Gadi Eisenkot doesn’t speak like a politician. He runs through his plans matter-of-factly, like a commander spelling out a mission to his troops.
It’s an unusual style of campaigning, and scarcely electrifying; he doesn’t so much appeal to voters as state what he sees as the obvious.
But for Mr. Eisenkot, a former Israeli military chief and the leading candidate against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Tuesday’s election, it reflects who he is, how he approaches leadership and how serious he believes Israel’s problems have become.
It also reflects the grief he felt as father to a son killed two months into Israel’s war in Gaza — grief that was on vivid display when he delivered a eulogy on national television.
Mr. Eisenkot, 66, says he is running to “save Israel.” In his view, Mr. Netanyahu has embroiled Israel in forever wars, destroyed its international standing and decimated its support in the United States. He’s pushed the country toward authoritarianism, Mr. Eisenkot argues, and turned segments of society against one another. Extremist Jews are marauding through Palestinian villages in the West Bank. Organized criminals are killing Arab citizens. Army reservists are called up again and again because ultra-Orthodox Israelis dodge the draft.
And Mr. Netanyahu has not accepted responsibility for the security failures that led to the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas-led attack.
It is the avoidance of responsibility that offends Mr. Eisenkot most.
When Israeli passengers overpowered the co-pilot of a FlyDubai jet who attacked the captain and tried to crash the plane, Mr. Eisenkot noted with disdain, Mr. Netanyahu milked the moment for a photo op. But when it became clear that Israeli security failures had nearly cost passengers their lives, he let underlings address the criticism.
Mr. Eisenkot now calls Mr. Netanyahu an “anti-leader.”
“I was taught, and it’s how I conducted myself throughout my military service: When things go well, put the people who made it happen out front,” he said on a podcast days later. “When things go wrong, step forward and take responsibility. This is the exact opposite of Netanyahu.”
“This election,” he told The Times of Israel, “is a choice between responsibility and running away from responsibility.”
The question, as Mr. Eisenkot’s lead over Mr. Netanyahu has dwindled, is whether Israelis will entrust someone who has served only part of one term as a lawmaker and eight months as a minister — and has never stood up to global pressure — with the country’s biggest responsibility of all.
Election framed around character
Mr. Eisenkot, who is refusing interviews with foreign news organizations, could not be less like the incumbent.
Where Mr. Netanyahu grew up in Jerusalem’s Ashkenazi elite, Mr. Eisenkot is a product of Israel’s long-neglected periphery: born in Tiberias, in the north, to Moroccan immigrants; raised in working-class Eilat, in the south. He would be the first Mizrahi to become prime minister. That could help him: Mizrahim, descended from Middle Eastern or North African Jews, make up roughly half of Israel’s Jews and much of Mr. Netanyahu’s political base.
The two men also approach work very differently.
Mr. Netanyahu is known to drag out decisions and maneuver for immediate advantage. “He’d say Thursday that he’d annex the West Bank, to get good results in the Friday evening TV, and then Sunday he’d say, ‘There are some limits,’ or ‘I’ll do it next week,’” said Yoav Horowitz, Mr. Netanyahu’s chief of staff from 2016 to 2019, who is writing a plan for Mr. Eisenkot’s first 100 days. “This is the opposite of Gadi. Gadi looks and works strategically, even though sometimes it hurts him.”
Mr. Eisenkot, a career military officer, also has developed a reputation for straight talk.
Former Prime Minister Ehud Barak said that Mr. Eisenkot, whom Mr. Barak chose as his military secretary when he defeated Mr. Netanyahu in 1999, would restore “trust and truth” to the premier’s office.
“In this regard, Eisenkot is a towering figure compared to Netanyahu,” Mr. Barak said.
“And it’s a great Jewish tikkun” — a repair, or correction — “to everything Israel has done,” he added. “Gadi will not be so eloquent,” he said, but he will also “not be the person other leaders are recorded talking about as a liar.”
Nothing looms larger in what drives Mr. Eisenkot than his bereavement. In December 2023, the youngest of his five children, Gal, 25, a reservist, was killed in Gaza in a tunnel explosion. Thousands attended the funeral. Many more watched on TV as Mr. Eisenkot choked up eulogizing his son.
The day of the funeral, a nephew of Mr. Eisenkot’s was killed in Gaza. Another nephew was killed 11 months later.
Now, Mr. Eisenkot says in his raspy voice, he hopes to be “worthy of the enormous price paid” by his son. “So that there could be a better reality here for our children,” he said.
A pragmatist on security
Rising through the ranks of the Golani Brigade, a gritty melting pot of an infantry unit, Mr. Eisenkot was known as a stickler for discipline.
As the brigade’s commander, he cracked down on misbehavior that had gone unaddressed for years. When one company rebelled, he told the Haaretz newspaper later, he sent dozens of soldiers to prison.
When he studied at the Army War College in Pennsylvania for a year in the 1990s, his wife, born in Hartford, Conn., started filling out applications for U.S. passports for their children. He tossed them in the trash. He suggested swimming lessons instead, since the kids would grow up in Israel — surrounded by past or present enemies — “with their backs to the sea.”
Mr. Eisenkot took command in the West Bank in 2003, at the height of the Second Intifada. Arresting Palestinian militants and speeding construction of a wall separating Israel from the West Bank, he helped stop the suicide bombings and end the uprising, according to Nitzan Alon, then a brigade commander, who said Mr. Eisenkot combined military capabilities and cooperation with the Palestinians “in a much more clever way.”
Palestinians in the West Bank interviewed by The New York Times did not specifically recall Mr. Eisenkot’s role in suppressing that uprising but described him as the far lesser of two evils when compared with Mr. Netanyahu.
Mr. Eisenkot also opposed right-wing calls for collective punishment of Palestinians for the acts of militants and, more broadly, argued for giving the Palestinians reason to hope for improved relations with Israel, including through political talks. “Someone who sees no light at the end of the tunnel will be quicker to light the fire,” he said in 2005.
He was harsher with Hezbollah. In 2008, he articulated the “Dahiya doctrine,” which called for creating deterrence by responding to attacks with devastation, as Israel did in the Dahiya suburb of Beirut in 2006, killing hundreds and displacing thousands.
In 2011, Mr. Barak, then defense minister, urged Mr. Netanyahu to name Mr. Eisenkot the military’s chief of staff over Benny Gantz, who was more senior. Mr. Eisenkot demurred, saying Mr. Gantz was more ready.
It was an unheard-of display of unselfishness among top generals known for jealousy and ambition. “I can’t fully explain it,” Mr. Barak said. “He didn’t question his own capability. He really just thought it was better for the army. It was noble behavior.”
Mr. Eisenkot did accept the top job in 2015, just as a wave of attacks began that killed dozens of Israelis. Some rabbis and politicians urged killing any attacker at the scene. But he warned soldiers to obey orders, not outsiders.
A month later, after a Palestinian stabbed an Israeli soldier and was quickly shot, a medic, Elor Azaria, walked up to the attacker, motionless on the ground, and shot him in the head — a killing captured on video.
Public sentiment heavily favored Mr. Azaria. But Mr. Eisenkot insisted that he be prosecuted. Despite angry protests, he stood by the military justice system, which sentenced Mr. Azaria to 18 months.
He has also politely declined repeated invitations to dine with Mr. Netanyahu, telling others he did not want a personal relationship to cloud his judgment.
And he stood his ground against what he saw as improper meddling. In 2017, when troops began the court-ordered evacuation of an illegal West Bank settlement, Mr. Netanyahu told Mr. Eisenkot to abort, according to two people briefed on the conversation who insisted on anonymity to discuss it. Mr. Eisenkot asked him to put the order in writing and get the attorney general to endorse it. Mr. Netanyahu backed down.
A Netanyahu spokesman did not respond to requests for comment.
“I probably wouldn’t have gotten to where I have in life without knowing how to be sophisticated, forceful when necessary and persuasive,” Mr. Eisenkot told one interviewer. “It didn’t happen because I was a nice person.”
A turn away from Netanyahu
Mr. Eisenkot’s time in Mr. Netanyahu’s current government was brief: He joined it, along with Mr. Gantz, five days after Oct. 7. He lasted eight months.
He describes Mr. Netanyahu as being unmoored by the attack, saying he was “shaking like a leaf.” But he lost patience with Mr. Netanyahu’s push for an elusive “total victory” over a deal with Hamas to release the hostages.
He resigned in June 2024. Last year, he formed a new party, Yashar — Hebrew for “straight” or “honest.”
On the trail, he assures Israelis that he would form a state commission of inquiry into the failures on Oct. 7, which Mr. Netanyahu has refused to do. Such a commission, he says, should also examine his own actions as chief of staff.
He promises to root out what he calls “Jewish terrorists” in the West Bank, remove illegal outposts, lift Israel’s squeeze on the Palestinian Authority and reissue work permits for many Palestinians to enter Israel.
He would also halt efforts to annex the West Bank, with its roughly three million Palestinians.
Such views have prompted Mr. Netanyahu to tell right-wing Israelis that Mr. Eisenkot would allow the creation of a Palestinian state. He also argues that Mr. Eisenkot’s relative inexperience — and even his comparably poor English — would allow world leaders to push Israel around, whereas Mr. Netanyahu can boast of President Trump’s endorsement and longtime backing.
Mr. Eisenkot does not, however, see a Palestinian state on the horizon.
Mr. Eisenkot’s entire platform is meant to get Israel on a path to what he considers normalcy. It includes term limits for prime ministers; drafting the ultra-Orthodox; requiring math, English and science classes, even in religious schools; and writing what Israel has never had: a constitution.
He wants to heal the country, something he says can occur only once Mr. Netanyahu is gone.
All of that prompts supporters to nod their heads. But seldom does he bring crowds to their feet. In a stop at the crowded Levinsky Market in Tel Aviv, he was almost bashful, sipping coffee and chatting one on one. Many voters had no idea he was there.
Which may help explain why his lead over Mr. Netanyahu has narrowed.
Some voters worry that he may lack what has kept Mr. Netanyahu in power: the political “knife between the teeth,” an all-out determination to do what it takes to win.
“I think his campaign is too quiet,” Ahuva Kfir, 73, said at a rally in Haifa. “He needs to step on the gas a little more.”
Her husband, Amitai, 77, saw things differently. “We shouldn’t compare him to Bibi,” he said. “We need someone who will be serious, honest, decent, brave, intelligent. I think he’s exactly the person.”
Adam Rasgon and Amit Elkayam contributed reporting from Tel Aviv.
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