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Western media outlets cannot seem to get enough of Gadi Eisenkot.
Israel’s former military chief and the leader of the newly formed Yashar party has been embraced by the international press as he and his party take the lead in the polls in the run-up to October’s elections.
“Will Israel embrace the ‘anti-Netanyahu’ who lost a son in Gaza?” asked the Times of London.
“He lost his son in Gaza. Now he’s coming for Netanyahu,” declared the Daily Telegraph.
“How Netanyahu’s Top General Became His Strongest Challenger,” ran the headline on a lengthy David Remnick profile of Eisenkot in the New Yorker.
“Does Gadi Eisenkot offer Israel a new chance?” wondered the Economist.
It’s a fair question. But perhaps British and American commentators aren’t the right people to answer it.
Why not ask the Palestinians of Gaza?
At the height of the genocide, between October 2023 and June 2024, Eisenkot sat in Benjamin Netanyahu’s war cabinet while Israel waged its barbaric military campaign in Gaza. During that period, Israeli airstrikes leveled entire apartment buildings, hit schools, hospitals and refugee camps, and killed more than 30,000 Palestinians.
Eisenkot eventually resigned from the war cabinet in 2024. But not over the horrific death toll. He left over what he regarded as the government’s strategic failures. Even the New Yorker’s Remnick, in his sympathetic profile piece, noted how the general, who lost his own soldier son Gal in the fighting, “remains reluctant to condemn Netanyahu in any detail for the extraordinary severity and duration of the war in Gaza”.
And Eisenkot has form when it comes to killing Gaza’s Palestinians. As Israel’s chief of staff during the “Great March of Return” in 2018 and 2019, he oversaw the armed response to mass Palestinian demonstrations against the siege of Gaza.
Israeli soldiers, mostly snipers, killed more than 200 Palestinians, including dozens of children. “The Israeli security forces killed and maimed Palestinian demonstrators who did not pose an imminent threat,” concluded a UN commission of inquiry, adding that it “found reasonable grounds to believe that demonstrators were shot in violation of their right to life”.
If the Economist wants to know whether Eisenkot represents “a new chance”, perhaps it should also ask Palestinians in the occupied West Bank.
Yes, Eisenkot may be opposed to the far-right Netanyahu government’s annexation plan, but he is also opposed to Palestinian self-determination and statehood. “I have never said two states for two peoples,” he proudly declaimed in an interview in June, “because I understand the depth of this religious-national-social conflict, and anyone who talks about ‘peace now’ and two states doesn’t understand the conflict.
“I very much believe in settlement in Judea and Samaria,” he continued, using the biblical term for the occupied West Bank.
So much for Eisenkot’s supposed pragmatism and liberalism. He openly rejects a two-state solution and proudly supports Israeli settlements – settlements that the international court of justice and multiple UN resolutions consider illegal under international law.
Or perhaps journalists should ask the residents of Beirut’s southern suburbs, where hundreds of men, women and children were killed in the 2006 Israeli assault on Lebanon, whether Eisenkot represents a fresh start.
As head of Israel’s Northern Command, he became closely associated with what came to be known as the “Dahiya Doctrine”: an Israeli military strategy of deterrence premised on the widespread destruction of civilian infrastructure.
“What happened in the Dahiya quarter of Beirut in 2006 will happen in every village from which Israel is fired on,” Eisenkot explained to an interviewer in 2008. “We will apply disproportionate force on it [village] and cause great damage and destruction there.”
The use of disproportionate force against civilian targets is, of course, an undeniable war crime.
Netanyahu may be a clear villain – but he can also be a cartoon villain. The danger with Eisenkot is that he is a villain who projects the image of a “moderate”. While Netanyahu has become a lightning rod, thanks to his arrogance and belligerence, and his indictment at the international criminal court (ICC) has made Israel an international pariah, Eisenkot cuts a more sober and reasonable figure; a “humble soldier”, to quote Remnick.
By simply not being Netanyahu, a Prime Minister Eisenkot would neutralize a lot of western liberal critics of Israel and restore the country’s standing in western capitals, while allowing the Israeli military and settlers to pursue the same policies of expansion and destruction in both the West Bank and Gaza.
Nor is Eisenkot unique. The Israeli political scene is filled with wolves in sheep’s clothing. There are Eisenkot’s fellow retired “moderate” generals in the Israeli opposition: Benny Gantz, who once bragged about sending parts of Gaza “back to the stone age”, and Yair Golan, who said after 7 October that Israel should prevent humanitarian aid from entering Gaza and the people there could “starve to death – it’s completely legitimate”.
Then there is Naftali Bennett, who has a long history of vile anti-Arab racism, oversaw the deadliest year on record for West Bank Palestinians when he was last prime minister of Israel in 2022, and is currently threatening both Turkey and Qatar.
The point is not that these Israeli politicians are all identical. They are not. They do differ in terms of tactics, personalities and political coalitions.
The point is that replacing Netanyahu with Eisenkot or any other Israeli opposition leader would not be a fundamental change in direction on the key issues of genocide, apartheid and occupation; it would only be a change in branding and messaging. For Palestinians and Lebanese, among many others in the Middle East, the result would be the same.
So come October, Israel’s most notorious prime minister may finally be voted out of office. If that happens, we can and should all celebrate the end of the Netanyahu era – and hope the ICC gets its man.
But then we’ll meet the new boss of Israel, same as the old boss of Israel.
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Mehdi Hasan is Guardian US columnist and the editor-in-chief and CEO of Zeteo.
