Gadi Eisenkot, the current frontrunner to serve as the main challenger to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the upcoming election, formally launched his campaign on Tuesday, vowing to be a unifying leader and replace a government he accused of creating “chaos.”

The head of the new centrist Yashar party declared he is running for prime minister and unveiled wide-ranging plans he promised to implement, from education, economy and public security to recruiting the Haredi and Arab publics to military and national service, and reversing the trend of brain drain.

Under the slogan “Israel must win,” he called the upcoming elections “fateful for the security, unity and soul of Israel.”

“This coming October, the government of the terrible October will come to its end,” he said, referring to the Hamas onslaught of October 7, 2023. “We will open a new and much better chapter in Israel’s history. We will write it together.”

Eisenkot, a former IDF chief of staff who left Benny Gantz’s Blue and White party to lead his own movement, vowed to be a “unifying” leader rooted in “the tradition of Israel, its heritage and Torah” and “to be a prime minister for all Israeli citizens.”

While he did not mention Netanyahu by name, he said there were “those” who sow division and “advance steps that go against the national interest and are a slap in the face of the Israelis who work, serve and are willing to sacrifice their lives for this homeland” — a reference to the government’s attempts to pass legislation reinstating blanket military exemptions for ultra-Orthodox men and to cancel sanctions for draft evasion.

After Netanyahu said recently that he wants to form a “broad national unity government,” Eisenkot said: “The leadership is using the term ‘national unity’ as a cynical election campaign. I will do everything to unify the nation.”

“This is a leadership for which the words ‘accountability’ and ‘personal example’ are foreign. It is a leadership that lies. As if there is no other way besides the chaos in which we live, which fuels division as if it has no cost; whose only way of governing is to pull us apart,” Eisenkot charged.

“We have a duty to put an end........

© The Times of Israel