The former military chief, whose son was killed fighting in Gaza, is building a powerful challenge around security, national unity and public frustration with Israel’s longest-serving prime minister
Gadi Eisenkot has spent most of his adult life preparing for wars rather than elections. Now the former chief of Israel’s military, a bereaved father whose son was killed fighting in Gaza, has unexpectedly emerged as the politician most capable of ending Benjamin Netanyahu’s long domination of Israeli politics.
With Israel due to hold parliamentary elections on October 27, Eisenkot has become Netanyahu’s principal challenger, transforming what initially appeared to be a fragmented opposition contest into a potentially direct confrontation between two very different visions of leadership. Recent polling has placed Eisenkot’s new centrist party, Yashar, narrowly ahead of Netanyahu’s Likud, while some surveys have also shown the former general leading the prime minister when Israelis are asked who is better suited to run the country.
The contrast between the two men is central to Eisenkot’s appeal. Netanyahu, 76, is Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, an internationally recognised political operator whose career has been defined by ideological battles, coalition manoeuvring and repeated electoral comebacks. Eisenkot, 66, is comparatively new to civilian politics. The son of Moroccan Jewish immigrants and raised in a working-class family, he spent four decades in the Israel Defense Forces and served as chief of staff from 2015 to 2019.
His political rise is inseparable from personal tragedy. Eisenkot’s 25-year-old son, Gal Meir Eisenkot, a combat soldier, was killed in Gaza in December 2023. Two of his nephews were also killed during the war. That loss has given his public persona an emotional weight unusual in Israeli politics, particularly at a moment when thousands of families have been directly affected by years of conflict. His supporters present him as a leader who understands the human cost of military decisions not merely as a commander but as a father.
Eisenkot entered Netanyahu’s emergency war cabinet after the Hamas-led attack of October 7, 2023, joining the government at a moment of national crisis. But the partnership did not last. In 2024, Eisenkot and Benny Gantz withdrew from the cabinet, accusing Netanyahu of failing to develop a credible strategic plan for Gaza and of confusing battlefield achievements with a wider political solution capable of delivering lasting security.
That criticism now lies at the heart of Eisenkot’s electoral message. He argues that Israel needs to rebuild its national institutions, restore public confidence and address the political and social divisions that have deepened since October 7. His Yashar party has promoted a platform focused on security, democratic governance, education and healthcare, as well as the creation of a state commission of inquiry into the failures that preceded the Hamas attack.
One particularly potent issue is military service. Eisenkot has promoted a principle of “Service for All,” challenging the longstanding exemptions enjoyed by many ultra-Orthodox Jewish men. After years in which reservists and their families have carried an increasingly heavy wartime burden, the dispute has become one of the most politically explosive questions confronting Netanyahu’s coalition. Likud itself is divided between voters seeking a more moderate course and party members who favour maintaining alliances with hard-right and ultra-Orthodox factions.
Yet Eisenkot should not be mistaken for a conventional peace-camp candidate. His political profile remains firmly rooted in Israel’s security establishment, and on many military questions he is considerably more hawkish than foreign observers might assume from his centrist positioning.
As a senior commander, Eisenkot became associated with the so-called “Dahiya Doctrine,” a military concept developed after Israel’s 2006 war with Hezbollah that envisaged overwhelming force against areas used by armed adversaries for military operations. He has also dismissed renewed discussion of an immediate Palestinian state as unrealistic following October 7 and supports Jewish settlement in parts of the occupied West Bank where he believes it serves Israeli interests.
The election is therefore unlikely to offer Israelis a simple choice between military confrontation and accommodation. Rather, the emerging argument concerns how Israeli power should be exercised, whether the country’s wars have been strategically managed, and whether Netanyahu’s political model remains viable after years of conflict and internal upheaval.
For Eisenkot, the case against Netanyahu is built around competence and responsibility. He argues that the failures surrounding October 7 require institutional accountability and that Israel’s military successes cannot substitute for a coherent long-term strategy. His campaign also emphasises repairing relations between competing sections of Israeli society and reversing what he describes as the country’s growing international isolation.
Netanyahu is already responding aggressively. He has portrayed Eisenkot as overly cautious in wartime and argued that military operations opposed or questioned by the former general were essential to weakening Hamas. Netanyahu’s campaign is expected to present the election as a choice between experienced wartime leadership and an opposition whose ability to assemble a stable governing coalition remains uncertain.
That coalition arithmetic could ultimately determine the outcome. Israel’s 120-seat Knesset is elected through proportional representation, making outright majorities extremely rare. Even if Yashar finishes ahead of Likud, Eisenkot would still need enough allies to command at least 61 seats and form a government. Netanyahu, one of the most experienced coalition builders in Israeli history, could potentially remain in power even without finishing first if his bloc proves more cohesive.
The opposition itself remains crowded. Former prime ministers Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid, as well as former defence minister Avigdor Lieberman and several smaller parties, are competing for overlapping pools of anti-Netanyahu voters. Any serious challenge will therefore depend not only on popularity but on whether rival leaders can cooperate after the ballots are counted.
For now, however, Eisenkot possesses something Netanyahu’s previous challengers have often struggled to achieve: credibility among voters beyond the traditional centre-left. His Moroccan background may help him appeal to Mizrahi Israelis who have historically formed an important part of Likud’s electorate, while his military record gives him considerable authority on national-security issues. Analysts have described him as less polarising and less overtly political than Netanyahu, a quality that could prove valuable in a country exhausted by years of conflict and internal division.
A recent Channel 12 poll gave Yashar 23 seats against 22 for Likud and found 43% of respondents considering Eisenkot the most suitable candidate for prime minister, compared with 34% for Netanyahu. Such figures remain only snapshots in a volatile campaign, but they illustrate why Eisenkot is increasingly being treated not merely as another opposition leader but as a plausible prime minister.
The October 27 election is consequently shaping up as much more than another test of Netanyahu’s remarkable political survival. It will also be Israel’s first national ballot since the trauma of October 7 and the subsequent wars in Gaza, Lebanon and Iran, making it an implicit judgment on the government’s management of the most turbulent period in the country’s recent history.
Eisenkot’s appeal rests on the belief that a soldier who spent much of his life defending the state might now be able to repair its political fractures. Whether that is enough to overcome Netanyahu’s formidable electoral machine and the complexities of Israeli coalition politics will only become clear in October. But for the first time in this campaign, Netanyahu appears to be confronting a challenger capable of competing with him on the terrain he has long considered his own: security, leadership and the meaning of national strength.
