The man who could topple Netanyahu: How former army chief who lost son in Gaza became Bibi’s biggest threat
Benjamin Netanyahu has dominated Israeli politics for much of the last 30 years, but as the country goes to the polls in a pivotal election the prime minister faces a challenger who in many ways could not be more different.
Former army chief Gadi Eisenkot is a straight talker, media-shy and a relative newcomer to Israeli politics. Yet opinion polls show his Yashar party leading Netanyahu’s Likud as millions cast their vote to determine the country’s future.
Bibi is facing a reckoning in the first general election since the October 7 terror attacks and the years of devastating war that followed in Gaza.
Eisenkot knows the cost of the conflict all too well, having lost his son and two nephews in the conflict.
In December 2023, while sitting as an observer in Netanyahu’s war cabinet, the former military chief of staff was informed that his 25-year-old son, Master Sergeant Gal Meir Eisenkot, had been killed in action in northern Gaza.
A day later, his nephew Sergeant Maor Cohen Eisenkot was killed in the enclave. A year later a second nephew, Captain Yogev Pazy, was also killed.
Together with other opposition figures, Eisenkot has accused Netanyahu for disregarding pre-attack intelligence alerts and botching the subsequent military campaign — accusations the prime minister’s office has dismissed as outright falsehoods.
Below The Independent looks at Netanyahu’s challenger, and what his victory could mean for Israel and the wider region.
Born in Tiberias in 1960 to Jewish Moroccan immigrants from Safi and Casablanca, Eisenkot grew up in the southern port city of Eilat, where his father worked the Timna copper mines and his mother ran the household.
It was at a local high school sailing club in Eilat that he met his future wife, Hannah; the couple married in 1984, eventually settling in Herzliya, where they raised five children.
Before trading khaki for Knesset committee rooms, Eisenkot racked up degrees in history from Tel Aviv University and political science from the University of Haifa, topped off with a stint at the US Army War College.
While Eisenkot himself rarely brings up his ethnicity on the stump, analysts see it as a quiet, powerful pillar of his appeal.
Israel has never had a Mizrahi prime minister, and an Eisenkot victory would mark an unprecedented historic milestone.
As analysts have observed, much of his resonance with the public stems from this domestic grounding, helping him connect with working-class voters outside liberal Tel Aviv. Previous efforts by the prime minister’s camp to sneer at Eisenkot’s background have backfired.
