“I look at what’s happening on the ground and feel tremendous momentum,” Gadi Eisenkot told the Israeli daily Yedioth Ahronoth, with less than three weeks left before the election. Polls show neither bloc heading for a decisive win, and some people in his own camp call his confidence excessive.
Eisenkot, a former chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces, leads the centrist Yashar party. He is positioning himself as the main challenger to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, campaigning on accountability, political reform and national unity. He backs Israel’s military operations but argues the government has no clear strategy, and he has called for an independent inquiry into the failures around the October 7 Hamas attacks. His military record and his personal loss in the Gaza war have strengthened his standing with many voters.
The path to 61 seats
Eisenkot says he is working to reach 61 Knesset members from a “basic bloc” of four parties: Yashar, Yisrael Beytenu, the Democrats and Beyachad. The opposition had appeared to be nearing the 61-seat majority needed to control the Knesset, but recent surveys show Netanyahu’s camp narrowing the gap. Eisenkot denies his strategy has stalled. “On the contrary. I’ve been very successful in recent months,” he said, noting that the four parties have organized surplus-vote agreements.
He predicts that Ofer Winter’s Amcha Yisrael and Yaron Zelekha’s party will miss the electoral threshold. “When you take them out, that brings us to around 61,” he said. His stated target is a 63 to 45 win over Netanyahu’s bloc.
Should the opposition fall short, Eisenkot says he will not let Netanyahu sit on as head of a caretaker government. “If the worst-case scenario occurs and we don’t reach 61, I’ll put it to a vote on the strength of the Zionist majority,” he said. He would ask all 120 members to vote by conscience and would not seek support from ultra-Orthodox or Arab lawmakers. He admits the plan carries political risk.
Left, right and the Arab parties
Eisenkot says his reason for entering politics was “to break the left-right divide and establish a national camp.” He called it the idea behind Blue and White, which did not succeed, and says he is advancing it through Yashar.
He rules out governing with Arab parties as they stand. A partner would have to accept Israel as a Jewish, democratic and liberal state, the values of the Declaration of Independence, compulsory IDF or national service, and recognition of Hamas as a terrorist organization that must be destroyed. “I don’t know of any Arab party that accepts that,” he said. He also criticized Netanyahu for attacking Arab citizens: “This is the only prime minister in the world who attacks 21% of his own citizens.”
The case against Netanyahu
Eisenkot says Netanyahu is aiming for a stalemate. “He knows he can’t win, so he’s following the pattern he’s used in recent years, which is winning by not losing.”
He served in the emergency government and the small war cabinet from October 2023 until he resigned on June 13, 2024. Less than two months before October 7, he says, he wrote to Netanyahu and the chairman of the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, asking them to suspend the judicial overhaul legislation. “We could face an event like the Yom Kippur War,” he recalls writing.
On hostages, Eisenkot says political survival came first. He describes a cabinet discussion during the first release deal in November 2023 on widening the eligible categories to include elderly and wounded captives, among them Hersh Goldberg-Polin. Netanyahu backed away, Eisenkot says, because Itamar Ben-Gvir had threatened to bring down the government unless fighting resumed within 10 days. “I saw how political considerations completely took over Netanyahu. I lost trust in him.”
He also describes a May 27, 2024 cabinet vote on a proposal that included a 42-day suspension of fighting. By his account every minister present, Gallant, Gantz, Dermer, Deri and Netanyahu among them, voted yes. After then-US President Joe Biden outlined the proposal publicly on May 31, 2024, Netanyahu distanced himself from it. “He passed a cabinet decision and then went back on it,” Eisenkot says.
Eisenkot also warns of a cabinet with Ben-Gvir as defense minister and Bezalel Smotrich as foreign minister, which he says would “drag the country into an abyss that’s difficult to imagine.”
Sources
- Israel elections: Who is Gadi Eisenkot, Netanyahu's challenger?
- Eisenkot vows to challenge Netanyahu for power after election, even without Knesset majority
