As he prepares to face Israeli voters next month after three years of incessant war, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has formulated a new strategy. Ignoring the huge costs in blood and treasure, let alone in support for Israel in the United States and elsewhere, he now publicly and explicitly supports waging wars without end. As a lesson of Hamas’s October 7, 2023, massacre, he asserts that Israel needs to take preemptive military action against every potential security threat it faces, regardless of the consequences. This has left many wondering how much of this hard-line approach might change if Gadi Eisenkot, the veteran military official who is running ahead of Netanyahu in the polls, manages to defeat him.

Thus far, Eisenkot, a classic centrist, has been blunt and sometimes caustic in making the case against the prime minister. But apart from vague statements about ending the longest war in Israeli history, he has generally avoided going into detail about his own national security strategy. On some issues, such as dealing with Hamas in Gaza, he has sounded more hawkish than Netanyahu. And when he is asked about the future of the conflict with the Palestinians—Israel’s most politically explosive issue—he has been extremely careful to avoid binding commitments. In a rare statement on such matters in August, Eisenkot said he was opposed to a Palestinian state, endorsing what is by now a consensus position across Israel’s political center and even parts of the center left as well as the right.

From such statements, it might be tempting to conclude that an Eisenkot government would be little different from its right-wing predecessor. Indeed, some analysts have argued that there will be no real differences on major security issues at all.But that ignores a number of important areas, from the crisis in the West Bank to Israel’s approach to Syria to the conflict in Gaza, where new strategies could yield real dividends, even if the changes are most likely to be incremental rather than dramatic. The extent to which an opening emerges will depend greatly on U.S. President Donald Trump and the nature of his relationship with a post-Netanyahu government, if Israelis elect one. The most important question is not whether change is possible but what kinds of changes, and with what kinds of engagement from Washington.

According to Israeli polls, Netanyahu, chairman of the right-wing Likud Party, will find it extremely difficult to form a government after the October 27 elections. For now, he appears to be devoting most of his efforts to forcing a deadlock that would prevent his rivals from assembling the next coalition. At the same time, he has promoted his strategy of continuous war.

The new Netanyahu preaches zero concessions and zero compromises. To his domestic audience, he also emphasizes what he claims is another achievement: Israel’s seizure of territory on almost every border—in southern Lebanon, in Syria, in the Gaza Strip—as self-styled security zones. Defense Minister Israel Katz takes this approach one step further, claiming that Israel will remain in these zones for many years as part of the price it is exacting from its enemies. Katz and other ministers are constantly searching for new military foes: they have claimed that Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who is deeply hostile to Israel but difficult to portray as a direct military antagonist, is now as much of a threat as Hezbollah and Hamas, an assertion that Netanyahu has also taken up. Some of these cabinet members have even maintained, without a shred of evidence, that Syria’s president, the former jihadist Ahmed al-Shara, is preparing to attack Israel.

This belligerent stance completely ignores the heavy price of the Netanyahu strategy. With large numbers of soldiers deployed on the forward fronts for months at a time, the Israel Defense Forces has had no time to train, and reservists are now bearing an enormous burden, serving on average more than 100 days a year since the 2023 attack. The Israeli economy has also taken an immense hit. According to the latest estimates, Israel has spent about $142 billion on the war since it began—equivalent to more than half of the country’s total annual budget. This is aside from the calamitous damage that the wars have wrought on Israel’s international reputation.

Amid these spiraling problems and the widespread unpopularity of the current right-wing coalition, Eisenkot has opened a substantial lead in the polls. As the IDF’s former chief of staff with a deep background in the security establishment, he presents a clear contrast with Netanyahu and his right-wing ministers: he has been in politics only a short time—he entered the fray just four years ago. He joined Netanyahu's government as a member of the war cabinet four days after the October 7 massacre. But he quickly fell out with Netanyahu about the conduct of the war, in particular over the prime minister’s insistence on slow-walking negotiations with Hamas to get back the Israeli hostages, and he left the cabinet the following June.

In December 2023, Eisenkot’s youngest son, Gal, a reservist in an elite........

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