A Former General Emerges as Netanyahu’s Most Serious Threat Yet

Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, is facing what may be the most consequential electoral test of his career this fall, and the challenge is coming from an unexpected quarter: a retired general with no history of partisan politics and a personal connection to the war that has defined the last three years.

Gadi Eisenkot, the former Israel Defense Forces chief of staff, has surged to the top of opinion polling since launching his centrist Yashar party’s campaign in June. A Channel 13 poll this week showed Yashar winning 23 seats if an election were held today, edging out Netanyahu’s Likud at 22, the first time any challenger has overtaken the prime minister’s party since the war began. Other surveys show the race essentially tied. Whatever the precise numbers, the trend is unmistakable: Eisenkot has become the clear frontrunner among Netanyahu’s rivals, displacing the previously favored opposition alliance led by Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid.

Eisenkot’s biography gives his candidacy a moral weight that is difficult for Likud to counter. He lost a son and two nephews in the Gaza war, and he resigned from Netanyahu’s war cabinet in 2024, accusing the prime minister of undermining efforts to secure hostage-release agreements and lacking a coherent exit strategy. That combination of personal sacrifice and insider credibility has proven potent with an electorate that polling consistently shows is exhausted by nearly two years of continuous conflict. Voters in conservative strongholds, including some who backed Netanyahu previously, have told reporters they are drawn to Eisenkot precisely because he represents a break from the current governing coalition rather than a return to the pre-war political establishment.

The math, however, remains unresolved. Israel’s parliamentary system requires 61 of 120 Knesset seats to form a government, and no combination of mainstream polling puts either Netanyahu’s coalition or the Jewish opposition parties over that threshold without support from Arab-aligned factions, something Eisenkot has so far resisted courting explicitly. In April, he called for a Zionist majority and convened opposition leaders without inviting Arab party heads, a decision that Arab list leader Mansour Abbas appears to be reading as an opening rather than a rejection; Abbas has said publicly he expects to eventually reach agreements with Bennett, Eisenkot, and Avigdor Lieberman.

That coalition arithmetic is the real story beneath the polling headlines. A dead-even race between Likud and Yashar does not by itself produce a government; it produces weeks or months of negotiation among smaller parties whose leverage grows precisely because the two largest blocs cannot govern without them. Investors and regional partners watching Israeli politics for signs of policy continuity should expect volatility regardless of who wins the largest single share of the vote in October.

There is also a structural story here about how wars reshape political capital. Eisenkot and Benny Gantz both entered Netanyahu’s wartime cabinet in 2023 with credibility earned through decades of military service, and both saw that credibility convert into political capital once they broke publicly with the prime minister. Gantz’s standing has since eroded, but Eisenkot’s has grown, suggesting that Israeli voters are drawing a sharper distinction between military leadership they trust and political leadership they have grown weary of.

For Netanyahu, the path forward likely runs through the same strategy that has kept him in office for the better part of two decades: consolidating the right-wing bloc, framing the election as a referendum on security experience rather than war management, and hoping that undecided voters break toward continuity rather than change. Whether that strategy still works against a challenger with Eisenkot’s specific combination of security credentials and personal narrative is the open question that will define Israeli politics through the October vote, and one with real consequences for US-Israel policy coordination heading into 2027.

The stakes extend well beyond Jerusalem. A Yashar-led or Yashar-influenced coalition would almost certainly approach the Israel-Hamas war’s aftermath, West Bank policy, and the broader regional diplomatic map differently than a continuation of the current Likud-led government, given Eisenkot’s public criticism of the current administration’s conduct of the war. Financial institutions with exposure to Israeli sovereign debt, defense contractors coordinating with the IDF, and multinational firms weighing Israeli market entry should treat this election cycle as a genuine inflection point rather than a routine electoral contest, since a change in governing coalition could plausibly bring shifts in defense procurement priorities, tax policy, and the pace of any postwar reconstruction spending in the region.

It is also worth noting how unusual it is for Israeli polling to show this degree of volatility this far from an election. Coalition dynamics in a fragmented Knesset can shift substantially in the final weeks of a campaign, and the eventual governing coalition will likely be determined less by which single party finishes first and more by which smaller factions extract the most favorable terms in the negotiations that follow.

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