A single opinion poll rarely changes an election narrative completely, but the one Israel's Channel 12 published on August 25 comes close. It shows Yashar leader Gadi Eisenkot beating Benjamin Netanyahu 44 per cent to 34 in a head-to-head contest over who is fitter to be prime minister in the October elections. Yashar itself emerges as the largest party in the Knesset, on course for 24 seats against Likud's 22 in October. For a prime minister who has spent two decades treating Israeli politics as his personal terrain, the numbers may be alarming.
Eisenkot's rise owes less to reinvention than to contrast. He is a four-star general and former IDF chief of staff, born in 1960 to Moroccan immigrants and raised in modest circumstances in Eilat. His career ran through the ranks of the Golani Brigade to the top of the military hierarchy before he retired in 2019 and entered politics. He joined Netanyahu's war cabinet after October 7, 2023, then left it in 2025, unwilling to accept a government he believed had rejected a ceasefire that might have brought hostages home sooner. That break produced Yashar, a centrist project built around the idea that Israel needs honesty and unity more than it needs another Netanyahu term.
The ideological content of Yashar is not soft. Eisenkot backs continued settlement in the West Bank and rejects a Palestinian state outright, positions indistinguishable from the far right. What separates him from Netanyahu is style, temperament and biography. He wants to end the draft exemptions that have long shielded ultra-Orthodox and Arab Israelis, sending them instead into military or national service. His economic pitch promises to break up monopolies in groceries and cosmetics, trim government ministries and fund reconstruction in the evacuated north.
None of this would carry the same weight without the personal history behind it. Eisenkot's son Gal and two nephews were killed fighting in Gaza, a fact that has effectively immunised him against the charge, routinely levelled at critics of the government, of being unpatriotic or soft. Where Netanyahu is fluent, American-educated and combative, Eisenkot is halting in English, has a thick accent, unglamorous and famously undemonstrative, an anti-populist in a political culture that has rewarded the opposite for years. The comparison Israeli commentators reach for is Yitzhak Rabin, another military man whose plainness was seen as trustworthiness.
The clearest marker of the divide between the two men remains the 2016 Elor Azaria affair, when an Israeli soldier shot an incapacitated Palestinian attacker. Netanyahu pushed for clemency while Eisenkot, then chief of staff, insisted on a court-martial. Eisenkot has since called for an independent state inquiry into the failures of October 7, a demand Netanyahu has resisted at every turn, calculating correctly that such an inquiry would implicate his own government.
Eisenkot's appeal reaches voters Likud has traditionally owned. As a Mizrahi Jew from a working-class background, he draws support from constituencies fatigued by Netanyahu's confrontational style and drawn to the idea of a quiet, stabilising figure instead. Analysts also argue that an Eisenkot government, unburdened by Netanyahu's baggage in Washington and Brussels, could repair relationships strained by years of friction.
His weaknesses are structural rather than personal. Four years in the Knesset is a thin political record, and his critics question whether a career built on hierarchy and command has equipped him for the messier negotiations of coalition politics. His economic platform still leans heavily on personal integrity rather than policy detail, a gap opponents will press as the campaign narrows.
The arithmetic complicates matters further. Eisenkot's broader coalition, including Naftali Bennett's B'Yachad and Avigdor Liberman's Yisrael Beytenu, currently polls at 58 or 59 seats, short of the 61 needed to govern outright. That leaves Eisenkot weighing a fragile minority government or an alliance with the Arab Islamist party Ra'am, a step that would secure a majority but risk alienating voters on the right. His allies are largely resigned to the trade-off, reasoning that a fragile Eisenkot government beats an indefinite Netanyahu caretakership.
Whether the numbers hold until October is another matter, but for the first time in years, Netanyahu faces a challenger the right cannot dismiss as either weak or unpatriotic.
