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Israeli President Itzhak Herzog has tasked Gadi Eisenkot, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's main rival, with forming a new government after elections that have left the country in a political impasse with no party having a majority and no clear path to power.
After last week's elections failed to secure a majority for either Eisenkot's or Netanyahu's bloc in the Knesset, Herzog, following talks with political parties, said he would give Eisenkot the first opportunity to form a government.
The presidential office said in a statement that it had informed both Eisenkot and Netanyahu of the decision. According to the statement, following consultations with delegations from the new Knesset, Eisenkot received 67 recommendations for the post of prime minister, and Netanyahu received 46.
The Israeli president has broad powers to select the candidate he believes has the best chance of forming a coalition, a task not necessarily assigned to the leader of the party that wins the most seats.
Eizenkot now has 28 days to try to form a new government, with a possible extension of this period by another 14 days.
Gadi Eisenkot, 66, the former chief of staff of the Israeli army, has issued an unexpected challenge to the man who has led Israel for much of the past three decades.
Politically, Eisenkot is a relative newcomer: he officially entered politics only in 2022, when he became a member of the Knesset for the National Unity Party. He later left the party due to "ideological differences".
Having created his own centrist Yashar (Forward) party last year, Eisenkot has become Netanyahu's main election rival.
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In recent years, the prime minister has been dogged by allegations of corruption - which he denies - and criticism of his handling of the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack. In addition, he recalls controversial reforms to reorganize the judicial system, which led to mass protests.
However, Eizenkot, a father of five, was also prompted to oppose Netanyahu in the election by personal tragedy: his youngest son, Staff Sergeant Gal Eizenkot, was killed in an explosion in the northern Gaza Strip in December 2023 during an operation to recover the remains of two Israeli hostages taken by Hamas on October 7.
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Gadi Eizenkot says he still hasn't opened a couple of boxes of his son's belongings given to him, which he keeps at his home in Herzliya, an affluent coastal city north of Tel Aviv.
“I still haven’t opened them. I keep putting it off until later,” he said on Israeli public radio Kan Reshet Bet in April.
Gala's death, as well as the deaths of two nephews during the Gaza operation, coupled with his view that the Netanyahu government had failed to prevent unprecedented Hamas attacks, increased Eisenkot's political ambitions.
“I can’t turn back time,” he told the Times of Israel in early November. “I will do everything in my power to justify the high price that Gal paid.”
Holding Netanyahu and his cabinet accountable is high on his to-do list. After the events of 7 October, Eizenkot joined the prime minister's war cabinet along with other opposition representatives as a sign of national unity. He resigned in June 2024 and accused Netanyahu of not acting quickly enough to secure the release of hostages taken by Hamas during the attack.
“Women and children were kidnapped under his watch, and he deliberately did not do what was necessary to free them,” he told the Times of Israel. Netanyahu himself has repeatedly denied this claim.
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Netanyahu claims that as a member of the war cabinet, Eisenkot opposed key military operations in Gaza. Eisenkot's approach would not weaken Hamas, he said.
“I remember what Gadi Eisenkot said and what others said when we were still occupying Gaza... They said we should just make a deal, take the hostages out and leave Gaza - leave all of Gaza,” Netanyahu said at a press conference in June, according to the Times of Israel.
Following this strategy, Netanyahu added, would mean that "all of Hamas" and senior officials killed by Israel during the war "would still be there, still alive and still in power."
In a recent interview with the Israeli website Ynet News, Eisenkot rejected Netanyahu's assertion and called on the prime minister to release the minutes of the war cabinet's discussions and votes. Days before the election, Eisenkot promised that if elected, he would end Hamas rule within 18 months.
Eizenkot's priorities
Nadav Eyal, one of Israel's best-known journalists and an academic who has followed Eisenkot's political career, says personal loss gave the former soldier a "sense of purpose and mission."
That mission, Eyal adds, is not just to ensure that his Yashar party has enough seats in the Knesset to form a coalition and remove the current prime minister.
Like Netanyahu, Eisenkot is convinced that any future plans for Gaza should not include Hamas.
"It is very important to understand that his son was killed by Hamas in a war that Hamas started," Eyal told the BBC.
In addition, the retired general did not speak out in support of the “two-state solution” (recognition of a Palestinian state along with the Israeli one). According to Israeli media, at the end of August he said that anyone who still believes in such a possibility is “delusional.” However, he said he intends to "reconsider" Israel's relationship with the Palestinian Authority.
“The Palestinian Authority must be given the opportunity to govern 2.8 million Palestinians [in the occupied West Bank]. I don’t want to manage them,” he said in an October interview with the Times of Israel.
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While Eisenkot supports the expansion of large settlement blocs as long as it is consistent with Israeli law and national interests, he has spoken out against controversial plans to increase the presence of Jewish settlers in some areas of the West Bank, namely a plan to continue settlement expansion in the so-called E1 area east of Jerusalem.
His reluctance to expand settlements in E1 appears to be a concession in response to international backlash, but more recently he has promised to “expel Jewish terrorists from Judea and Samaria” (the name Israel uses to refer to the occupied West Bank).
One of his campaign promises is to open an investigation into the Oct. 7 attacks, examining possible failures on the part of the Israeli government.
Major Israeli media outlets published claims that UAE and Egyptian authorities warned Netanyahu of a possible attack from the Gaza Strip.
The Prime Minister denied these allegations and sued the Israeli newspaper that first published this information. He has also consistently refused a government investigation led by Israel's Supreme Court, arguing that the judiciary would be biased against him.
“This election,” says Eizenkot, “is a choice between responsibility and flight from responsibility.”
In his 10-point plan, Eisenkot also promised to launch an emergency program aimed at addressing the outflow of highly skilled Israelis from the country and encouraging an influx of new immigrants.
In addition, he intends to eliminate military service exemption rules for ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities and Arab Israelis.
“Another step we will take will be the adoption of a law on universal service for all Israeli citizens: military, national or civilian, including national service for Arabs,” he told the Times of Israel.
Previous attempts to expand military service, including by the Netanyahu administration, have sparked protests from ultra-Orthodox communities.
Humble origins
Eisenkot was born in Tiberias and raised in Eilat, two cities distant from Israel's main centers of political power, Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. He is the son of Moroccan immigrants of modest means who settled in Israel in the 1950s.
Jewish communities from the Middle East and North Africa are known as Mizrahi. No Mizrahi has ever become prime minister of Israel, although there have been such attempts.
New Yorker editor David Remnick, who spent time with Eisenkot during the campaign, notes that Eisenkot challenges Netanyahu's position as a champion of the dispossessed in Israeli society, such as the Mizrahi, which would seem to contradict the fact that Netanyahu himself is a descendant of Jewish migrants from Eastern Europe and grew up in an upscale neighborhood of Jerusalem.
According to Israeli media reports, the Mizrahim community - which has historically supported Netanyahu's Likud party - often refers to Eisenkot by the word "dialina" ("one of us") from the Moroccan dialect of Arabic.
“My parents immigrated from Morocco and I am proud of them and my heritage, but I would be happy, first of all, if we were proud of being Israeli,” Eisenkot told Channel 13 television earlier this year.
Military career
Eizenkot enlisted in the Israeli army at age 18 and served for 40 years, rising through the ranks to become chief of the general staff, which he held from 2015 to 2019.
In the 2000s, he commanded Israeli troops in the West Bank during the second intifada, a four-year Palestinian uprising that killed nearly 1,000 Israelis and more than 3,000 Palestinians.
Eisenkot's name later became associated with the "Dahie Doctrine", which provides for the massive use of military force against civilian infrastructure in areas from which Israel believes it is being attacked.
It is also important to note that Eisenkot, despite all his criticism of Netanyahu, never spoke out against Israel's military response to the October 7 attacks.
The attack, carried out by Hamas, killed about 1,200 people and took 251 hostage.
In response, Israel launched a military operation in the Gaza Strip that, according to the Hamas-controlled Ministry of Health, killed more than 74,200 people; The UN considers these data reliable.
“We are forced to defend ourselves. We need to take an honest look at where this all started,” Eisenkot told the Times of Israel.
“Eisenkot is not Netanyahu,” but he will allow “the same policies of expansion and destruction in both the West Bank and Gaza,” journalist and TV presenter Mehdi Hassan writes in the British Guardian newspaper.
Anshel Pfeffer, the Economist's Israel correspondent and author of a biography of Netanyahu, notes that Eisenkot "is not a pacifist."
“But he also comes across as a serious person. [...] Moreover, he is not from the elite, so it is very difficult to make him the target of a smear campaign,” Pfeffer says in an interview with the BBC.
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He notes that Eisenkot's emergence as a direct challenger to Netanyahu was somewhat unexpected: “Until six months ago, [former Prime Minister] Naftali Bennett was the most likely challenger. But Eisenkot seems to have struck a chord with voters at the right time.”
Eisenkot is often described as the "anti-Netanyahu": a man who does not like the spotlight and is not a great political speaker. Eyal believes that Eisenkot doesn't even like being a politician.
Political bargaining
Despite performing well in the polls, Eisenkot's party did not win an absolute majority in the 120-seat Knesset - 61 seats are needed to form a majority government, which has historically forced parties to form coalition governments.
However, Benjamin Netanyahu is a master of post-election maneuvers: he has participated in 10 national elections as leader of the Likud party and was able to form a coalition government six times, including in 2009, when his party actually won fewer seats than its main rival.
In the final weeks before the election, Netanyahu's campaign argued that Eisenkot would need to win the support of Arab parties to form a government.
Arab parties are popular among the more than two million Arab citizens living in Israel (who make up about 20% of the country's population). In these elections they won a record 19 seats in the Knesset.
“Do you want a Jewish state or a Palestinian one?” the Prime Minister asked Eisenkot in a campaign video.
Eisenkot publicly ruled out the possibility of Arab parties participating in his government, but did not completely close the door to the creation of an alliance in the Knesset to counter Netanyahu in the event of a minority government.
"Netanyahu is staying in power because of his ability to convince his supporters that voting for him is a matter of life and death," Tel Aviv-based political analyst Dalia Sheindlin told the BBC.
This time, however, she said, Eisenkot's background could complicate matters for the prime minister: "Military leaders have enjoyed public support since the founding of the Israeli state due to the high level of trust that the Israeli public has in the army."
Building relationships
Will Eisenkot's victory help improve relations between Israel and the international community? Professor Yossi Mekelberg, an Israeli expert on international relations at the British think tank Chatham House, told the BBC that such a possibility exists.
However, he cautions against hoping for "instant change" and notes that replacing Netanyahu is no guarantee of goodwill on the part of Israel.
"I don't believe any of the opposition parties, including Eisenkot's, offer a clear alternative to Netanyahu," he says. “If Eisenkot wins, he will need to take decisive action against Jewish settlements in the West Bank and improve the situation in the Gaza Strip.”
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