An unknown quantity outside of Israel, this son of Moroccan immigrants is now forerunner to become the country’s next leader. Foreign Editor David Pratt profiles Gadi Eisenkot...
IF there’s one thing he certainly cannot be accused of being, it’s an “armchair warrior”.
As a 22-year-old infantryman in Israel’s Golani Brigade back in 1982, young Gadi Eisenkot fought in the bloody assault on Beaufort Castle, a historic mountaintop fortress in South Lebanon that in those days was held by the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO).
As so often is the case in the Middle East, you need only then fast forward through the decades and history is likely to repeat itself.
On this occasion, it takes us to last month when Beaufort Castle once again saw bitter fighting between Israeli forces and another of their long-time foes, Lebanese Hezbollah fighters.
The story goes that back in 1982, during a highly publicised, televised tour of the newly captured castle, the then Israeli prime minister, Menachem Begin, reportedly asked his defence minister, Ariel Sharon, if the defending Palestinian fighters had “machine guns”.
It’s said too that not surprisingly Israeli soldiers scoffed at Begin’s remark, given how profoundly out of touch he was with the realities of the combat they had faced.
Having been on the receiving end of such political obliviousness, someone like Eisenkot, you might think, would in the future steer clear of politics and those that inhabit its ranks.
But Israel’s wars and the harsh realpolitik of relations with its neighbours has never been that kind of place – especially for an ambitious career soldier.
Perhaps it should come as no surprise then that from those early days as a company commander, to Eisenkot becoming 21st Chief of the General Staff of the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) from 2015–2019, this working-class son of Moroccan Jewish immigrants has never shied away from either soldiering or politics.
In fact, as Nahum Barnea, one of Israel’s most prominent political journalists, noted last month as the latest battle for Beaufort was being rerun, Eisenkot, along with Naftali Bennett, two potential candidates for prime minister from the opposition camp, were actually pushing Benjamin Netanyahu’s government to do more militarily in Lebanon.
A pretty hawkish take by any standards some might argue, and certainly characteristic of Eisenkot’s past soldiering career which is replete with accounts of an uncompromising officer.
He was, after all, a leading architect of the “Dahiya Doctrine”, so named after the southern, predominantly Shia suburb of the Lebanese capital, Beirut, where Eisenkot advocated for the use of massive, disproportionate force against civilian infrastructure deemed to be harbouring Hezbollah combatants – irrespective of the death of innocents.
Likewise, as I remember well from reporting on the final two years of the second Palestinian intifada (uprising), Eisenkot was a staunch proponent of “mowing the lawn” – a metaphor used to describe a military strategy of intermittent, limited interventions aimed at degrading the ranks and capabilities of Palestinian resistance.
For its part, the IDF preferred to give such a military doctrine a more benign title, calling it the “Campaign Between Wars”, one example being a 2018 operation focused on destroying cross-border tunnels dug by Hezbollah from Lebanon into Israel, rather than striking Hezbollah directly.
Eisenkot’s military portfolio doesn’t stop there, for it also includes ordering snipers to shoot Palestinians during Gaza’s Great March of Return in 2018.
But Eisenkot’s supporters insist there is another side to this dogged, hard-bitten soldier. As evidence of this, they point to his strict enforcement of the army rules of engagement over the now infamous Elor Azaria case – often called the Hebron shooting.
Occurring in 2016, Eisenkot was to back the court-martial and manslaughter prosecution of Azaria, a soldier who shot dead a wounded Palestinian assailant in an incident that sparked massive legal, ethical and political rifts across Israeli society regarding the military’s rules of engagement and code of ethics.
Eisenkot’s stance in supporting the soldier’s prosecution subsequently resulted in a fierce backlash from right-wing politicians and parts of the Israeli public who argued he was abandoning the troops.
In that very same year, Eisenkot also revoked and cancelled the IDF’s controversial operational procedure known as the “Hannibal Directive”, originally introduced in 1986, which authorised the use of maximum force to prevent the capture of Israeli soldiers by enemy forces. The “directive” effectively operated under the premise that it is better for a soldier to be killed than taken hostage.
All this, say Eisenkot’s supporters, points to a different kind of “thoughtful” soldier and man from the one historically portrayed.
But it’s a claim in turn dismissed by those who maintain it does nothing to mitigate against the battlefield decisions he took as IDF Chief of General Staff that resulted in massive civilian casualties in Lebanon, Gaza and the Occupied West Bank.
Much as such actions are now supposedly in the past, few doubt that Eisenkot’s record will again become a focus of attention as he enters a new chapter in his career, seeking to become Israel’s next prime minister.
This weekend, Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, dissolved after formally selecting October 27 as election day, the latest date mandated by law – bringing to a close what was by many measures the most tumultuous four-year term for any government in Israeli history.
What now lies ahead will be voters’ first chance to pass judgment on their leaders since the Hamas attacks of October 7, 2023. But more than that, they will have to determine what kind of future they want for their country.
It comes too as Eisenkot has emerged as something of a dark horse in the coming election campaign and his newly founded party, Yashar – Hebrew for straightforward or honest – has in recent polls overtaken both Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud and the opposition alliance Together, led by Bennett and Yair Lapid.
In one of the latest polls from Israeli public broadcaster Kan, it showed Yashar inching ahead of Likud by one seat – 24 to 23 – in Israel’s 120-seat parliament, echoing a similar survey by Channel 13 aired previously.
In the Kan poll, Eisenkot led Netanyahu by 41% to 37% among respondents when asked who would be better suited to serve as prime minister.
Stocky and straight-talking, untested in domestic politics and a stranger to foreign policy circles, 66-year old Eisenkot stands – in style, at least – in marked contrast to the polished and articulate Netanyahu.
At the launch of his party’s manifesto, Eisenkot said that Israel needed “to know when to go to war”, rather than seeing in war “an aim to itself”.
Eisenkot’s message rings true with many Israelis – and his own family’s sacrifices in the war are well known to the population.
Eisenkot lost his son and two nephews in the war in Gaza. After his son Gal was killed during a 2023 hostage-rescue operation, Eisenkot blamed “cowardice, political hesitation and the political and ideological considerations” of those seeking to resettle Gaza “in complete opposition to the goals of the war”.
Public perception is everything here and plays in Eisenkot’s favour at Netanyahu’s expense.
While the former general loses a son in battle, Netanyahu, by contrast, with his full raft of corruption charges, bemoaned the “personal cost” his family bore when they were forced to postpone his youngest son’s wedding (for the second time) after he launched the 2024 war on Iran.
It’s not lost on many Israeli voters either that while Netanyahu’s eldest son spent most of the last three years in Miami, Eisenkot had long forbidden his children from getting American passports.
In a 2024 interview with the Jerusalem Post, Eisenkot spelled out his own views as to why he thought the time was up on Israel’s longest-serving prime minister.
“Netanyahu is bound by personal and political needs that outweigh his ability to save the State of Israel. He does not have those leadership capabilities – that’s why he needs to be replaced.”
As the UK-based online magazine The New Arab (TNA) recently highlighted, most Israeli commentators agree that the more Eisenkot sets himself apart from Netanyahu, the more we are likely to see the former general’s standing rise in the polls.
“This [election] is essentially a referendum against Netanyahu,” was how Palestinian lawyer and analyst Diana Buttu explained it. “The main goal of all parties is to oust him,” she added, while predicting that Eisenkot will likely keep the rest of his platform as vague as possible as the campaign runs on.
So just where does Eisenkot stand on Israel’s ongoing wars and other issues and how does he differ, if at all, from Netanyahu?
The place to start is that both he and his Yashar party’s key policies are rooted in security.
In that sense, Eisenkot’s political positions do not represent a break with his military career, but rather its extension into the political sphere.
In a 10-point plan, Eisenkot and Yashar call for a state commission of inquiry into the Hamas-led October 7 attacks, and military or national service for all citizens, including the ultra-Orthodox and Arab populations.
Domestically, he has made the issue of Haredi conscription one of the main banners of his political project under the slogan “service for all”, proposing to limit religious exemptions to a small percentage of each annual cohort and end the system of near-universal exemption. It’s a issue that has proved a real political headache for Netanyahu.
Eisenkot has also proposed a “new” defence doctrine based on planning and strategy that will make Israel a main regional power in a plan laid out on Yashar’s website.
“At the same time, we will aim to expand the circle of peace, to ensure a solid Jewish majority for generations and establish Israel’s position in the world,” reads the website blueprint.
As the Israeli daily newspaper Haaretz also highlighted last week, among Eisenkot and Yashar’s other declarations is establishing term limits for the office of prime minister and direct opposition to the current far-right government’s attempts to overhaul the Israeli judiciary, the latter a long bone of contention within the country that led to mass protests.
For now, with these and other policies, Eisenkot’s steady rise rests on three key factors.
The first is the continuing decline in Netanyahu’s security image.
The second is the weariness inside Israel over the continuing regional conflicts and internal political divisions.
The third comes from Eisenkot’s own image as the “general” who has paid a direct price in the war and stood detached from the perceived failures of many associated with the Gaza “campaign”.
The real issue now is whether that rise will continue and if Eisenkot can translate his advantage into a governing majority within Israel’s notoriously labyrinthine political system, characterised so often by coalition deals and horse-trading.
As for the Palestinians, few expect it to be anything other than business as usual, even should Eisenkot win office.
He is already on the record as rejecting the establishment of a Palestinian state at the present stage, arguing that the events of October 7 changed the environment in which that option had been proposed.
In May last year, he told Israel’s Channel 12 that “a Palestinian state is irrelevant after October 7”, adding in a later statement that talk of “peace now and two states for two peoples” reflected, in his view, a misunderstanding of the nature of the conflict, and calling instead for “other solutions in the Palestinian arena”.
Just what those “solutions” would actually involve remains to be seen, but for now, Eisenkot is very much man of the moment election wise – even if a largely unknown quantity to most outside Israel.
“He’s going to get a lot of votes because he’s new, he’s fresh, and he’s got the sympathy thing, and they like the idea of having a military person in power,” predicts Buttu. “But [the candidates] are all the same. They all want to beat up on Palestinians.”
Born in Tiberias, the son of working-class immigrants of Moroccan origin, Eisenkot has come a long way, first as a soldier and now as an aspiring politician.
When first appointed chief of the general staff in 2015, his mother, Shoshana, reportedly said, “I wanted him to become a rabbi” – not, by all accounts, that she was disappointed at his military promotion.
Should he now go on to oust Netanyahu, he would be the first Mizrahi (a Jew of Middle Eastern or North African descent) prime minister Israel has ever had.
For the moment, many Israelis firmly believe Eisenkot represents the best hope yet of bringing Netanyahu’s era in Israeli history to a definitive close.
But outside of Israel, there remains the lingering fear that what might unfold will simply be an illusion of reform, marked by absolute and predictable conformity on the issues that really need addressing – regional peace and Palestinian sovereignty.
