Gadi Eisenkot: Who is Netanyahu's main rival who could become Israel's new prime minister?

Former military commander Gadi Eisenkot was chosen by Israel's president to try to form a new government after an inconclusive election that did not give any of the most voted parties a clear path to power.

By BBC

Israel's president chose Gadi Eisenkot, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's main rival, to try to form a new government after an inconclusive election that gave neither of the top two candidates a clear path to power.

Isaac Herzog has been holding talks with political parties after neither Eisenkot's bloc nor Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's bloc managed to gain a majority in the Israeli parliament, known as the Knesset, following last week's elections.

Herzog stated that, after consulting with all parties during the week, he would give Eisenkot the first opportunity to form a government.

A statement from the president's office said he had already informed both Eisenkot and Netanyahu of the decision. After consultations with delegations from the new Knesset, Eisenkot received 67 recommendations for the position of prime minister and Netanyahu, 46, according to the statement.

The president has broad freedom to choose who he believes has the best chance of forming a coalition and does not need to choose the leader of the party with the most seats.

Eisenkot will now have 28 days to try to form a new administration, with a possible extension of 14 days.

Gadi Eisenkot, the former head of the Israeli army, represented an unexpected challenge to the man who had led Israel for most of the past three decades.

Eisenkot is a newcomer to politics, having formally entered political life only in 2022, when he became a member of the Knesset for the National Unity party. He later left the party due to what he described as ideological differences.

Since breaking away from leading opposition figures last year to form his own centrist party, Yashar (meaning "upright" or "upright"), Eisenkot has emerged as Netanyahu's main election rival.

The prime minister has been the target of allegations of corruption in recent years — accusations he denies — and criticism of his management of the October 7, 2023 attacks. There is also the issue of controversial reforms to the Judiciary, which have led to huge protests.

But Eisenkot's determination to run in the election against him was also motivated by a personal tragedy.

His son, Master Sergeant Gal Eisenkot, the youngest of his five children, was killed in an explosion in northern Gaza in December 2023, during a mission to recover the remains of two Israeli hostages captured by Hamas on October 7.

Gadi Eisenkot says he has not yet examined his son's belongings given to him in a few boxes, which he keeps at home in Herzliya, a wealthy coastal city north of Tel Aviv.

"I haven't opened them yet. I keep putting it off," the 66-year-old told Israeli public radio Kan Reshet Bet in April.

Gal's death — as well as the loss of two nephews in the Gaza campaign, coupled with his opinion that the Netanyahu government failed to stop Hamas' unprecedented attacks — boosted Eisenkot's political ambitions.

“I can’t go back,” he told The Times of Israel earlier this month. "I will do everything in my power to be worthy of the high price Gal paid."

Holding Netanyahu and his cabinet accountable is on his list of priorities. After the October 7 attacks, Eisenkot joined the prime minister's war cabinet, alongside other opposition figures, in a show of national unity.

He resigned in June 2024 and accused Netanyahu of failing to act more quickly to secure the release of hostages taken by Hamas during the attack.

“Women and children were kidnapped under his watch, and he deliberately did not do what was necessary to rescue them,” he told The Times of Israel — an allegation Netanyahu has repeatedly rejected.

Netanyahu claims Eisenkot opposed major military moves in Gaza during the period he was part of the war cabinet. According to him, Eisenkot's approach would not have weakened Hamas.

"I remember what Gadi Eisenkot said, and what others said, when we were still in Gaza... They said we should just make a deal, release the hostages and get out of Gaza — get out of all of Gaza," Netanyahu said at a press conference in June, as reported by The Times of Israel.

Following this strategy, Netanyahu added, "all of Hamas" and the senior officials killed by Israel during the war "would still be there, alive and in control."

In a recent interview with news website Ynet, Eisenkot rejected Netanyahu's claim and called on the prime minister to release the minutes of the war cabinet's discussions and votes to the public.

Just days before the election, Eisenkot promised to end Hamas rule within 18 months if elected.

Eisenkot's priorities

Nadav Eyal, one of Israel's most prominent journalists and an academic who has followed his political trajectory, says Eisenkot's personal loss filled him "with a sense of purpose and mission."

That mission, Eyal adds, is not just about ensuring that his party, Yashar, gets enough seats in the Knesset to be in a position to form a coalition and remove the current prime minister.

Like Netanyahu, Eisenkot is convinced that any future plans for Gaza must exclude Hamas.

"It's very important to understand that his son was killed by Hamas, in a war started by Hamas," Eyal told the BBC.

The retired general also did not express support for the two-state solution (the recognition of a Palestinian state alongside an Israeli state). In late August, he stated that anyone who still believed in this possibility was "deluded", according to Israeli media reports.

But he declared that he intends to "redefine" Israel's relations with the Palestinian Authority.

"The Palestinian Authority needs to be allowed to govern the 2.8 million Palestinians [in the occupied West Bank]. I don't want to govern them," he said in an interview with The Times of Israel in October.

While Eisenkot supports the expansion of major settlement blocs as long as it is in line with Israeli law and national interests, he has spoken out against controversial plans to increase the presence of Jewish settlers in some areas of the West Bank, most specifically the plan to pursue settlement expansion in an area known as E1, east of Jerusalem.

His reservations appear to be driven by negative reactions from the international community, but more recently he has promised to "remove Jewish terrorists from Judea and Samaria" (Israel's name for the occupied West Bank).

One of his campaign promises is to launch an investigation into the October 7 attacks, which would look into possible failings by the Israeli government.

The country's main media outlets published allegations that Netanyahu had been warned by authorities in the United Arab Emirates and Egypt about a possible attack from Gaza.

The prime minister has denied the allegations and is suing the Israeli newspaper that made the initial accusation; he also consistently rejected a state investigation led by Israel's Supreme Court, arguing that the judiciary would be biased against him.

"This election," says Eisenkot, "is a choice between responsibility and evading responsibility."

In his 10-point program, Eisenkot also promised to launch an emergency plan to deal with the number of highly qualified Israelis leaving the country and encourage the arrival of new immigrants.

He also wants to end military service exemption rules for ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities and Israeli Arabs.

"Another thing we will do is pass a universal service law for all Israeli citizens: military, national or civil service, including national service for Arabs," he told The Times of Israel.

Previous attempts to expand military service, including one proposed by the Netanyahu government, have resulted in protests from ultra-Orthodox communities.

Modest origins

Born in Tiberias and raised in Eilat, two cities far from Israel's main centers of political power, Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, Eisenkot is the son of Moroccan immigrants of modest means who settled in Israel in the 1950s.

Jewish communities in Middle Eastern and North African countries are known as Mizrahi. No Mizrahi has ever been prime minister of Israel, although politicians from that community have tried in the past.

The New Yorker editor David Remnick, who spent time with Eisenkot during the campaign, says he challenges Netanyahu's stance as a defender of those marginalized in Israeli society, such as Mizrahim Jews — which appears to contradict the fact that Netanyahu is a descendant of Eastern European Jewish immigrants and grew up in a wealthy neighborhood in Jerusalem.

According to Israeli media reports, the Mizrahim community, which historically supports Likud, often uses the Moroccan Arabic word "dialina" ("one of us") to describe Eisenkot.

"My parents immigrated from Morocco and I'm proud of them and my origins, but I would be happy, first of all, if we were proud of our Israeli identity," Eisenkot told TV channel Channel 13 earlier this year.

Military life

Eisenkot joined the Israeli Army at age 18 and spent 40 years in the force, rising through the ranks until reaching the position of chief of staff, which he held from 2015 to 2019.

In the 2000s, he was in command of Israeli forces in the West Bank during the Second Intifada, a four-year Palestinian uprising in which nearly 1,000 Israelis and more than 3,000 Palestinians were killed over more than four years.

Eisenkot would later be associated with the "Dahieh Doctrine", which advocates the overwhelming use of military force against civilian infrastructure in areas where Israel believes it is being attacked.

It is also important to note that Eisenkot, for all his criticism of Netanyahu, never spoke out against Israel's military response to the October 7 attacks.

Around 1,200 people were killed in the Hamas-led attack and 251 were taken hostage.

In response, Israel launched a military offensive in Gaza that killed more than 74,200 people, according to the Hamas-controlled Ministry of Health, whose figures are considered reliable by the UN.

"We are obliged to defend ourselves. We must honestly analyze where this all started," Eisenkot told The Times of Israel.

Journalist and broadcaster Mehdi Hasan writes in the British newspaper The Guardian that "Eisenkot is not Netanyahu", but would allow "the same policies of expansion and destruction in both the West Bank and Gaza".

Anshel Pfeffer, Israel correspondent for The Economist and author of a biography of Netanyahu, says Eisenkot is "not a pacifist."

"But he also has the image of a serious man. So far in the campaign, he hasn't made any absurd promises. Furthermore, he doesn't come from an elite family, [which makes] him very difficult to vilify," Pfeffer told the BBC.

Eisenkot's emergence as Netanyahu's direct challenger was somewhat unexpected, he notes.

"Until six months ago, the most likely opponent was [former prime minister] Naftali Bennett. But Eisenkot appears to have won over the electorate at the right time."

Eisenkot is often described as the anti-Netanyahu: a man who is uncomfortable in the spotlight and is not a great political speaker. Eyal believes Eisenkot doesn't even like being a politician.

A horse trading game

Despite doing well in the polls, Eisenkot's party is unlikely to win an absolute majority in the 120-seat Knesset — 61 seats are needed to form a majority government, which historically forces parties to form coalition governments.

But Benjamin Netanyahu is a master in the art of post-election politics: he contested 10 national elections as Likud leader and, on six occasions, managed to form a coalition government. This includes the 2009 election, when his party actually won fewer seats than its main rival.

In recent weeks, Netanyahu's campaign has argued that Eisenkot will need the support of Arab-led parties to form a government.

Arab parties are popular among the more than two million Arab citizens and residents in Israel (who represent about 20% of the country's population), and polls project that the four main Arab parties (Hadash, Ta'al, Balad and Ra'am) could together win 12 to 15 seats in the Knesset.

"Do you want a Jewish state or a Palestinian state?" the prime minister asked Eisenkot in a campaign video.

"Military leaders have enjoyed public support since the founding of the [Israeli] state, due to the high level of trust the Israeli public places in the army."

Repairing the fences

Would a victory in Eisenkot help restore relations between Israel and the international community? Professor Yossi Mekelberg, an Israeli international relations expert at Chatham House, told the BBC yes.

But he warns against expectations of a "sudden change" and says replacing Netanyahu is no guarantee of good will on Israel's part.

"I don't believe that any of the opposition parties, including Eisenkot's, offer a clear alternative [to Netanyahu]."

"If Eisenkot wins, he will need to take decisive action regarding Jewish settlements in the West Bank and improve the situation in Gaza," adds Professor Mekelberg.