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The media is infatuated with Gadi Eisenkot, the ‘anti-Netanyahu’. Why?

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Western media outlets cannot seem to get enough of Gadi Eisenkot.

Israel’s former military chief and the leader of the newly formed Yashar party has been embraced by the international press as he and his party take the lead in the polls in the run-up to October’s elections.

“Will Israel embrace the ‘anti-Netanyahu’ who lost a son in Gaza?” asked the Times of London.

“He lost his son in Gaza. Now he’s coming for Netanyahu,” declared the Daily Telegraph.

“How Netanyahu’s Top General Became His Strongest Challenger,” ran the headline on a lengthy David Remnick profile of Eisenkot in the New Yorker.

“Does Gadi Eisenkot offer Israel a new chance?” wondered the Economist.

It’s a fair question. But perhaps British and American commentators aren’t the right people to answer it.

Why not ask the Palestinians of Gaza?

At the height of the genocide, between October 2023 and June 2024, Eisenkot sat in Benjamin Netanyahu’s war cabinet while Israel waged its barbaric military campaign in Gaza. During that period, Israeli airstrikes leveled entire apartment buildings, hit schools, hospitals and refugee camps, and killed more than 30,000 Palestinians.

Eisenkot eventually resigned from the war cabinet in 2024. But not over the horrific death toll. He left over what he regarded as the government’s strategic failures. Even the New Yorker’s Remnick, in his sympathetic profile piece, noted how the general, who lost his own soldier son Gal in the fighting, “remains reluctant to condemn Netanyahu in any detail for the extraordinary severity and duration of........

© The Guardian