Gadi Eisenkot, the former IDF Chief of Staff, is a bug in the system — a phenomenon of his own. When he splintered from the centrist party he ran with in the last election and created his own party, Yashar (straight, upright in Hebrew), most analysts estimated that he would ultimately merge with an existing opposition party and wield limited power. After all, he is like no other politician in the field: he is calm, poised, unimpressive, and he abhors the histrionics that have come to define Israeli politics in the Netanyahu era. And yet in recent weeks, he has soared to unprecedented levels, surpassed Naftali Bennett, the revenant who most commentators believed would be the uncontested leader of the opposition going into this race, and is now in a statistical dead heat with Netanyahu’s Likud in several consecutive polls.
The conventional wisdom was not unreasonable: modern politics increasingly reward noise, and Israel is no exception to this trend. It rewards grievance, spectacle and the self-mythology that Netanyahu has mastered over three decades and that Bennett has worked hard to emulate. Eisenkot has none of that: he does not perform, he does not lash out, he does not pivot. When he speaks, he sounds less like a politician than like a senior officer briefing a parliamentary committee: measured, specific, slightly dry. He is no politician in the modern sense.
And perhaps that is the allure. The failed Iran war, and what it revealed about Netanyahu’s broader Iran strategy since 2015, appears to have reshuffled the deck in ways that few fully predicted. Netanyahu, who had staked his political identity on being Israel’s life-depending security man, finds himself unable to credibly claim victory: the MoU was negotiated over his head, Washington cut the deal and a plurality of Israelis describe the outcome as a failure. Bennett, who had surged on a platform of muscular hawkishness and executive competence, watched his numbers crater in the weeks after the deal. The security crisis that was supposed to be his lane turned out to suit Eisenkot better.
After years of maximalist rhetoric from the governing coalition, about total victory, about reshaping the Middle East, about divine mandates over biblical territory, there is a constituency, apparently larger than anyone anticipated, that is simply exhausted; tired of being lied to about what victory looks like. Eisenkot, who lost a son in Gaza, who resigned from Netanyahu’s war cabinet in June 2024 and spent months methodically documenting the government’s strategic failures, carries a credibility that no amount of campaign spending can manufacture.
Interestingly, after Peter Magyar’s landslide victory in Hungary, many pundits in Israel, especially those affiliated with Bennett, emphasized that Israel, too, needed a Peter Magyar: an insider-turned-reformer with enough credibility on the right to peel off Likud voters. They were right about the need but seemingly wrong about the man. Bennett, whatever his virtues, broke with Netanyahu in 2021 and has spent years auditioning for the role of opposition savior; the rupture is old, the grievance familiar, the positioning too predictable. Eisenkot is the more newer proposition. He sat in Netanyahu’s war cabinet; he watched the October 7 failures from the inside; he resigned in June 2024 with the methodical precision of a general who had finished his reconnaissance. If Magyar’s power derived from the fact that he knew exactly where Orbán’s system was rotten, then Eisenkot carries a version of that same knowledge, more recent and more specific than anything Bennett can claim. The dull knife, then, is sharper than we thought.
In 1981, François Mitterrand coined the phrase “la force tranquille” (quiet force) to describe his brand in the French presidential campaign. He used it to describe a man who had lost two presidential elections, who had waited his turn, who had accumulated credibility through patience rather than performance and who ultimately defeated an incumbent President not by out-shouting him but by making him look erratic by comparison. While Mitterand was far more ideological than Eisenkot is, the political logic is identical.
Gadi Eisenkot is leveraging this moment in Israeli politics with remarkable precision: his social media operation, lean, pointed and frequently praised across the Israeli political press, has managed to be scathing without being shrill. Where Netanyahu blusters and Bennett scrambles, Eisenkot releases carefully sourced videos and moves on.
And the coalition he has assembled around Yashar tells its own story. His party’s members read like a curated cross-section of Israeli institutional life: Shir Siegel, daughter of former Gaza hostages Aviva and Keith Siegel; Shaul Meridor, former head of the Finance Ministry’s Budget Division; Matan Kahana, a former Bennett ally who defected; Nir Zohar, President of Wix; and, strikingly, Yoram Cohen, former head of the Shin Bet (Israel’s internal intelligence agency). They are generals, economists, technologists and survivors; people whose credibility was earned somewhere other than a Knesset committee room. While Likud convulses through primary infighting, its members reliably providing Israeli political television with its weekly dose of parliamentary theater, Eisenkot has assembled a coalition of institutional gravitas. The implicit message is deliberate: governance is a craft that he is mastering.
Eisenkot’s sharpest weapon is the one Netanyahu built his entire career on: security. For three decades, Netanyahu has owned the terrain of Israeli defense, labeling himself as “Mr. Security,” the hawk’s hawk, the man who could be trusted to keep Iran at bay, to talk tough in Washington, to name the threat when others looked away. That ownership is now being systematically dismantled, first on October 7, then with the Iran debacle. When the US-Iran memorandum of understanding was announced, Eisenkot did not reach for the vocabulary of outrage that Bennett and the far-right reflexively deployed; he reached for precision. He noted that Israelis were once again learning about a major agreement affecting their security not from their own government, but from foreign leaders. He described the outcome as “the dismal result of a failed government.”
This is what makes Eisenkot uniquely dangerous to Netanyahu on his own terrain. Bennett can criticize Netanyahu on security, and he has, but he was out of power when it happened and many Israelis bleakly remember his short term as Prime Minister where Netanyahu leveraged a wave of terrorism to paint him as weak. Eisenkot sat in the war cabinet; he watched the strategies he had helped build get discarded for political convenience. He is someone who can reveal, for instance, a joint Mossad-IDF programme launched in 2015 to develop capabilities for a decisive strike on Iran, a plan that “cost billions of shekels” and was ultimately abandoned. He knows where the bodies are buried because he was in the room when the decisions were made, first as Chief of Staff, then as war cabinet member.
It is therefore no wonder that Likud has now pivoted away from Bennett and begun attacking Eisenkot in a slew of ads, some of which have been labeled as racist for their characterization of both Israeli-Arabs, attempting, as Likud has done for decades, to weaponize the specter of Arab political influence against whoever threatens them most. But the attacks have not landed cleanly, and for a reason that cuts to the heart of Israeli political sociology: Eisenkot is a Mizrahi Jew. The son of Moroccan Jewish immigrants, he was born into precisely the demographic that Likud has relied upon for fifty years as its most loyal electoral base — the Mizrahi working and middle class, historically marginalized by the overwhelmingly Ashkenazi left and wooed by Netanyahu’s coalition. That courtship is now visibly fraying: earlier this year, Netanyahu’s own spokesman Ziv Agmon was caught on tape calling Mizrahi Likud lawmakers a “baboon” and a “r*tarded Moroccan,” prompting a scandal that forced his eventual departure.
And when Netanyahu’s camp, specifically his aide Jonatan Urich, himself facing criminal indictment for leaking classified information and cavorting with Qatar, posted a video mocking Eisenkot’s accented English, the response was a masterclass: Eisenkot called it racist. He described the ignominious mockery of a Moroccan Jewish immigrant’s son for not speaking the language of Philadelphia. Then Eisenkot twisted the knife: “Where was Netanyahu’s excellent English on October 7? Did it help us with anything?”
Between the security brand and this, the game Eisenkot is playing is clear. The Mizrahi constituency is not monolithic and he is not naive enough to believe identity alone will carry it. But he is betting that a Mizrahi former IDF chief, one who lost a son in Gaza, who sat inside Netanyahu’s war cabinet, who speaks the language of security professionally, can peel off enough of Likud’s traditional base to make the coalition arithmetic work in October. Bennett, for all his tactical intelligence, is an Ashkenazi national-religious politician trying to appeal to voters who have always seen his type as the enemy. Eisenkot is breaking through because he is boring, and perhaps, the answer to relentless authoritarian populism is this brand of “force tranquille.”