Polls opened in Israel for a major election as voters consider opposition candidate Gadi Eisenkot. Known for his honest image, Eisenkot remains vague on the two-state solution. “I’ve never said that the solution is two states for two peoples,” he said. Many voters now weigh his military background against Netanyahu.
Unpolished, anti-Bibi, but evasive on peace: who is the Israeli opposition candidate Gadi Eisenkot?
Peter Beaumont
He has been called the man who is everything that Benjamin Netanyahu, is not. Gadi Eisenkot, a former general and the main opposition candidate in Israel’s elections, is unpolished where Netanyahu is slick.
To Israelis he is both menschy (decent) and schlumpy (unkempt), his crumpled appearance contrasting with Netanyahu’s hair rinse, makeup and obsessive need to control his media depiction. In the Israeli commentator Anshel Pfeffer’s framing, he is the anti-Bibi among a roster of wanna-Bibis.
And in an era of Israeli politics that has been defined by betrayals, dirty tricks and public and private smears, Eisenkot’s brand is rectitude. He only entered politics four years ago, and the name of his party – Yashar – means “straight” or “honest”.
But on key issues, an Israel under Eisenkot may not look very different, as he has been non-committal on crucial issues – including the two-state solution and Israeli settlement of the occupied West Bank.
For many voters, Eisenkot’s appeal is less about ideology than the vibe around him. Key to his appeal, said Dahlia Scheindlin, an Israeli pollster and political analyst, is his “very modest background”. While Netanyahu is the son of a Polish-born academic, Eisenkot’s family were Mizrahi Jews from Morocco. He joined the army as an infantryman, and worked his way through the ranks to become the Israeli military’s chief of staff.
But what precisely does Eisenkot believe in? On the domestic front, he is pushing for a full investigation of the intelligence failures that allowed Hamas’s deadly 7 October 2023 attack. More divisive is his support for the end of the military draft exemption for the ultra-Orthodox, long a source of friction in Israeli society.
On the biggest issues, not least a two-state solution that would create a Palestinian state – he is ambiguous.
“I’ve never said that the solution is two states for two peoples,” Eisenkot said on the campaign trail. “There is a very deep religious-national conflict here, and anyone who thinks an agreement can be reached now is gravely mistaken.”
On the broader issue of Jewish settlements in the West Bank, Eisenkot is also evasive. He opposes the planned E1 settlement block that is seen as a potential obstacle to any future Palestinian state, but he supports settlement in general.
Where Eisenkot separates himself from the current government, is over Netanyahu’s decision to place the far-right, pro-settler minister Bezalel Smotrich in charge of the occupied West Bank, where there has been a surge of settler violence, prompting widespread international condemnation and sanctions. Eisenkot has said he would immediately “reverse” that situation and put the army back in charge of the West Bank.
“What Eisenkot and the rest are basically saying,” said Prof Yossi Mekelberg of the Chatham House thinktank, “is we’ll be better CEOs. We’ll manage the country better, not take it in a different direction … They are not really talking about the Palestinian issue.”
Eisenkot is unequivocally not a dove in his views on the use of military force. As Israel’s northern front commander during the 2006 second Lebanon war, he was the architect of the notorious Dahiya doctrine, promising that Israel would wield “disproportionate power … and cause immense damage and destruction” – a policy that would see its fullest expression in the current Gaza war.
On Gaza, he has been more of a military realist, insisting two years ago that Israel was unlikely to win “total victory” over Hamas, and calling for a strategy that prioritised the lives of hostages still held by Hamas. His son Gal Meir Eisenkot, 25, died of his wounds in late 2023 after an operation in Gaza to recover the bodies of Israeli hostages.
But while observers say an Eisenkot administration would be likely to crack down on settler violence in the West Bank, they wonder if it would go much further.
Read Peter’s full profile of Eisenkot here:
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Polls open in elections for Israeli parliament
Hello and welcome to our coverage of the Israeli elections. Polls have opened in the first election since the Hamas-led attacks of 7 October 2023, Israel’s subsequent destruction of Gaza, and the launch of its war with the US against Iran.
Most polling shows prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition will lose its majority in the 120-seat Knesset, but the opposition bloc will probably also fall short of the 61 seats needed to form a government.
For Netanyahu, 76, who has led the most far-right government in Israel’s history, the stakes are both political and personal. He is on trial for corruption in three separate cases, despite interventions from Donald Trump, who called for a pre-emptive pardon in the long-running saga and even wrote to Israeli president Isaac Herzog on Netanyahu’s behalf. The cases are ongoing.
It was on Netanyahu’s watch that Hamas militants broke out from Gaza three years ago to kill nearly 1,200 people, the majority of them civilians, on the deadliest day in Israel’s history. This election is widely seen as a referendum on Netanyahu’s leadership since those attacks.
The IDF’s globally condemned assault on Gaza, which has killed at least 75,000 people and been deemed a genocide by a UN commission, academics, legal scholars and Israeli and international rights groups, has left Israel a pariah on the world stage.
Three years of regional conflict followed the 7 October attacks, including this year’s war on Iran, which sparked an ongoing global energy crisis and has killed thousands of people, mainly in Lebanon and Iran.
What is more, under Netanyahu’s government there has been an unprecedented, aggressive surge of deadly extremist settler violence to bolster Israeli control in the occupied West Bank, as settler militants and their political backers – who have propped up Netanyahu’s government – exploited their seat at the cabinet table and expanded with impunity.
Indeed, settlement expansion has been a key feature of Netanyahu’s re-election campaign. However, it is also a driving force behind Israel’s growing international isolation, with many of its traditional allies condemning “settler terrorists” and announcing plans to impose sanctions.