How Netanyahu’s Top General Became His Strongest Challenger: Gadi Eisenkot, whose view of war is shaped by the loss of his son, is, in manner and character, the anti-Bibi. (David Remnick, July 27, 2026, The New Yorker)
The sources of alarm seem inexhaustible: the fighting up north in Lebanon; the Trump Administration’s turn from frenetic negotiations with the newly emboldened regime in Tehran to a prolonged bombing campaign; Netanyahu’s deals of convenience with the ultra-Orthodox, a crucial component of his voting bloc; the deepening hostility toward Israel across the ideological spectrum and all over the world. What is far more rarely discussed, in Kfar HaNagid and elsewhere, is the colossal human suffering and devastation in the Gaza Strip and the mayhem committed daily against Palestinians by settlers in villages throughout the West Bank.
Finally, Eisenkot arrives. He is sixty-six, a man of broad belly and pained expression. When he smiles, he winces as if from a twinge of sciatica. He is dressed in a dark polo shirt, his post-military uniform. Eisenkot’s parents were Moroccan immigrants of modest means. He was born in Tiberias and grew up in Eilat, two cities considered to be on the Israeli periphery. Were Eisenkot to win, he would be the first Prime Minister with such a background.
This presents a problem for Netanyahu. Despite growing up in an affluent neighborhood in Jerusalem, and being the Ashkenazi son of a prominent historian of the Spanish Inquisition, Netanyahu has long positioned himself, and his Likud Party, as the security-minded champion of the working class, the pious, the voiceless, and the Mizrahim, who came to Israel from Jewish communities in predominantly Muslim countries. Most analysts here believe that, in a close election, Eisenkot can prevail if he attracts at least some “soft right” voters in provincial cities like Kiryat Shmona, Ofakim, Ashdod, Nahariya, and Dimona. In many traditional Likud strongholds, the journalist Hilo Glazer wrote in Haaretz, Eisenkot is described by his supporters as dialina, Moroccan Arabic for “one of us.” […]
He is just short of dull and makes a virtue of it. Last year, he founded a party called Yashar—the name meaning straight, upright, just. At the lectern, he briskly ticks through his themes and campaign promises, among them a pledge to restore Israel as a “Jewish, democratic, progressive, and liberal state.” This sort of phrase is rarely heard from Netanyahu, much less from two of his most racist and reactionary ministers: Itamar Ben-Gvir, the minister of national security, and Bezalel Smotrich, the minister of finance. Both are unapologetic in their support for the ethnic cleansing of Gaza and the annexation of the West Bank.