unify under his premiership. And it appears as if this call to action is working.
The electorate is flocking, mostly from the former-near-frontrunner and big-tech pro-settler Naftali Bennett camp , to Eisenkot in steadily increasing numbers.
Following weeks of a tie, Eisenkot’s Yashar Party on Wednesday overtook Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud for the first time, according to a Channel 13 poll. A referendum against Netanyahu With a resume that includes ordering snipers to shoot Palestinians during Gaza’s Great March of Return in 2018 and authoring the army's strategy of indiscriminately decimating civilian areas, known as the ‘Dahiyeh Doctrine’, many Israelis are drawn to the centrist career soldier’s military background.
But Eisenkot’s platform, like the rest of the opposition, is built almost entirely around the core principle that he is not Israel’s current and longest-serving prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu - in form at least.
“This [election] is essentially a referendum against Netanyahu,” Palestinian lawyer and analyst Diana Buttu tells The New Arab . “The main goal of all parties is to oust him.” Eisenkot will likely keep the rest of his platform as vague as possible as the campaign runs on, she predicts.
This ambiguity, says Amjad Iraqi, senior Palestine-Israel analyst at the International Crisis Group (ICG), is tactical.
"This happens when you get [army] generals entering politics. They try to present themselves as 'I don’t get involved in the muck of internal ideological politics; I’m just here to think about the state.'" Eisenkot himself has said as much, telling the Herzliya Conference in early July that “the goal is to win against Netanyahu, and this bad coalition”.
The Yashar! [Straight!] party campaign team needn’t worry if their boss doesn’t have a way with words – or much of a political position at all.
Israeli commentators largely agree that anything Eisenkot is or does that sets him apart from Netanyahu will send him further up the polls. To this end, Eisenkot’s matter-of-fact, no frills character appears to be giving Netanyahu the closest thing to a run for his money in nearly 19 years.
“He’s going to get a lot of votes because he’s new, he’s fresh, and he’s got the sympathy thing, and they like the idea of having a military person in power,” Buttu predicts of the elections, which by law should happen by 27 October. “But [the candidates] are all the same. They all want to beat up on Palestinians.”
Eisenkot’s son was killed in Gaza two months into the military’s genocidal war there, impressing on Israelis the image of a true patriot who puts the country above all else.
Netanyahu, on the other hand, with his full suite of corruption charges, bemoaned the “personal cost” his family bore when they were forced to postpone his youngest son’s wedding (for the second time) after he launched the 2024 war on Iran.
His eldest son spent most of the last three years in Miami, while Eisenkot had long forbidden his children from getting American passports.
The 66-year-old Eisenkot’s footprint can be found across much of occupied Palestine. He was born to Jewish Moroccan immigrants (making him, if elected, the first Mizrahi prime minister) in the northern city of Tiberias and raised alongside seven siblings in a working-class family with his father’s second wife in the southern port city of Eilat. He studied history in Tel Aviv and political science in Haifa, and during the Second Intifada in the early 2000s, he was commander of the army’s West Bank division, where he pushed the “mowing the lawn” military strategy - short but routine attacks to cut down Palestinian fighters (and many civilians with them) and keep resistance to occupation at bay.
Before that, however, at 18, he was drafted in and gradually rose up the ranks of the Golani Brigade. This unit within the Israeli army was historically made up of farmers and new immigrants, and part of his 2026 platform includes boosting services for this “periphery” of Israeli society.
He fought in Lebanon in 1982, spent the 1990s with an infantry reserve brigade, and then returned to the Golani Brigade as its commander in 1997. After overseeing the West Bank operations that suppressed the Second Intifada, Eisenkot was then promoted to head of operations for the Israeli army in 2005, and it was during the 2006 Lebanon war that he formulated the infamous ‘Dahiyeh Doctrine’.
“That was indeed a plan I prepared as head of the Operations Directorate,” Eisenkot told Yedioth Ahronoth in a recent report. “We destroyed 246 buildings. Every one of them housed Hezbollah terrorists. Every missile goes toward a target.”
He first mentioned the doctrine to the newspaper in 2008, saying that in future attacks against Lebanon, the Israeli army would “wield disproportionate power against every village from which shots are fired on Israel, and cause immense damage and destruction”.
“From our perspective, these [villages] are military bases," he said. "This isn't a suggestion. This is a plan that has already been authorised.” Eisenkot retired from the army in 2019, but with the devastation wrought upon southern Lebanese villages during these last two wars, it's clear that his doctrine has remained operational. Replacing Netanyahu, preserving the status quo Eisenkot’s security strategies are the clearest part of his platform. He believes that all-out wars are, generally, to be avoided, and that, in their place, the army should carry out routine “campaigns between wars” as outlined in his 2015 ‘Gideon’ army strategy document and demonstrated by Israel’s unending attacks in Gaza and Lebanon.
Wars, should they occur, are ideally forceful, strategic, and quick. It was Netanyahu’s apparent divergence from this approach that eventually led Eisenkot to withdraw from the war cabinet and resign from the Knesset in June 2024.
“Eisenkot is seeing what these multi-front wars are doing to Israeli society,” Iraqi tells The New Arab . He guesses that if elected, Eisenkot would try to keep as much of the current ‘status quo’ as possible - controlling Gaza, southern Lebanon and the West Bank - without making any dramatic decisions or “ruffling too many feathers”.
Eisenkot has adamantly opposed Israeli settlements in Gaza , ostensibly because he feels it risks Israeli unity, but he’s also expressed concern for Israel's reputation abroad. As for the West Bank settlements, recently epicentres of rampant pogroms against Palestinians , he says he only supports those that are “in line with Israel’s interests”.
Iraqi says Eisenkot’s issue isn’t with occupation or expulsion; it’s about the disorder of Israeli settler attacks , that they’re not coordinated with the army, that the settlers are “out of control and that they just need to be reigned back in”.
“It’s typical of [ex-] generals,” he explains. “They just need to be in control.”
That security background also means that Eisenkot likely sees Palestinian land as purely strategic and doesn't see the people who live there at all, Buttu says.
While marginally different from settler groups and their political patrons, who acknowledge the presence of Palestinians only as part of their mission to expel them, the end result is the same. “It’s racist in both cases,” Buttu says. “One is ‘I actively want to get rid of these people,’ the other one is ‘I don’t care if I harm these people as long as Israel is protected.’”
How would it all play out if he came into power? “I think a lot of it depends on the coalition. That’s always the case with Israel,” Buttu says. Israeli politics is based on proportional representation, meaning each government is formed via alliances.
“The idea of a stable coalition post-Netanyahu… We really can’t expect that to happen,” Iraqi says. “It’s going to be stretched out, and there’s going to be a lot of debate.”
But that debate, he adds, is not going to be over whether or not to expand control over Palestine and Lebanon, but rather how and to what degree.
As of now, Palestinians and Palestinian political parties are largely absent from Israel’s election campaigns, although their role in tipping the scales could bring them into the fold.
Meanwhile, “psychopathic naval-gazing,” as Buttu puts it, means that while Israelis are mostly concerned about dominance and security at all costs, they’re not going to come up with any new solutions - other than “hit them harder, faster, more often”. Amelia Hankins is a journalist, editor, and fiction writer based in Beirut whose recent work has been published in L'Orient Today and the Markaz Review Edited by Charlie Hoyle