Israel election: Netanyahu faces Gadi Eisenkot as divided country votes
Israelis vote in an election on Tuesday with former general Gadi Eisenkot leading the opposition challenge to Benjamin Netanyahu, who has held the premiership for 19 of the past 30 years.
Israel election: Netanyahu faces Gadi Eisenkot as divided country votes
The challenger from Modi'in
At an evening rally in Modi'in, a modest city halfway between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, Gadi Eisenkot brought his Israel election campaign to supporters ahead of Tuesday's vote. He is a son of working-class Moroccan Jews who rose through the army ranks to become IDF chief of staff and entered politics only four years ago.
His party is called Yashar, meaning straight or direct, and among its proposals are US-style term limits for the prime minister - "because power corrupts", in Eisenkot's words.
Supporters at the rally suggested his plainer manner is the point. Noa Sadeh, 56, put it this way:
"I'm fed up with people who know how to talk – like Bibi. We need someone who will do the doing part."
- A retired colonel who served under him, David Nadler, 74, urged a journalist to write down the word "integrity".
- The rally's warm-up speakers raised a racial slur against Eisenkot on pro-Netanyahu Channel 14, where loyalist Yinon Magal characterised him as a Moroccan "monkey" this week.
- Eisenkot himself did not mention the remark in Modi'in.
Bibi versus anti-Bibi
The two blocs in this election are framed not as left and right but as Bibi and anti-Bibi. The anti-Netanyahu camp includes former prime minister Naftali Bennett and Moldova-born Avigdor Lieberman, whose natural home is on the nationalist right, and both were once close to Netanyahu before falling out with him.
Israeli polls forecast the anti-Netanyahu bloc doing better than Netanyahu's but falling short of an overall majority in the Knesset. The contest could turn on the fate of just one of the parliament's 120 seats - and expat Israelis flying home to vote are not picked up by pollsters and could sway the result.
The record Netanyahu runs on
His latest poster campaign offers voters a rhyming choice of Yamin, meaning the right, or Falastin - his face and flag on one side, and opposition leaders alongside two heads of parties representing Palestinian citizens of Israel, about a fifth of the country's population, on the other.
His vulnerabilities, as set out in the report, include:
- The 7 October 2023 massacres at the Nova music festival and southern kibbutzim, described as the biggest disaster in the country's history, happened on his watch.
- He promised a war that would destroy and eradicate Hamas; that did not happen. The Gaza war has killed more than 70,000 Palestinians, though Israel says one-third of them were Hamas combatants. He also pledged to remove Iran's nuclear threat, and Israel's international reputation has suffered.
- Before 7 October he pursued what critics call a "judicial coup" to weaken the supreme court, splitting the country; he faces the Qatargate scandal, in which his closest aides stand accused of taking money from Doha in return for boosting Qatar's image, and an ongoing corruption trial.
- Yet his base has stayed loyal, unmoved even by reports that he received credible warnings of the 7 October Hamas attack and failed to act. His narrative shifts blame to army and intelligence chiefs - a baseless claim, advanced by what the report calls his "poison machine" of media and online outriders.
Within his camp, Yishai Fleisher of Itamar Ben-Gvir's Otzma Yehudit party told about 30 orthodox voters in a Bet Shemesh study hall that Netanyahu is like a shopping trolley: "He has a tendency to go left, so you have to pull him to the right."
Voices on both sides
Oded Levi backed Netanyahu in 2022 but came to the Modi'in rally. "Whoever was prime minister [then] is responsible. He has to go. For this reason alone, we need a change," he said.
The final days carried older echoes too. On Thursday a state ceremony in Jerusalem marked the 1995 assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, gunned down after singing at a peace rally; Netanyahu stayed away and sent a low-ranking minister. A viral video showed young Israelis at a Negev music festival singing Shir LaShalom, the last song Rabin sang before he was shot 31 years ago.
Yair Golan, leader of the Democrats - a successor to Rabin's party - served with Eisenkot and drove south in his own car to rescue people on 7 October. He described himself as going into battle never expecting to be killed or wounded, but to win. "I'm optimistic... we are going to win," Golan said.
By the polls' arithmetic, the anti-Netanyahu bloc is expected to outperform Netanyahu's without securing an overall Knesset majority, leaving a result that may rest on a single seat among the 120.
