Gadi Eisenkot, the Man Who Could Unseat Netanyahu — and What His Rise Says About Israel

The numbers don't lie. Founded in September 2025, Gadi Eisenkot's Yashar! party ("straight," "honest") now polls at 22 to 24 Knesset seats, against 21 to 23 for Benjamin Netanyahu's Likud. More striking still: Beyachad, the merger engineered in April between Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid precisely to block Eisenkot's path, is stuck at 13-15 seats. The operation designed to smother him has left him alone at the top.

On paper, nothing destined this 66-year-old to threaten the most formidable political animal in recent Israeli history. Three years in the Knesset, eight months in the war cabinet, a deliberately vague platform — "seek the truth, repair Israeli society after the war." No flash, no storytelling: a black t-shirt, jeans, a grandfather's smile. And yet, for months the Likud has trained the bulk of its attacks on him. When Netanyahu's machine picks its target, it is pointing at its real danger.

What is at stake goes beyond the man. Eisenkot would be the first Mizrahi prime minister in Israel's history: the son of immigrants from Morocco, raised in Tiberias and Eilat, who rose through the Golani Brigade — the brigade of Israelis who do the hard work. He is breaking through in Likud strongholds like Dimona and Kiryat Shmona — meaning he is siphoning off the very electorate Netanyahu held through identity, not through his record. And there is Gal, his youngest son, killed in Gaza in December 2023 during a mission to recover hostages' bodies. Two nephews as well. At a time when the Prime Minister's sons did not serve in this war, Eisenkot embodies the price paid — without ever having to say it.

A Yashar! activist, Inbar Harush-Giti, sums up the phenomenon: the public recognizes in him the "honesty and humility" it wants to see again in its leaders, and claims Ben-Gurion's mamlakhtiut — "the general good comes before the good of any particular group." Eisenkot defines himself as "traditional," that Jewish identity — majority among Mizrahi voters, at once observant and open — which the religious-secular divide usually erases.

Here is the angle the mainstream press is missing: it reads Eisenkot as just another "anti-Bibi centrist." Wrong. His rise does not signal an ideological turn in Israel — his platform is too vague for that — but a shift in criteria. After two years of war, the electorate is no longer asking "right or left?" but "who paid, who served, who tells the truth?" It is a deeply Israeli yardstick, born of October 7, where legitimacy is measured in shared sacrifice. A former adviser to both Netanyahu and Bennett, Moshe Klughaft, attributes his success to a thirst for novelty. Perhaps. But if a bereaved general — Mizrahi, traditional, with no media talent — can beat the master of political communication, it means the war has changed the question Israel asks itself. And that question, no poll can make disappear.