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Don’t Believe the Gadi Eisenkot Hype

The former IDF leader is being touted as the “anti-Netanyahu” in Israel’s upcoming elections. But in the ways that matter most, he’s more of the same.

Former Israeli army chief of staff Gadi Eizenkot speaks during the launch of the Yashar party’s election campaign in Hod Aharon, Israel on June 30, 2026.

On October 27, Israel will hold its first legislative elections since the start of the war against Gaza and the wider regional conflict it has sparked. Despite this having been the first time since 1988 that an Israeli government has served out its full term, a sign that in any other state would be taken as a signal of sustainability, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is in trouble.

Already Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, having served for nearly 19 years out of the last 30, the 76-year-old leader of Likud is gunning for another term in office. This, despite a widely publicized bribery trial against him and his wife, unending controversy over the issue of conscription of the Haredim into the military, and a war with Iran that remains without an end in sight and has left its greatest adversary in control of arguably the world’s most important waterway. (The genocide and subjugation of Palestinians, something supported by Jewish Israelis across the spectrum, is not one of the major political problems Netanyahu is contending with.)

Many politicians, such as former prime ministers Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid, and longtime former minister Avigdor Lieberman, are looking to succeed Netanyahu, to dispense with his legacy, and to bring Israel back into the good graces of the world. But for an increasing segment of the anti-Netanyahu crowd, there is one truly formidable candidate emerging to take his place: former Chief of the General Staff of the Israel Defense Forces Gadi Eisenkot.

Eisenkot’s party Yashar (Hebrew for “Honest”) has skyrocketed in the polls since April, and is now neck and neck with Likud as the country’s most popular political force. Eisenkot has been sold to the Israeli public as the “complete opposite” of Netanyahu, with commentator Raviv Drucker writing in Haaretz in June, “His honesty, thoroughness and seriousness would be the ultimate remedy for us.”

Some outside Israel are beginning to take notice as well. A recent David Remnick profile of Eisenkot in The New Yorker presents the former IDF leader as the “anti-Bibi” in both “manner and character”—a “humble soldier” fighting for a “Jewish, democratic, progressive, and liberal state.”

Heavily downplayed amid these sanguine thoughts about what kind of leader Eisenkot could be is the issue of the kind of military leader he has already been. While this may be of little concern to the........

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