Gadi Eisenkot was one of the very few people who knew about Gideon Sa’ar’s decision in December 2020 to leave Likud and run in an independent party. Sa’ar courted him intensely and offered him the number-two spot. Eisenkot passed on the opportunity and watched from the sidelines as it ended with six seats.
It is customary to say that Eisenkot is not a politician. As a non-politician, he has so far made some excellent political decisions. As the military secretary to prime ministers, he observed and learned politics up close, and above all internalized the power of patience — not jumping to hasty decisions.
As Benny Gantz’s number two, Eisenkot was the subject of intense efforts to persuade him to leave Blue and White. He waited and waited, but eventually left. He did so without leveraging his power, did not take with him all the Knesset members who wanted to go with him, and insisted that he would neither run alone nor establish another party. Some time passed, and he did all of those things. Then Eisenkot once again faced pressure to hurry up, make a decision, and unite with Naftali Bennett. He waited and waited. Today he looks down at Bennett from above, and it is difficult to imagine a scenario in which he is not the leading candidate of the change bloc for prime minister.
What kind of prime minister would Eisenkot be? First and foremost, the complete opposite of Benjamin Netanyahu. Eisenkot once had a conversation with Ron Dermer, Netanyahu’s man. “You don’t understand the language,” Dermer told him. “You look for rationality, you look for a worldview, you look for facts. Bibi and I are different. We have a narrative.”
Netanyahu is an artist of chaos. He believes there is no point in setting a strategy and almost sneers at the concept. He has clear objectives and is confident in his ability to navigate from day to day while maintaining complete flexibility. Eisenkot is in love with strategic documents, staff work, and orderly plans. As chief of staff, he published a security doctrine for the IDF, even though this is clearly the prime minister’s responsibility. Netanyahu is a performer, an actor, a master orator; truth is barely an option for him. Eisenkot is introverted, a boring speaker, does not know how to perform, and finds it extremely difficult to lie. His main weakness is that his skin is too thin. He is an obsessive consumer of the media and takes every piece of nonsense from Yaakov Bardugo too personally. Perhaps he will get over it.
Campaign season is difficult for Eisenkot. You have to put on a bit of a disguise. He does not like it. He needs to distance himself from the Arab parties even though he has great respect for — and even affection for — Mansour Abbas. He needs to present center-right positions and constantly attack Netanyahu from the right. None of this comes naturally to him.
When it comes to labels, Eisenkot deserves credit for always avoiding the center-left label. Perhaps his years in prime ministers’ offices taught him that this is a label from which you do not reach the prime minister’s office.
On the other hand, his substantive positions have been close to those of the center-left. In his General Staff, for example, Yair Golan was considered more right-wing than Eisenkot. Eisenkot was the one who convinced the Netanyahu right-wing government, together with Moshe Ya’alon, to deal intelligently with the “lone-wolf” intifada: not to begin with excessive shows of force, but rather to allow normal daily life to continue as much as possible. It worked.
In general, Eisenkot has been convinced for many years that an intifada in the West Bank is just around the corner because of the government’s efforts to weaken the Palestinian Authority. So far, his dire predictions have not materialized. But it is reasonable to assume that as prime minister, he would devote considerable attention to the issue.
I hope Eisenkot will be the next prime minister of Israel. After Netanyahu, his honesty, depth, and seriousness are the ultimate remedy for all of us. He deserves it, and so do we.