The campaign headquarters of the Yashar Party (the name means straight, honest), led by former IDF chief of staff Gadi Eisenkot, occupies an unassuming office building directly above a Yochananof discount supermarket at the Morasha Interchange, northeast of Tel Aviv.

Situated at the exact point where Route 5 intersects with Route 4, the location offers rapid transit access from some of the most congested highways in Israel.

The campaign’s launch video, screened on Tuesday evening at the official launch event, depicts Eisenkot marching down major highways and main streets across Israel. In one scene, he ascends in the transparent glass elevator of the very building where his campaign HQ sits, overlooking the Morasha Interchange.

The launch event itself was held a few kilometers away, at the South Sharon Regional Council municipal compound, right on the suburban fringe.

If Israel’s highway system were mapped onto its political landscape, Eisenkot would be Route 4. He is out to conquer the vast middle-class heartland of suburban Israel, stretching from the northern Sharon region down to the southern Lowlands. His target audience comprises the voters living from Even Yehuda and Kfar Saba, through the Morasha Interchange, Petah Tikva, Kiryat Ono, and Holon, all the way to Rishon Lezion.

This is the Israel of commuters who drive to work each morning, endure traffic congestion, pay off their mortgages, raise families, and manage demanding lives. This is neither the playground of the ultra-wealthy top one percent nor the ideological fringes; it is the industrious, working-and-studying Israeli center.

To extend this infrastructure analogy, former prime minister Naftali Bennett and opposition leader Yair Lapid represent Route 2, the Coastal Highway. They speak for affluent, liberal, tech-driven Israel — the people of the coastline.

Bennett, a Haifa native, and Lapid, who hails from north Tel Aviv, embody a demographic continuum that begins at Haifa’s high-tech park, looks west over the Mediterranean from the upscale enclaves of Zichron Yaakov and Caesarea, runs through Herzliya Pituah, and culminates in an electric scooter ride to the corporate glass towers of Tel Aviv and Yarkon Park.

Meanwhile, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Likud occupy the mountain ridge line. They are Route 60, stretching from the Tapuah Junction to the West Bank settlement of Efrat, with a vital cross-cutting link to the Benzion Netanyahu Interchange — named after the prime minister’s father — where Route 50 out of Jerusalem hits Route 443.

Only recently, the prime minister, a master of political marketing, orchestrated an entire ceremony to rename the thoroughfare, rebranding Route 60 as “The Bible Highway.” This primary transit axis, which cuts through the West Bank from north to south and connects Jewish settlements to Jerusalem, was thus handed a fresh scriptural identity, drawing clear inspiration from American Evangelical voters and carrying a distinct flavor of the US Bible Belt.

Completing this infrastructure-minded analogy, the victor of the Israeli elections in October will be the leader who manages to crack Route 1 — the highway connecting Tel Aviv and Jerusalem — by bridging the modern and the ancient, the ascents and the descents, at the same time.

No fireworks, no rock ’n’ roll

The Yashar campaign launch event ran like clockwork.

Looming behind........

© The Times of Israel