Israelis voted last Tuesday in their first national election since Hamas’s attack of 7 October 2023. Polling stations opened at 7 a.m. and closed at 10 p.m. local time. For Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has been in office for 19 years and is Israel’s longest-serving leader, it was a contest for political survival. His main challenger, Gadi Eisenkot, is a former military chief of staff and a security hawk with backers on the right and in the centre. Opinion polls showrd a close race, with some surveys putting Eisenkot’s party ahead of Likud. But the more important story is not who leads the polls but how the parliamentary arithmetic works: neither man has a clear path to a governing majority, and the result may depend on groups that both camps try to keep at arm’s length.
The election takes place after one of the most turbulent periods since Israel’s founding in 1948. Voters were weighing Netanyahu’s leadership after the October 7 attacks, in which Hamas-led militants killed 1,200 people and took 251 hostages, and after wars in Gaza and with Iran and Israel’s deepening international isolation. Israel’s offensive in Gaza flattened much of the territory, and Gaza health officials say that Israeli attacks have killed 74,000 people. A UN inquiry has concluded that Israel committed genocide in Gaza, a finding Israel rejects. Israel also dealt heavy blows to Hezbollah in Lebanon, and fought Iran in a 12-day air campaign against nuclear sites in 2025 and in this year’s joint war with the United States.
For many of Netanyahu’s opponents, the central issue is accountability for the security failures of 7 October. Mali Hajaj, an Education Ministry employee supporting Eisenkot, said that “the most important thing is the establishment of a national inquiry because that’s where our healing will come from.” Others say they want a change because of what they see as damage to Israel’s image abroad. Supporters see it differently. Nof Gabay, an 18-year-old Likud voter, rejected the idea that Netanyahu is to blame for the attack and said he “managed the war in the best possible way.”
The divide is therefore both generational and moral: whether the failures of October 7 are a political responsibility that should end a career, or a catastrophe that the prime minister handled as well as anyone could.
Netanyahu has run on his wartime leadership and on his alliance with US President Donald Trump, who has endorsed him and joined Israel in the war on Iran. On Sunday, Netanyahu said Trump was prepared to act again to “finally” remove the Iranian threat, but only if Netanyahu remained in power. The statement ties the security argument directly to his own survival: voters who see Iran as the key danger are told that continuity of leadership is a precondition for American support.
Eisenkot rejects the premise. He has accused Netanyahu of “relying on a campaign of fear-mongering, lies and threats,” and said he was confident that Trump would work “in full cooperation with any leader chosen by the people.”
The prime minister also faces corruption charges that he denies, in a long-running criminal trial, and he remains widely blamed for the security failures of October 7, according to opinion polls. Yet he is described as a formidable survivor, in a system where nationalist politics is increasingly entrenched and fragmentation may leave him best placed to put together a government.
Eisenkot’s appeal rests on contrasts. Reserved, media-shy and a relative newcomer to politics, he stands in sharp contrast to a flamboyant, combative incumbent. Analysts describe him as likable and unsophisticated in a way that helps voters to relate to him. His family history adds weight: a son and two nephews were killed fighting in Gaza. He is the son of Moroccan immigrants and would be the first prime minister from the Mizrahi community, Jews with roots in the Middle East and North Africa, a constituency that has been important for Netanyahu and has historically been disadvantaged in a state whose early decades were dominated by Ashkenazi Jews.
His career is that of a soldier. He served in the Israel Defense Forces for 41 years, commanded troops in the West Bank during the second intifada and in the 2006 war with Hezbollah, and was chief of staff from 2015 to 2019. After 7 October, he joined Netanyahu’s war cabinet as an observer and quit after eight months, criticising Netanyahu’s leadership. The party he founded in 2025 is called Yashar, meaning straight or honest.
It is important to see that the break he offers concerns style, personnel and coalition partners, not security doctrine. He opposes Palestinian statehood, saying “two states for two peoples is a mistake,” and wants Israel to hold overriding security responsibility between the Jordan River and the sea. He says Hamas’s military wing must be destroyed or dismantled. He cites his “Dahiyeh doctrine” of responding to attacks with disproportionate force, which he applied in 2006; the name refers to Beirut’s Hezbollah-controlled southern suburbs, and the UN emergency relief coordinator at the time said the bombardment breached humanitarian law. On Iran, he says the next government must prevent a military nuclear capability, by force or through an “arrangement” such as a US-backed diplomatic solution.
to be continued
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