| Bibi’s centrist rival |
Gadi Eisenkot speaks in Israel during the launch of his party’s election campaign last month. Photo: Ariel Schalit/APDavid Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker, writes in a “Letter from Israel” that the strongest challenger to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the election coming Oct. 27 is Gadi Eisenkot, a general who quit Netanyahu’s war cabinet in 2024 and founded the centrist party Yashar (“straight, upright, just”). “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,” Remnick writes. Eisenkot, 66, a son of Moroccan immigrants who rose to chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces, pledges to restore Israel as a “Jewish, democratic, progressive, and liberal state,” Remnick writes:”Eisenkot is selling himself as the humble soldier, a political novice untainted by corruption or duplicity. … At the urging of his consultants, and in response to the political realities of post-October 7th Israel, he is tacking further toward the center. He seldom voices reservations about the scale and prosecution of the war in Gaza. “Remnick concludes that the election will decide whether those themes can “compete with the fears Netanyahu … spent years cultivating.”Keep reading. |
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Gadi Eisenkot speaks in Israel during the launch of his party’s election campaign last month. Photo: Ariel Schalit/AP