How Netanyahu’s Top General Became His Strongest Challenger
It’s a warm, buggy night in Kfar HaNagid, a coastal village named for Shmuel HaNagid, the eminent poet, scholar, warrior, and statesman of medieval al-Andalus. A mature crowd of several hundred has gathered on the village green. They sit restively in white plastic chairs, awaiting the arrival of Gadi Eisenkot, a retired chief of the Israel Defense Forces who currently appears to have the best chance of unseating Benjamin Netanyahu, the longest-serving Prime Minister in the history of the state. The elections are scheduled for October 27th. Eisenkot is running late.
Israeli pop songs blare over the loudspeakers, and the air is thick with political talk. The sources of alarm seem inexhaustible: the fighting up north in Lebanon; the Trump Administration’s turn from frenetic negotiations with the newly emboldened regime in Tehran to a prolonged bombing campaign; Netanyahu’s deals of convenience with the ultra-Orthodox, a crucial component of his voting bloc; the deepening hostility toward Israel across the ideological spectrum and all over the world. What is far more rarely discussed, in Kfar HaNagid and elsewhere, is the colossal human suffering and devastation in the Gaza Strip and the mayhem committed daily against Palestinians by settlers in villages throughout the West Bank.
Finally, Eisenkot arrives. He is sixty-six, a man of broad belly and pained expression. When he smiles, he winces as if from a twinge of sciatica. He is dressed in a dark polo shirt, his post-military uniform. Eisenkot’s parents were Moroccan immigrants of modest means. He was born in Tiberias and grew up in Eilat, two cities considered to be on the Israeli periphery. Were Eisenkot to win, he would be the first Prime Minister with such a background.
This presents a problem for Netanyahu. Despite growing up in an affluent neighborhood in Jerusalem, and being the Ashkenazi son of a prominent historian of the Spanish Inquisition, Netanyahu has long positioned himself, and his Likud Party, as the security-minded champion of the working class, the pious, the voiceless, and the Mizrahim, who came to Israel from Jewish communities in predominantly Muslim countries. Most analysts here believe that, in a close election, Eisenkot can prevail if he attracts at least some “soft right” voters in provincial cities like Kiryat Shmona, Ofakim, Ashdod, Nahariya, and Dimona. In many traditional Likud strongholds, the journalist Hilo Glazer wrote in Haaretz, Eisenkot is described by his supporters as dialina, Moroccan Arabic for “one of us.”
The crowd applauds lightly as Eisenkot mounts a small makeshift stage. He has spent much of the day in the city of Ashkelon, he explains, where he attended the funeral of a young Army captain named David Hazutt, who was killed in battle “around dawn” in Lebanon.
“I didn’t know him personally, but the family asked me to attend,” Eisenkot says. His cadence is measured, his tone solemn. “He’d lost his father and was his mother’s only son, with one sister. His mother had agreed to sign the consent form allowing him to serve in a combat role, because he had insisted. He volunteered for a combat unit in the Golani Brigade.” As everyone at the gathering knows, this was Eisenkot’s outfit, too, and a populist signifier in Israel, the “people’s brigade.”
Over the next hour, Eisenkot delivers his speech and answers questions. Routine stuff. He has neither Netanyahu’s practiced eloquence nor his fluency in English, and he has little in common with the firebrands of an earlier era, such as Menachem Begin. He is just short of dull and makes a virtue of it. Last year, he founded a party called Yashar—the name meaning straight, upright, just. At the lectern, he briskly ticks through his themes and campaign promises, among them a pledge to restore Israel as a “Jewish, democratic, progressive, and liberal state.” This sort of phrase is rarely heard from Netanyahu, much less from two of his most racist and reactionary ministers: Itamar Ben-Gvir, the minister of national security, and Bezalel Smotrich, the minister of finance. Both are unapologetic in their support for the ethnic cleansing of Gaza and the annexation of the West Bank.
Eisenkot is selling himself as the humble soldier, a political novice untainted by corruption or duplicity. After forty-one years in the Israel Defense Forces, including a stint under Netanyahu as chief of the general staff, the military’s highest post, Eisenkot served in the Knesset from 2022 to 2025. During that brief tenure, he says, he discovered that “Israeli democracy is far more fragile than I had imagined.”
Since the collapse of the Oslo peace process and the outbreak of the second intifada, a generation ago, popular opinion has moved steadily rightward. By contemporary Israeli standards, Eisenkot can plausibly be described as a small-“d” democrat of the center-left. At the urging of his consultants, and in response to the political realities of post-October 7th Israel, he is tacking further toward the center. He seldom voices reservations about the scale and prosecution of the war in Gaza. He recently called New York’s mayor, Zohran Mamdani, antisemitic for asking the federal government to arrest Netanyahu under an International Criminal Court warrant. Eisenkot also avoids the language of a two-state solution, at least as an impending possibility. In June, he told an interviewer for Channel 12’s “Meet the Press,” “I have never said two states for two peoples, because I understand the depth of this religious-national-social conflict, and anyone who talks about ‘peace now’ and two states doesn’t understand the conflict.”
As I followed Eisenkot’s campaign and spoke with him at length, it became clear that the most adhesive aspect of his appeal had little to do with ideology or policy. If he wins (and that, despite recent surges in the polls, is far from assured, considering Netanyahu’s political skills), it will be because he is, in manner and character, the anti-Bibi. What’s more, he reflects back to many Israelis something of themselves. Eisenkot is a broken man. He has suffered profound loss. In no small measure, he is a politician whose deepest connection to Israeli voters is his grief.
Shortly after six-thirty in the morning on October 7, 2023, Eisenkot was at home in Herzliya, north of Tel Aviv, when news reports started arriving from southern Israel. Thousands of Hamas militants, led by the élite Nukhba forces, had just broken through the Gaza fence at more than a hundred points. They entered Israel by land on motorcycles and in pickup trucks, by sea in motorboats, and by air on motorized paragliders. With astonishing speed, they infiltrated some twenty kibbutzim and the small city of Sderot. A killing spree began. There were soon reports on radio and television of families locking themselves in their safe rooms, begging by phone for help. For hours, little came.
As Eisenkot absorbed those first reports, he called out to one of his five children, his twenty-five-year-old son, Gal.
“Gal, wake up,” he said. “It’s war.”
“What are you talking about?” Gal said.
“It’s war,” Eisenkot said again.
Gal, who was studying bioinformatics at Tel Aviv University, was home for the weekend. “His idea, his dream, was to be either a doctor or a scientist,” Eisenkot told me.
He drove Gal to his apartment in Tel Aviv to collect his uniform and gear and then took him to a rendezvous point where he joined his fellow-reservists. Gal had been trained as a combat medic.
Four days later, with a ground invasion of Gaza imminent and an attack on Hezbollah in Lebanon under consideration, Netanyahu asked Eisenkot to become part of a small war cabinet. Eisenkot had served under Netanyahu as chief of the general staff from February, 2015, to January, 2019, but was now a political opponent. Netanyahu hoped to present a united front to a deeply divided public, much of which had come to loathe and distrust him. After months of mass demonstrations against his effort to curtail the power of the judiciary, he urgently needed support for the coming war. Before the Hamas attack, many reservists, including pilots in Air Force units, had threatened to refuse service in protest of the danger they believed Netanyahu posed to Israeli democratic institutions.
“I joined the war cabinet, even though I never in my life thought I would be at the same table with Ben-Gvir and Smotrich,” Eisenkot told me. “The first meeting”—on October 11th—“was very dramatic. Bibi called me to sit at a meeting at five in the evening. When I walked into the room, I didn’t know what it would be about. This was the first time Bibi realized what it is to lose your balance. It was very strange. At first, I didn’t know what we were doing. Then I realized that they had called me in to talk about a targeted killing of Hassan Nasrallah,” the leader of Hezbollah. “I didn’t know that Netanyahu had just gotten off a call with Biden, and Biden had told him, ‘Do not.’ There was a presentation, and it was said that the attack would be at 7 P.M. After the chief of the general staff stopped speaking, Netanyahu turned to the war cabinet and said, ‘What are your thoughts?’ ”
Israeli intelligence later obtained documents indicating that Yahya Sinwar, the leader of Hamas in Gaza, and other Hamas leaders had discussed for several years with Nasrallah and the Iranian regime a multifront “plan of annihilation” against Israel. Sinwar launched the assault without advance warning to his allies, then sent messages to Beirut and Tehran apologizing for taking them by surprise and imploring them to join the fight immediately. Hezbollah’s élite Radwan force and its immense arsenal of rockets were positioned in southern Lebanon, near the border, but Nasrallah declined to rush into a war of such consequence. He sanctioned only a limited, symbolic attack in support of Hamas.
In the war cabinet, Eisenkot argued against opening a second front. “I said we had to be focussed on the south,” he recalled. “We needed to have stability there. And only after we deal with Hamas in the south should we turn northward.” He continued, “The meeting finished at six, and we went to an underground bunker. When I arrived, someone told me that only a brigadier general”—Amit Saar, the head of the Military Intelligence Research Department—“really had his head on straight. Everyone else had lost their minds. The chief of the general staff said, ‘We have to finish up this conversation, because I have only twenty minutes before I send the planes into the air.’ So I asked that this brigadier general get up and present to the room. Saar said he thought it would be a big mistake. After his presentation, three other people in the cabinet agreed with him.” In the end, Eisenkot’s argument won out. With the planes in the air, Netanyahu called off the strike.
“We prevented a very wrong decision, because, according to the Washington Post, if we were to attack in Lebanon then, we would have realized Sinwar’s strategic vision to bring about an immediate regional war,” Eisenkot said. “Hamas, which caused us the greatest damage in our history, would have become a secondary front.”
The meeting ended around midnight. As Eisenkot left for home, he saw that he had several messages on his phone from Gal.
He called his son back. “Gal, what’s going on?” he asked.
Years earlier, when Eisenkot had polled his family about getting into politics, Gal had told him that four decades in the Army was enough service. He should enjoy his life. But now Gal said, “I understand why it’s important for you to be involved in politics.”
“I was still exhausted from the meeting,” Eisenkot told me. “I said, ‘I think I just did something very important for the war, and I will tell you about it later.’ ”
In the weeks that followed, Eisenkot participated in fierce debates over the conduct of the war. He pressed for rapid agreements to free as many hostages as possible. The hostages were scattered across Gaza, many of them deep in the network of tunnels beneath the Strip. Israeli intelligence didn’t see a prospect of rescuing them in large numbers. There would be no Entebbe-style miracle. Eisenkot argued that the only way to bring them home was to make their release the national priority and keep negotiating with Sinwar. Smotrich, Ben-Gvir, and senior military officials put the annihilation of Hamas first, no matter the cost to civilians. As casualties and destruction mounted, Netanyahu invoked an open-ended doctrine that he would soon call “total victory.” Intelligence reports indicated that the hostages were being abused, yet Netanyahu and his ministers showed little sympathy for their families, who were pleading for action to free them. Eisenkot, having lost the argument, eventually left the war cabinet. He could no longer act as a “fig leaf,” he says, for a Prime Minister whose main concern was to preserve his coalition with Ben-Gvir and Smotrich, and his own political power.
On a Thursday in late November, Gal came home for a break from reserve duty. For nearly a week, a hostage deal had paused the fighting and brought the release of dozens of captives. The pause ended the next morning. That evening, Gal had Shabbat dinner with his parents. Early on Saturday, Eisenkot drove him to Tel Aviv, where he could catch a bus to his assembly point. They rode mostly in silence. Gal had been up until 4:30 A.M. with his friends. When he and his father finally got to Tel Aviv, they hugged and said their see-you-soons.
One morning in the first week of December, Eisenkot visited a base on the Gaza border for a briefing on explosives confiscated in the Strip. At division headquarters, a general abruptly pulled him from the room and said that Gal had been “very badly wounded.” Eisenkot should return home immediately. Eisenkot had delivered such messages many times before. “Give me credit,” he told the general. He understood that his son was dead.
“At that moment,” he recalled, “I switched to autopilot.” In a kind of trance, he got in his car and headed north toward Herzliya. As he drove, he called his eldest son, Guy, and said, “Gal has been killed. Go home and make sure no one enters the house until I get there.”
Sometime after three, Eisenkot arrived home. His wife, Hanna, was putting their granddaughter down for a nap. His three daughters were there as well. He told them what he’d learned about what happened. Intelligence officers had discovered that the remains of two fallen Israelis—a soldier named Ziv Dado and a young woman named Eden Zakaria, who had been at the Nova music festival—were being held by Hamas on the outskirts of Jabalia, in the northern Gaza Strip. Gal and another soldier, Eyal Berkowitz, had joined an effort to find and extract the two bodies. During the operation, Gal and “Berko” were killed by an I.E.D. The extraction was successful, but was it worth it? “My wife asked me a lot of difficult questions about the mission,” Eisenkot told me. “Was it right to endanger soldiers to retrieve dead hostages? She’s asked me that many times.”
Thousands of people crowded into the military cemetery in Herzliya for Gal’s funeral. Netanyahu and much of Israel’s political and security establishment were there. Eisenkot told me that he had not cried in fifty years, but, as he stood before his son’s flag-draped coffin and spoke to the assembled, he was at times unable to continue.
“Galush, our beloved,” he said, “I promise you that we will continue to be a united and happy family, so that your sacrifice and that of the other fallen will not be in vain and that we will be worthy of it. I salute you, beloved son.” Then Eisenkot, wearing dark glasses, his voice cracking, addressed the mourners: “The pain is great. It is huge. But we are a happy, strong family, and, if Gal could tell me one more thing, he would say, ‘Choose life—keep being happy.’ He lives with us in our hearts. He was like that in life. And he will remain that way for us forever.”
Not long afterward, the television journalist Ilana Dayan interviewed Eisenkot on Channel 12 and asked him how he and the family were enduring their loss.
“The mornings and nights became harder,” he said, “but as far as I am concerned, at least, there is no alternative, because I know the alternative is bad for me personally and bad for the family. Before bed, and when I get up, it is with me. But I truly hope that I’ll learn to live with it. I must. The alternative is an abyss.”
Loss followed loss: two of Eisenkot’s nephews were also killed in battle, one in Khan Younis, the other in Beit Lahia. For a long time, Eisenkot was in mourning, drained, deferring all political decisions. Then he left the National Unity party in July, 2025, founded Yashar two months later, and, on June 30, 2026, formally declared his intention of succeeding Netanyahu as Prime Minister.
In the immediate aftermath of the Hamas attack on October 7th, two propositions were treated as nearly axiomatic in Israeli public discourse.
The first was that Netanyahu could not possibly survive as Prime Minister. He had, after all, presided over the worst breakdown of national security in the country’s history. Netanyahu, who had fashioned himself as an Israeli Churchill, had concentrated on Iran while waging a distinctly Trumpian culture war against enemies real and imagined: the media, cultural élites, and supposed deep-state antagonists in the courts and the military. He considered Hamas—especially compared with Hezbollah, in Lebanon, or the regime in Tehran—to be a ragtag force, gangsters and fanatics with AK-47s who could be contained through infusions of Qatari cash, sophisticated electronic surveillance, and periodic rounds of limited warfare, a strategy known as “mowing the grass.” Within a week of the massacre, polls indicated that Netanyahu, who had offered no gesture of contrition, was almost certain to lose power. His likely successor was Benny Gantz, a former general and leader of the I.D.F. who was so tall, so silver-haired and taciturn, that Donald Trump would surely have regarded him as “straight out of central casting.”
Netanyahu faced fury in the streets and within the government. Yair Lapid, who heads Yesh Atid, a center-left opposition party, and who for six months served as Prime Minister, in 2022, recalled for me a speech that he delivered in Netanyahu’s presence in the Knesset after the attack. “Mr. Prime Minister, the amazing thing is that you still don’t understand,” Lapid said, his voice full of contempt. “Nothing will be left of you. There will be no museum in your name, no square. There will not even be a Benjamin Netanyahu Fountain. There will be only one thing: October 7th. . . . Your time is up. Your extremist and reckless government is collapsing. Under your feet, the ground is burning.”
Yet Netanyahu continued to prosecute the war, while refusing to acknowledge his role in its origins. Support for Gantz, who lacked both a message and a vivid public presence, ebbed. And so the Prime Minister, despite his diminished standing and Eisenkot’s ascendance of late, could well be reëlected this fall. His methods will be familiar to Americans. He survives by sheer demagoguery and by catering to an implacable, MAGA-like base, indulging extremist ministers in their pursuit of annexation and ethnic cleansing, and acceding to ultra-Orthodox demands for exemption from military service and ongoing access to enormous state subsidies.
Netanyahu’s opponents believe that this survival strategy has finally become untenable. “Bibi thinks he can keep riding the tiger,” Lapid told me. “He thinks he can ride the tiger of Jewish extremism—but it rides him. He thinks he can ride the tiger of religious power—but religious power rides him.”
Even so, anxiety runs through the opposition. Ehud Olmert, who served as Prime Minister from 2006 to 2009, told me that many of Netanyahu’s opponents fear he might take a page from Trump’s book and attempt to discredit the election results. “The police here are not governed normally,” Olmert said. Ben-Gvir, as minister of national security, oversees the police. “How will they enforce the elections if Bibi loses?” Olmert went on. “He might try not to recognize the ballot, like his friend Trump did on the sixth of January.”
Should Netanyahu prevail, Eisenkot, Olmert, Lapid, and many others I spoke with expect that Israel’s isolation will deepen, and that many of its most talented and productive citizens, especially those with second passports, will consider their options. “If Bibi wins the elections, I presume that a hundred thousand people, from twenty-five to forty—high-tech people, academics with kids—will leave the country rapidly,” Olmert said.
“I think Israel has lost its mind, like the U.S. after 9/11,” Assaf Sharon, a professor of philosophy at Tel Aviv University and a pro-democracy activist, told me. “For the first time in my life, I am no longer confident that the country will survive. I always hated this alarmism. But Israel has cornered itself into a position in which there is a tangible threat to the survival of the state.”
That fear was recently voiced by a veteran of America’s Democratic Party establishment. In early July, Rahm Emanuel, a former top adviser to both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, came to Tel Aviv University to denounce Netanyahu for leading his country into a disastrous cul-de-sac of “occupation and isolation.” He warned that Israel wasn’t just losing the Democratic Party; it was in danger of losing the United States. “The pursuit of a so-called Greater Israel is as self-destructive and fanatical as the chant ‘from the river to the sea,’ ” Emanuel said. “Your government has been complicit in the horrors now being inflicted on innocent families in the West Bank. That undermines your international legitimacy as a small nation, at a time when you can least afford it.” The medicine was particularly harsh because it came from someone who could hardly be dismissed as a radical or an antisemite. Emanuel’s father served in the 1948 War of Independence. His middle name is Israel.
The second premise of those early post-October 7th days was that Netanyahu would be compelled, by conscience and tradition, to establish an official commission of inquiry into the origins of the catastrophic security failure. It would be modelled on the commission chaired by Shimon Agranat, the chief justice of the Israeli Supreme Court, after the surprise invasion by Egypt and Syria on Yom Kippur, in October, 1973. The Agranat Commission identified the missed clues and the ignored warnings, thereby exposing the carelessness of the security establishment. The country had looked into the void. Had Israeli tank forces not rallied after days of terrible losses in the Sinai and the Golan Heights, the Egyptian and Syrian Armies might well have overrun central Israel. The report prompted the resignations of numerous senior security and intelligence officials and helped end Golda Meir’s political career.
Netanyahu, however, will never accept responsibility in this way. A succession of senior military and intelligence officials have resigned, issuing statements of profound regret for their failures before and on October 7th. Netanyahu, the head of the government they served, has refused to do the same. He airily observes that Franklin Roosevelt did not resign after Pearl Harbor, and that George W. Bush did not step down after 9/11. They focussed on the wars before them. Netanyahu’s non-apologies are exercises in deflection.
Netanyahu has publicly distanced himself from rampant talk of “traitors from within,” but he has done little to curb its spread in his political camp and beyond. This cluster of conspiracy theories holds that senior military and intelligence officers deliberately failed to wake him in time to prevent the Hamas invasion. According to a survey conducted by Reichman University, as many as half of those who voted for Netanyahu’s coalition in 2022 have come to believe in such deep-state theories. The purveyors of these theories include commentators on the Netanyahu-friendly Channel 14 and Netanyahu’s son Yair, a podcaster and social-media bomb-thrower who combines the blood loyalty of Donald Trump, Jr., with the shitposting energy of Laura Loomer. Tally Gotliv, a Likud member of the Knesset, has claimed, falsely, that American intelligence intercepted a telephone call between the partner of Shikma Bressler, a left-leaning protest leader, and Sinwar, the Hamas leader who planned the attack.
“It’s much more pervasive than 9/11 conspiracy theories in the U.S., and it’s not hard to figure out why,” the journalist Amos Harel told me. “It’s hard to explain to yourself what happened if you believe that Bibi is God. How did it all collapse so completely? Someone needs to be blamed.”
Although Netanyahu has given lip service to the idea that the security failures should be investigated, few Israelis expect him to establish an independent state commission of inquiry. In the absence of one, Harel, a longtime defense analyst for Haaretz, has done much of the preliminary work himself. His recent best-seller, “06:29: Anatomy of a Failure,” is a four-hundred-page indictment of arrogance, neglect, and institutional complacency. He lacks the subpoena power of an official commission, but his extensive sources in the national-security establishment enabled him to reconstruct how warnings were repeatedly ignored, and how a governing assumption, a conceptzia, had taken hold that utterly misread the situation in Gaza.
Harel describes how junior officers, including female ground observers stationed near Gaza, detected signs of a major attack well before the fence was breached, only to have their reports discounted by their superiors. Intelligence officers also noticed that Hamas had activated Israeli SIM cards in the hours before the invasion. But senior officers concluded that Hamas was conducting an exercise or, at most, preparing a limited attack.
Harel also reconstructs consultations among senior military and intelligence officials through the night of the sixth and the seventh, after signs of unusual activity appeared inside Gaza. Ronen Bar, the head of Shin Bet, the nation’s internal-security service, and Herzi Halevi, the chief of the general staff, both received late-night calls. The reports were alarming enough that Halevi wrote himself a note: “Let’s not convince ourselves that this is nothing.” At around 5:49 A.M., Israeli surveillance systems detected men on motorcycles and in jeeps near the security barrier. Still, no effective measures were taken.
“When I read transcripts of what happened before the attack, I feel like banging my head against the wall,” Harel told me.
Eisenkot and the other opposition leaders—including Lapid, the center-right former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, and Yair Golan, of the left-leaning Democrats—agree that one of the first acts of a new coalition government should be the establishment of a state commission of inquiry into October 7th. Netanyahu’s claim that his intelligence chiefs merely failed to wake him would be unlikely to carry much weight with its investigators.
“In the chain of command, not knowing does not excuse responsibility. Quite the opposite, it adds to it,” Eisenkot said. “The Prime Minister is first in line, he gets his updates from military intelligence and the I.D.F., and he was involved. . . . Therefore, the responsibility was given to him when he took the oath of office on the Bible. He bears a sharp and clear responsibility. You don’t have to take responsibility. It’s there.”
Eisenkot’s insistence on command responsibility has a conspicuous limit. He remains reluctant to condemn Netanyahu in any detail for the extraordinary severity and duration of the war in Gaza. “When the war began, it caused Israelis for the first time to begin speaking in terms of the Shoah,” he said. “People started to say, ‘Hamas are Nazis.’ There was the conviction that there had been a massacre, rape, horrible things, and this was the knowledge that everyone went into war with. And therefore people like Gal were willing to pay with everything, including with their lives, so that there could continue to be a state. . . . But there is no denying it—after October 7th and the beginning of the war, the Israeli mind-set moved rightward. I stayed in the same place. But I understood that, if Israel didn’t strike with a heavy hand at first and show power, then we have no future here.”
This was my fifth trip to Israel since October, 2023. When I had last visited, the previous June, Netanyahu and his supporters were arguing that Hamas was being soundly defeated and that Israel had used its military power to remake the region. Without irony, they spoke of a “new Middle East,” a phrase that Shimon Peres, a former Prime Minister, had once used to describe a peaceful future in which Israel would at last live in political and economic harmony with its neighbors, including a nascent Palestinian state.
When the two men were political rivals, Netanyahu ridiculed Peres as hopelessly out of touch with the cruel realities of the region. Now, in the summer of 2025, Netanyahu and his camp envisioned a different sort of “new Middle East,” one in which Israel had rebounded from catastrophe, shattered Hezbollah, and, with American B-2 bombers dispatched by Trump, destroyed the Iranian nuclear project, which the President declared “obliterated.” They predicted a popular uprising in Iran and the imminent collapse of the Islamic theocracy. Stability would surely come to Lebanon and Syria, and the Abraham Accords would expand to include more Sunni nations, among them Saudi Arabia. Michael Oren, who had served as Netanyahu’s Ambassador to Washington, told me at the time, “There’s a very good chance that you won’t be able to understand the twenty-first century without understanding the Twelve-Day War.”
Entirely absent from this euphoric, triumphalist, end-of-history vision was any acknowledgment of the deaths of at least seventy thousand Palestinians, including more than twenty thousand children; the complete destruction of the vast majority of housing, schools, and hospitals throughout the Gaza Strip; and the many other acts committed there that constitute war crimes. Nor did it anticipate that Netanyahu and Trump would embark on a reckless new war. By the time I returned, months of Israeli bombardment had killed thousands of people in Lebanon and driven some 1.2 million people from their homes. A year after the Twelve-Day War, Oren allowed, “That was the glass-half-full version of things.”
Eisenkot, for his part, regards Netanyahu’s declaration of victory in Iran as ludicrous. After watching Netanyahu make the claim one night on Channel 14, he called one of his advisers and said, “Does Bibi really think everyone here is stupid?”
Danny Citrinowicz, who spent twenty-five years in military command positions, including as head of the Iran branch of military intelligence, was sharper still. “Israel, in its wounded rage after October 7th, lost its strategic mind,” he told me. The joint Trump-Netanyahu military campaign ended in “an absolute disaster,” he said. The bombing on the first day killed the aging Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who was succeeded by his even more hard-line son, Mojtaba, and left the leadership of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps more radicalized and empowered than ever. The hope that bombing might inspire a rapid popular uprising was “preposterous from the start.”
In the end, Citrinowicz told me, “we ended up giving even greater legitimacy to the Iranian regime and strengthening them.” The Gulf states, which had been drawing closer to Israel and the United States, would now seek an accommodation with Iran. Trump had imagined that he could replicate the ease of the American operation in Venezuela. Instead, he launched an air campaign against a country of more than ninety million people and found himself in a quagmire that was fracturing the MAGA coalition and threatening the global economy. Netanyahu, who had sold the plan to Trump after failing to do so with American Presidents going back to George W. Bush, now faced an Iranian leadership with a stronger motive to acquire a nuclear weapon. And U.S. support for Israel had cratered across the political spectrum, a development that most Israelis had yet to grasp fully.
“Most Israelis cannot bear to hear Israeli policy criticized abroad, and so many of them turn around and assume it is antisemitism,” Citrinowicz told me. “Antisemitism exists, but you can’t be so defensive to think that any and all criticism comes from that place.”
Yet most Israelis, despite their generally favorable view of Trump, believe that the American President ended the campaign too soon and failed them. “The bottom line was a lack of American will,” Oren insisted.
Amit Segal, a conservative commentator for Channel 12 and Israel Hayom, told me that Netanyahu regards renewed conflict with Iran as politically advantageous. “For Trump, ending the war with Iran is a crucial condition for the midterms,” Segal told me. “For Netanyahu, ending the war is the obstacle to winning the 2026 election. From a political perspective, this is why there is a divide between them.”
When it became clear that Eisenkot would be a leading candidate for Prime Minister, the producers of “Uvda,” Channel 12’s investigative-news program, made an hour-long documentary about the early stages of his campaign. It was a traditional fly-on-the-wall piece, though, in this case, the fly generally buzzed around Eisenkot’s car as he was ferried from one campaign stop to another. He sat in the front passenger seat, displaying a kind of wry detachment from the patter and questions directed at him. Eisenkot does not hesitate to describe himself as fat, and he cheerfully admitted to his fellow-passengers that he had recently lost a few kilos through a combination of diet, exercise, and “the shot.”
“All of his rivals may be slicker than him,” the narrator intoned early on, but Eisenkot “has a stronger story.” The story, of course, was that of the honest military man and the grieving father.
The question posed by the documentary, and daily in the Israeli press, is whether Eisenkot has what it takes to defeat Netanyahu. In a typical scene, Eisenkot visited the Tel Aviv apartment of Ronni and Shelly Zehavi, a prosperous couple who made their money in tech, and met with their equally prosperous friends. As he girded himself for a polite assault from these potential donors, the narrator said that the “elephant in the room” needed to be addressed. The country, Eisenkot allowed, had grown accustomed to a cunning politician “who knows how to deliver a message, talk, and connect.” If Netanyahu were to win, one guest warned, “half the kids of the people in this room won’t be here in twenty years.” They worried that Eisenkot, for all his years in the military, was “too polite.” (Israelis do not, in the main, value politesse.) One potential donor told him to “wake up” and “stop fumbling.”
At a humbler gathering of predominantly Moroccan Jews, the message was much the same. “The gloves have to come off,” one woman told him. “This is the moment.”
In another scene, filmed at campaign headquarters, Eisenkot and his advisers were being tutored by Steve Miller, a protégé of the late Arthur Finkelstein, an American political consultant who worked closely with Netanyahu. In the 1996 campaign, Finkelstein supplied Netanyahu with the hot-button slogans “Peres will divide Jerusalem” and “Bibi is good for the Jews.” They exemplified his method of turning political disagreement into a stark choice between security and betrayal. Miller lectured Eisenkot and his advisers on the art of political positioning. Using a left-to-right axis, he made clear that Eisenkot would be wise to edge rightward to win voters on the center-right.
“What defines right and left—the Palestinians?” Eisenkot asked. Such questions, though, were anathema in mainstream political conversations after October 7th. Even Yair Golan, who would occupy the left flank of any opposition coalition led by Eisenkot, told me that although he was prepared to speak of two states as an eventual goal, the other opposition leaders were far more circumspect. Ultimately, Golan said, the choice facing Israelis is “annexation or separation.” That is no secret to anyone.
Recent months had brought intense jockeying within the opposition. The former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, seeking to return to the office, had hoped to lead a broad alliance that included Golan, Lapid, Eisenkot, and Avigdor Lieberman, a hawk with strong support among immigrants from the former Soviet Union. Bennett had once led the Yesha Council, the settlers’ umbrella organization, and later served as Netanyahu’s minister of the economy. His party rose for a time in the polls, but Eisenkot was cool to the idea of accepting a subordinate role, and when Bennett and Lapid formed an alliance in April, under the name Beyachad, or Together, they gave him a last chance to join. He refused. His calculation was easy to discern: Why Bennett and not him?
The polls soon exposed Bennett’s vulnerability. His alliance with Lapid cost him support on the right, while his hold on centrist voters had never been secure. (It was through the vagaries of coalition politics that Bennett had managed to become Prime Minister, in 2021, despite the fact that his party commanded just seven of the Knesset’s hundred and twenty seats.)
People in Bennett’s campaign were eager to warn me that, with Eisenkot as the opposition’s leading figure, the election could become a “rerun” of previous challenges to Netanyahu led by center-left politicians: Gantz, Lapid, Tzipi Livni, and Isaac Herzog. “Gadi has a high sympathy rate, he lost his son, he’s a likable guy,” a campaign source said. “They think that will do the job.” Bennett himself emphasized his own right-wing credentials on security. “If we want to win, we have to unite,” he told me. “We have to learn from the mistakes of previous elections and get into a room and decide things until the smoke comes out. It’s still early.”
Eisenkot agreed about the need for unity, but he smiled and made clear that, in his mind, the leadership question had already been settled. He was even predicting what Netanyahu would do after losing. “I believe he’ll take his package, like Viktor Orbán did,” he told me. “I don’t think he will stay in the opposition. I think he will retire.”
Others were less certain. A source close to the Prime Minister described Israeli coalition politics to me as a “circus.” Eisenkot could emerge from the election as the opposition’s dominant figure and still fail to assemble a government. “And then, who knows?”
If Netanyahu did leave the scene, Eisenkot said, Israel would at least have a chance to ease its polarization and repair its standing abroad. This was the core of his immediate ambition. “We have an opportunity now to build a real Jewish state,” he said. “We’ll have the ability to correct the terrible division created during Netanyahu’s reign and bring Israel back to the values of David Ben-Gurion,” a founder of the nation and its first Prime Minister.
Eisenkot’s campaign headquarters occupies the second floor of a high-rise in Ramat HaSharon, north of Tel Aviv. His campaign manager, Ronen Manelis, is an astute former military-intelligence officer of Russian descent who first served under him during the second intifada near Nablus and later at the Kirya, the military complex in Tel Aviv. A brigadier general, Manelis was also the spokesman for the I.D.F. from 2017 to 2019. He is unabashed about selling a visitor on his candidate.
“Gadi has the gravitas to do this step-by-step work,” Manelis told me on my first visit to Ramat HaSharon. “He is one of the cleverest people in Israel. He is shrewd, more of a politician than people think. He is lovable. People come up and kiss him. A cabdriver tells me he is kadosh, holy, like a god. He is what the country needs. This is Biden against Trump in 2020, a fight for the soul of the nation. The only one who can do it is Gadi. If we lose it, I am not sure we will have another chance.”
He barely paused for breath. “For a generation, we’ve really known only one Prime Minister. So people believe you need the fluent English. The makeup. The teleprompter. The standing ovations in Congress. But we need something else. We need the antithesis.”
And so on. Eventually, Manelis exhausted his urge to propagandize and began to show off his other role: the hard man prepared to fight Netanyahu with his own weapons. When I asked him about employing one of Arthur Finkelstein’s epigones, he smiled and noted that several members of the staff had worked in Netanyahu’s circle. He expressed admiration for Jonatan Urich, a Netanyahu media adviser who has been the subject of three criminal investigations.
“Look, you can’t beat them if you don’t play their game,” Manelis said. “Unfortunately, Bibi succeeded with all this shit. If I want to win, I need people who know how to succeed.” He did not care if the left-leaning Haaretz criticized the campaign for adopting Finkelstein’s methods: “We’re not going to beat Netanyahu appealing only to Haaretz readers. We need to bring voters from between the blocs.”
By now, anyone in Israeli public life can anticipate Netanyahu’s ugliest lines of attack. Chief among them will be an attempt to brand Eisenkot as pro-Arab. In an earlier election, Netanyahu warned that Arab voters were “coming in droves” to vote for the opposition. The tactic combines racism with hypocrisy. Although Palestinian Arabs make up roughly a fifth of Israel’s population, forming a government dependent on Arab parties remains widely regarded as politically illegitimate. Still, Netanyahu himself explored the possibility of bringing into his coalition Mansour Abbas, the head of Ra’am, an Islamist Arab party in the Knesset, before Abbas instead joined the short-lived government led by Bennett and Lapid.
None of this will prevent Netanyahu from using the same weapon again. The most effective instrument of his so-called “poison machine” is Channel 14, an outlet that makes Fox News look like “Democracy Now!” For a time, the channel seemed reluctant to attack the father of a fallen soldier. No longer. Recently, it assailed Eisenkot’s campaign for the sin of courting Arab voters.
Eisenkot’s military record offers no certain protection from right-wing condemnation. In addition to having been Netanyahu’s highest-ranking military commander, he served in Lebanon and the West Bank. He is closely associated with the Dahiya doctrine, which calls for the use of overwhelming and disproportionate force against areas from which hostile organizations operate, including extensive destruction of civilian infrastructure. (Dahiya refers to the predominantly Shiite southern suburbs of Beirut, where Hezbollah established one of its main strongholds.) But, in contemporary Israel, long service in the military or intelligence establishment can indicate a suspicious degree of moderation. Many former commanders, shaped by decades of fighting terrorism and watching negotiations fail, have concluded that two sovereign states or some form of separation from the Palestinians is essential, both as a moral principle and as a practical means of Israeli survival. Netanyahu will portray Eisenkot as belonging to that tribe. “In the past, a general always got his falafel for free,” Nadav Eyal, a columnist for Yedioth Ahronoth, a major Israeli daily, told me. “Not today. Today, he is considered a lefty.”
The campaign expects Netanyahu to use Eisenkot’s long military career against him. One example is the so-called Azaria affair. In 2016, an Israeli soldier named Elor Azaria shot and killed a wounded Palestinian assailant who lay incapacitated on the ground. Eisenkot said that Azaria had violated the ethics of the Army, and backed his prosecution. Netanyahu, after seeing support for the soldier swell on social media, spoke with Azaria’s father and urged “balance” in the proceedings.
Manelis does not hesitate to turn his candidate’s bereavement into a political credential. “The fact that his son died is insurance that he won’t do things that are dangerous for the nation,” he told me. Manelis regards it as his job to prevent Netanyahu from defining Eisenkot first. With an air of mischief and pride, he took out his phone and showed me a video on Instagram featuring a Likud jingle sung in Arabic and a reminder of Netanyahu’s courtship of Mansour Abbas. “I don’t think it’s racist,” Manelis said. “We are using his terms—and we need to win.”
He then showed me another campaign video. It reprises a Netanyahu ad from the 2015 campaign—“You will decide who will defend your children!”—while, thanks to A.I., Netanyahu wanders through the charred remains of kibbutzim torched by Hamas three years ago. “If you want to lose,” Manelis told me, “don’t use someone close to Arthur Finkelstein, don’t do a negative campaign, speak only about the Palestinian issue, and say you love Mansour Abbas. Then see what happens in the fall.”
As if to prove Manelis’s point about the inevitability of a brutal confrontation, the Netanyahu campaign put out an A.I.-generated video in mid-July that seemed to transgress every boundary of taste and decency. The clip, which Netanyahu himself posted, showed Eisenkot running through a meadow toward a young man wearing a T-shirt with the motto “Israeli Unity” emblazoned on it. But Eisenkot ignores the young man and instead runs past him to embrace Mansour Abbas. News accounts throughout Israel noted that the young man resembled Eisenkot’s late son, Gal. Einav Zangauker, the mother of a son who had been held hostage in Gaza and a former supporter of the Prime Minister, was among the many in Israel who considered the video both despicable and typical of Netanyahu’s campaign tactics. “When the video started playing and I saw Gadi running with open arms, the thought crossed my mind that, from the other side, we’d see his late son Gal running into his father’s arms,” she wrote on X. “A hug like that would have warmed the heart. But what was I thinking? This is Netanyahu.”
One uncertainty haunting the Eisenkot campaign is Donald Trump. Will the American President intervene at the last moment to help Netanyahu? Manelis wondered whether Trump might do for Netanyahu what J. D. Vance had tried to do for Viktor Orbán by campaigning for him in Budapest. Yet it was unclear how much warmth, if any, remained in the relationship. Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan’s recent book, “Regime Change,” recounts a chilling telephone call in which Trump turned against Netanyahu: “Everybody’s sick of you, Bibi. All the Jews are sick of you. Even the two Jews on this call are sick of you.” Manelis remains mindful of the President’s unpredictability; Trump may still prefer the devil he knows. “The game changer could be the Trump Administration,” he told me.
Campaigns live from moment to moment, poll to poll. Eisenkot and the opposition as a whole were on the rise. One evening, Eisenkot’s chief of staff, Noam Bar-Lev, handed Manelis her phone. He glanced at the screen and smiled broadly.
“Amazing,” he said. “We had a good day on Polymarket!”
It was a hot summer morning on the road to Hebron, the second-largest city in the West Bank, after East Jerusalem. I was riding along with Yehuda Shaul, who served in Hebron in the I.D.F. during the second intifada. Later, in his disillusionment, he helped organize Breaking the Silence, an activist organization of Army veterans who document instances of settler violence and evidence of Israel’s increasingly blatant attempt to absorb Palestinian land in the occupied territories without formally annexing it. The Tarqumiya checkpoint, which used to be crowded with Palestinians entering and leaving the West Bank in the south, was quiet. Since October 7th, Israeli security forces have cracked down on the movement of Palestinians throughout the West Bank. At the same time, there has been an alarming spike in settler violence across the region, from the villages near Jenin in the north to the Hebron Hills in the south. Young, armed settlers, many of them from small encampments and bent on intimidating Palestinian villagers, stage raids, slaughter farm animals, commit arson, and, all too often, inflict physical mayhem. Palestinians know that they can expect little help from Israeli forces, and still less from the police, which fall under Itamar Ben-Gvir’s ministry.
I’ve visited Hebron many times over the years, and it seems only more menacing now. Large sections of town are ghostly quiet. Army troops enforce strict, perversely precise rules about where Palestinians may, or may not, walk and drive. There is a bewildering maze of “sterile” streets. And the Arabs in town rarely test the litany of restrictions. “For now, they look at Gaza and they know that Israelis behaved this way—there was no check on Israeli cruelty,” Shaul said. “But there will come a moment when the young Palestinians say, ‘Why are we accepting this?’ This is a disaster waiting to happen, and I fear it will be like Rafah.”
There are two hundred and thirty thousand Palestinians in Hebron; roughly eight hundred Jewish settlers are protected by an entire Army battalion. In Kiryat Arba, the major Jewish settlement in greater Hebron, there are around eight thousand souls, including Ben-Gvir himself. Shaul and I briefly stopped outside Ben-Gvir’s house, which is heavily guarded by armed security. He lives there with his wife, Ayala, and their children. It is said that on their first date they visited the nearby grave of Baruch Goldstein, an American-born physician and settler. On February 25, 1994, Goldstein opened fire with an assault rifle on a crowd of Palestinians at prayer, killing twenty-nine and wounding a hundred and twenty-five.
Hebron is the Belfast of the West Bank—a place with far too much history, bloodshed, and religious fervor and not enough geography. For Jews, the massacre of 1929 was yesterday. For Palestinians, Goldstein lives. The Greater Israel movement gained one of its most consequential early footholds in Hebron, in April, 1968, when Moshe Levinger, an Orthodox rabbi, and a small group of followers posing as Swiss tourists arrived at the Arab-owned Park Hotel for a Passover Seder. This was less than a year after Israel’s victory in the Six-Day War, and its seizure of Gaza from the Egyptians and the West Bank and East Jerusalem from Jordan. After the holiday, Levinger and his followers refused to leave—and, in effect, they never did, eventually establishing Kiryat Arba. This was an act that they regarded as similar to Abraham’s acquisition of the Cave of the Patriarchs during the Bronze Age.
“The uniqueness of Hebron is in its spiritual essence, rooted in the dawn of our national history,” Moshe Mayefsky, the official historian of Kiryat Arba, wrote. “The acquisition of the Land of Israel in its practical sense first took place here.” This manner of settlement—seizure followed by the eventual acquiescence of the government—is part of a pattern that has characterized the occupation of the West Bank ever since.
In the late seventies, the Israeli journalist and historian Amos Elon interviewed Levinger in Hebron. He asked the rabbi if he favored giving the vote to the Arabs in Greater Israel. Levinger replied, “I agree the Arabs were also made in God’s image. The trouble is, they’re opposed to this being a Jewish state. Therefore, the Jewishness of this state must take precedence in value over their being created in the divine image. . . . Democracy must be subordinated to Israel’s national and religious purposes. Do they grant civil rights to thieves and robbers in the United States?”
Levinger’s legal adviser, Elyakim Haetzni, told Elon that he had left his law practice and leased his house in Tel Aviv to move to Hebron. “I am a deliriously happy man,” he told Elon. “The Land is here, in Kiryat Arba, not in Tel Aviv. . . . Kiryat Arba does not exist to defend Tel Aviv from Arab attack, but the other way round. Tel Aviv exists to protect Kiryat Arba.”
As Shaul and I walked through Hebron and discussed the recent surge in settler violence, he recalled his own service there as a young soldier. The Israelis conducted nighttime raids meant to intimidate the population, a practice they called “making our presence known.” Now, with Ben-Gvir and Smotrich exercising broad power over the West Bank, the atmosphere was immeasurably more ominous.
“Have you ever seen an anti-colonial struggle where the native population is the majority and gives up?” Shaul said. “This is not the American Indians. The quiet in Hebron is camouflage. Look at the numbers. This is not China and Tibet. Israel doesn’t have tens of millions of Jews to overwhelm the Palestinians. The ruthless geographical policies are a sign of weakness in the face of demography. That’s how a minority rules.”
His foreboding echoed what I had heard in Jaffa, from Rula Daood, one of the leaders of A Place for Us All, a small Arab-Jewish party. “Something will explode,” she said. “You can’t take the rights of people and think they will sit quietly.” Daood recalled seeing a settler strip naked on the street in Hebron, deliberately affronting the religious Muslims around him. “It is another way of conquering the land,” she told me.
Shaul and I drove out of Hebron and into the parched hills toward the village of Susya. Shepherds tended small flocks beside a road leading to a cluster of ramshackle dwellings. There we met Nasser Nawaja, an impassive man in his early forties who works as a field researcher for the human-rights group B’Tselem. He spends his days recording acts of settler violence in the hills and estimates that an incident occurs somewhere in the area every few hours.
Nawaja was born in 1982 in a cave in Old Susya. Four years later, after the Israeli authorities declared the village an archeological site, his family was among the residents expelled from their homes. Nawaja said that the most formative experience of his life came years later, when, at the age of seventeen, he was arrested with several other villagers. They were accused of a killing about which they knew nothing, and were interrogated through the night, bent over, “our noses and mouths in the dirt.”
“In the morning, they realized that we had nothing to do with it and they released us,” Nawaja said. “We approached the ridge near our house—and I didn’t see our village! Where were our tents and our homes? When I got here, I saw people crying and faces black with dirt. The I.D.F. came and demolished the whole village. More than thirty families. Right where we are sitting now.”
He recalled, “I was full of hatred. If you had given me a suicide belt, I hated Jews, I would go do it at that moment. I slept one night here, and I thought about what I went through and about revenge. The next morning, a bunch of Jews came here, buses of Jewish activists who came to rebuild our homes. It shakes your brain! Who are they? Collaborators? Just yesterday, Jews had destroyed our homes. That made me think. That’s when I understood ultimately that I was at a junction between becoming violent or taking a different path toward nonviolence. I chose that path.”
The path has been difficult. Nawaja cares for an ailing, elderly father and a five-year-old daughter with profound physical and cognitive disabilities. He said that he has repeatedly been arrested and detained, and is barred from visiting the Al-Aqsa Mosque, in Jerusalem. “I am an enemy of the occupying regime,” he said. “And, on the Palestinian side, you always feel you need to explain your position to those who don’t understand Jewish and Palestinian activists.”
When Nawaja and other activists call the police to report settler vandalism or violence, the officers sometimes take the activists themselves to a nearby base and interrogate them for hours. Police officers and settlers are often connected by friendship or family ties. “They treat animals better than they treat us,” Nawaja said.
The plan, Nawaja believed, was clear: to “embitter” the lives of the more than three million Palestinians in the West Bank and, when the political circumstances permitted, annex the territory to a Greater Israel. It was the future that Moshe Levinger had imagined decades earlier.
Nawaja regards October 7th as having provided a “golden opportunity” for the radical right to advance its agenda. He is gravely concerned that, even if the October election ends the government of Netanyahu, Ben-Gvir, and Smotrich, an opposition government led by Eisenkot or someone else will lack the will or the political capacity to chart a radically different course.
“The way I see it, there will be a change, but not a dramatic one,” he said. “Eisenkot might ‘protect democracy’ and the courts in Israel, but when it comes to the Palestinians it won’t change things much.”
The alarm is hardly confined to Palestinian activists. In June, dozens of former leaders of the Israeli establishment, including Prime Ministers, generals, a Nobel laureate, and heads of Mossad, sent Netanyahu, Ben-Gvir, Smotrich, and other ministers a letter protesting “Jewish terrorism” in the West Bank. They cited acts of murder, sexual violence, and desecration of the dead, carried out, they said, with “almost complete impunity.” Tamir Pardo, a former chief of Mossad, warned in the letter that the failure to halt such violence represented “an existential threat for the state of Israel and runs the risk of further slaughter in the manner of October 7th.” The signatories threatened legal action and wrote that the violence in the West Bank was “reminiscent of similar crimes and pogroms committed against our people by other nations in eastern Europe in the 19th and 20th centuries.”
Netanyahu did not respond. He generally reserves his Hebrew-language interviews for Channel 14 and speaks more freely to the foreign press. When he does address the crisis in the West Bank, he finds rhetorical means to diminish it. In a recent interview with CNN, he blamed the violence on a small group of young extremists, “a hundred and fifty or so what you would call juvenile delinquents” who were, he claimed, not themselves settlers.
Viewed from abroad, Netanyahu’s grip on power can seem almost incomprehensible after years of scandal, brutality, and attacks on democratic institutions. Yet, despite his current peril in the polls, he may endure for a simple reason. He knows how to play on fear and has depicted himself as the only man ruthless enough to keep Israelis safe.
Nadav Eyal, the columnist for Yedioth Ahronoth, told me about meeting a woman recently in Kfar Aza, one of the kibbutzim hit hardest by Hamas. She was crying and said that she could no longer live near Palestinians. “If Netanyahu wins, it’s because of that,” Eyal told me. “This is what people don’t get. The sentiment in Israel, and Netanyahu understands it, is so powerfully about what has happened and how your worst fears were completely vindicated. From the outside, October 7th was another round of violence that ended with seventy thousand people dead. No, what happened on October 7th had never happened here before, a pogrom that triggered something here—the Jewish experience, over thousands of years. This is how Netanyahu gains power and maintains it. His skepticism, his distrust of the region around him, his devotion to the Iron Wall. His ability is to use the Israeli psyche. He represents a deep skepticism toward Arabs unless they accept Israel’s dominance over the territory.”
Eyal was describing the emotional terrain on which Netanyahu hoped to survive. The response that Eisenkot’s campaign had decided on was less a contrasting ideology than a contrasting character. In late June, Eisenkot formally launched Yashar’s campaign at an event center in Hod HaSharon, north of Tel Aviv. It was a smoothly run, thoroughly scripted affair. During an outdoor reception before the rally, I spotted Nahum Barnea, the dean of Israeli journalism. He is eighty-one and slender as a stalk, and travels to his appointments by bicycle. He has been the acerbic bane of many Prime Ministers, including Netanyahu, yet he seemed encouraged by Eisenkot’s candidacy, particularly by its projection of a sense of decency.
“He can stop the bleeding in two areas,” Barnea told me. The first was Israel’s standing in the world. “Remember the old ad campaign for 7 UP? He is the ‘un-cola.’ ” The second was the country’s polarization, the bitterness of its political discourse. Eisenkot might embody a different kind of public figure. “He’s misleading because people see an overweight guy, like a bear, very warm and informal. He doesn’t look like a general. But he is hardly mediocre. He is serious. And, yes, he lost his son in war. He knows that his bereavement is a political advantage, and not cynically. He represents a going back to public service.”
As “Golani Sheli,” the anthem of Eisenkot’s old brigade, boomed from the speakers, the candidate walked onstage to loud applause. There was little ideology in his appeal, certainly nothing about a Palestinian state. The campaign had been built around service, sacrifice, reform, and repair. Whether those themes could compete with the fears Netanyahu had spent years cultivating was a question that the election would decide. ♦