Cleveland Jewish NewsMeet Gadi Eizenkot, the political novice who plays hardball — and who may unseat Benjamin Netanyahu
If you believe the polls, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu – Israel’s dominant political player and media maestro for the past decade and a half – is poised to lose to a political neophyte with relatively limited communications skills and a nondescript platform.
How is that possible?
The rise of the potential usurper, former Israel Defense Forces Chief of Staff Gadi Eisenkot, is remarkable. He only formed his party, Yashar! (Hebrew for “straight” or “honest”), less than a year ago, in September 2025. He lacks the political resume of many of his rivals within the opposition. He served as a Member of Knesset for just three years in Benny Gantz’s National Unity party and for just eight months in Netanyahu’s war cabinet.
His party platform also doesn’t stand out – it positions itself somewhere in the political center, with its stated goals neither distinct nor specific: “seeking truth, rehabilitating Israeli society after the war and strengthening the country in the long-term.”
What’s more, in a move designed to curb Eisenkot’s rise and end his bid to become prime minister, his main opposition rivals – former Prime Ministers Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid – merged their parties in April to create a new center-right political juggernaut. In doing so, Bennett seemed poised to take over as the sole candidate who could beat Netanyahu.
But four months later, Eisenkot’s party is consistently receiving 22 to 24 (out of the 120 that comprise the Knesset) in polls, while Bennett and Lapid’s party, Beyachad (Hebrew for “together”), is lagging far behind at 13 to 15 seats. In contrast, Netanyahu’s Likud garners about 21 to 23 seats in current polls.
Even more remarkably, Eisenkot has made inroads in far-flung areas of Israel previously considered Likud strongholds, such as Dimona in the south and Kiryat Shmona in the north. The Likud campaign itself is telling – in recent months its social media accounts and spokespeople have focused their criticism almost entirely on Eisenkot. The attention to the political newcomer suggests that they view him as the ultimate threat to Netanyahu’s reign, which he has maintained for 16 of the last 17 years.
Short, overweight and unassuming, Eizenkot is the un-Bibi
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