As he prepares to face Israeli voters next month after three years of unremitting war, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has formulated a new strategy. Ignoring the enormous cost in human lives and finances, not to mention the loss of support for Israel in the United States and elsewhere, he is now publicly and unequivocally endorsing the waging of endless wars, writes Amos Harel for Foreign Affairs.
"As a lesson from the "Hamas" massacre On October 7, 2023, he argued that Israel should take preemptive military action against any potential security threat it faces, regardless of the consequences. This has led many to wonder how much that hard-line approach would change if Gadi Eisenkot, a military veteran who is ahead of Netanyahu in the polls, were to defeat him.
So far, Eisenkot, a classic centrist, has been outspoken and sometimes scathing in his arguments against the prime minister. But except for his general statements about ending the longest war in Israel's history, he has generally avoided detailing his own national security strategy. On some issues, such as how to deal with "Hamas" in Gaza, he sounds even "more hawkish" than Netanyahu. And when asked about the future of the conflict with the Palestinians — Israel's most politically explosive issue — he is extremely careful not to make binding commitments. In a rare statement on the subject in August, Eisenkot said he opposed the creation of a Palestinian state, thus supporting a position that has already become a consensus among the Israeli political center, and even among parts of the center-left spectrum, as well as on the right.
From such statements, one could easily conclude that an Eisenkot government would not differ much from its right-wing predecessor. Some analysts even argue that on basic security issues there would be no real differences at all. But this ignores a number of important areas - from the West Bank crisis to Israel's approach to Syria and the conflict in Gaza - where new strategies could bring real results, even if changes are likely to be gradual rather than dramatic. The extent to which the opportunity for change arises will depend largely on US President Donald Trump and the nature of his relationship with a possible post-Netanyahu government, if Israelis choose one. The most important question is not whether change is possible, but what kind of change is possible and what kind of commitment from Washington would be necessary.
Rightward tilt
According to Israeli polls, Netanyahu, chairman of the right-wing Likud party, will have an extremely difficult time forming a government after the October 27 elections. For now, he seems to be focusing most of his efforts on creating a stalemate that will prevent his rivals from forming the next coalition. At the same time, he is promoting his strategy of perpetual war.
The new Netanyahu preaches zero concessions and zero compromises. To his domestic audience, he also emphasizes what he presents as another achievement: Israel’s seizure of territory along almost every one of its borders — in southern Lebanon, Syria and the Gaza Strip — which he designates as security zones. Defense Minister Israel Katz goes even further, claiming that Israel will remain in these zones for many years as part of the price it is exacting from its enemies. Katz and other ministers are constantly looking for new military adversaries: they argue that Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who is extremely hostile to Israel but can hardly be portrayed as a direct military adversary, already poses as great a threat as "Hezbollah" and "Hamas" - a claim that Netanyahu has also adopted. Some of these cabinet members even claim, without any evidence, that the president of Syria, the former jihadist Ahmed al-Sharaa, is preparing to attack Israel.
This belligerent stance completely ignores the high cost of Netanyahu’s strategy. With large numbers of soldiers deployed on the front lines for months, the Israel Defense Forces has had no time for training, and reservists are already under enormous strain, serving an average of over 100 days a year since the 2023 attack. Israel’s economy has also taken a huge hit. According to recent estimates, Israel has spent some $142 billion on the war since it began — an amount equivalent to more than half of the country’s total annual budget. This is in addition to the catastrophic damage the wars have done to Israel’s international reputation.
Amid these deepening problems and the widespread unpopularity of the current right-wing coalition, Eisenkot has built a significant lead in opinion polls. A former chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces and a man with deep security experience, he stands in stark contrast to Netanyahu and his right-wing ministers: he has been in politics for a relatively short time — having only joined it four years ago. Four days after the October 7 massacre, he joined Netanyahu’s government as a member of the military cabinet. However, he quickly fell out with the prime minister over the way the war was being fought, particularly Netanyahu’s insistence on dragging out negotiations with Hamas over the release of Israeli hostages, and left the cabinet the following June.
In December 2023, Eisenkot’s youngest son, Gal, a reservist in an elite military unit, was killed during an operation to recover the bodies of Israeli hostages in the northern Gaza Strip. In his emotional farewell speech at his son's funeral, Eisenkot promised to work to address the weaknesses revealed in Israeli society: to respond to the public's call for accountability for the security failures that led to October 7 and to address the need for political change. His words were seen as a kind of political and moral mission born of his son's death.
When Eisenkot signaled his decision to take on Netanyahu last year, he gradually gained support, including through a modest shift of traditional Likud voters to his new party, Yashar! (Hebrew for "honest, honorable"). In recent polls, Yashar! has come out ahead of Likud, and Eisenkot has built a significant lead over Netanyahu on the key question of who is better suited to be prime minister. But the candidate and his advisers clearly believe that the way to increase that lead is to proceed cautiously.
On the one hand, the diverse opposition he leads, known informally as "Anyone but Bibi", includes four parties spanning the center-right to the left. There is also a right-wing party opposing Netanyahu, whose chances of passing the electoral threshold and winning seats in the Knesset remain uncertain, as well as three Arab parties that could support a coalition against Netanyahu without participating in the government. (There is also a scenario in which one of them could even join such a coalition, as it did in 2021, when Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid formed a government.
There is also the question of where voters stand right now. Over the past three years, Israeli public opinion has shifted significantly to the right. The vast majority of Israeli Jews distrust the Palestinians, or, more generally, their Arab neighbors; they fear the prospect of a Palestinian state and agree that Israel must take a more aggressive approach to deterring threats. (Most of Israel’s Arab citizens, who make up about 20 percent of the country’s population, do not share these views.) The problem for Netanyahu is that a significant number of Israelis no longer believe he is the man who can make that vision a reality.
Eizenkot has at times tried to flank Netanyahu on the right, accusing the prime minister of taking defeatist positions. The two main opposition contenders to Eisenkot’s right — Bennett, who recently joined the centrist Lapid in the “Together” alliance, and Avigdor Lieberman — are even more hawkish. The only opposition politician willing to speak in support of a peace process with the Palestinians is Yair Golan, leader of the "Democrats" - the leftmost party in the Zionist center-left bloc. But even Golan argues that realizing the two-state vision would be extremely difficult in the short term because of the mutual trauma left by October 7 and the subsequent war.
It is therefore highly unlikely that Eisenkot and his partners will fundamentally change Israel’s foreign and security policies if they defeat Netanyahu. It would be a mistake, for example, to expect that the next Israeli government will voluntarily cooperate with proceedings in the international courts in The Hague and launch a full investigation into allegations of war crimes by the Israel Defense Forces in the Gaza Strip. This is not to say that Eisenkot does not have opportunities to change the country’s direction — especially if Trump intervenes.
Containing the Settlers
One of the increasingly disastrous policies Eisenkot will have to deal with is that in the West Bank. For the past four years, the territory has been dominated by Bezalel Smotrich, the leader of the "Religious Zionism" party, who holds both the posts of finance minister and minister responsible for the West Bank. Although his official authority covers only civil matters, not military policy, Netanyahu has given him complete freedom of action, and Smotrich has taken full advantage of it. With the government’s approval — or its tacit inaction — he has completely changed the reality on the ground in the West Bank. Since 2023, more than 200 new settlements and outposts have been built or are in the process of being built. In some cases, they have displaced the original Palestinian owners of the land.
The settler campaign to seize territory now combines a political wing with an increasingly powerful military wing. The political contingent includes ministers, Knesset members, and regional council heads, while the military wing is now a violent group of nearly 1,000 mostly young settlers (although Netanyahu has described them as “about 70 confused young men”). This group is increasingly well-armed: Israel’s far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir has expanded settlers’ access to firearms and weapons in general after 2023. The settlers’ political allies sometimes distance themselves from the military wing’s actions, and in rare cases even condemn them. In reality, however, they are all working towards the same goal: land grabbing and population displacement, which at its most extreme constitutes localized ethnic cleansing.
The West Bank has been in chaos in recent months, with the army and police refraining from confronting violent settlers who have rampaged unhindered. As this approach has led to the destruction of Palestinian homes, cars and mosques and the killing of Palestinians, the flood of criticism from foreign governments has intensified. (As Haaretz reports, attacks on Palestinians in the West Bank have increased dramatically since 2023, with dozens of communities destroyed and hundreds of Palestinians injured.) Even Trump’s ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, who openly identifies as a friend of the settler movement, has publicly condemned the violence and called on the government to rein in the extremists. In practice, however, both Smotrich and the rioters view the condemnatory statements as a temporary phenomenon: they have been given no reason to believe that the pressure could threaten their positions.
The settlers have tightened their grip on the military government in the West Bank.
The Israeli media often complains about the damage that the violence is doing to Israel’s public diplomacy abroad. But this misses the point: settler violence in the West Bank is a moral injustice that deepens the suffering caused by the excessive use of force in Gaza in response to the October 7 massacre. If this trend is allowed to continue, it could also mean a real loss of centralized military control by the Israel Defense Forces, with the West Bank increasingly falling under the influence of lawless militias.
A new Israeli centrist government could at least begin to rein in the extremists. Halting settlement expansion would be an important and achievable step, but it alone would not solve the crisis. Smotrich and his partners have scattered new settlements in strategically important locations, deliberately dividing areas under Palestinian control to disrupt the territorial continuity that could one day serve as the basis for a Palestinian state. It is not clear that this can easily be reversed. While Netanyahu governments have rarely approved limited measures to remove outposts — either under international pressure or because of court rulings — it has been more than 20 years since the last large-scale evacuation of Israeli settlers: the removal of nearly 9,000 settlers from the Gaza Strip in 2005 under Ariel Sharon. Moreover, given how many officers and soldiers in the Israel Defense Forces already identify with the settlers and the religious-right parties, any evacuation order for even a handful of settlements could lead to mass disobedience.
But the more immediate issue is the governance of daily life. Over the years, and with even greater intensity during the Smotrich era and with Netanyahu’s approval, the settlers have tightened their grip on the military administration of the territories. Senior figures in the settler leadership effectively shape policy, influence the decisions of IDF commanders in the West Bank, and exert pressure behind the scenes so that extremists involved in terrorist acts and harassment of Palestinians can operate without interference.
Since the beginning of the Netanyahu era — he has been in power for all but a year and a half since 2009 — the organizational model of the Israel Defense Forces has been gradually changing. In recent years, there has been a clear trend towards the promotion of officers close to Netanyahu, the settlers, or both. Particularly telling was the prime minister's decision to appoint as director of the "Mossad" - the Israeli foreign intelligence service - an officer whom he described as "discreet and loyal" - his military secretary, Major General Roman Hoffman, as well as another officer with hawkish religious and ideological views - Major General David Zini — to head the Shin Bet internal security service.
Along with other security service veterans, Eisenkot undoubtedly views the situation in the West Bank as an imminent threat to Israel’s future, though he has been reticent about it publicly and it is unclear how far he is prepared to go in trying to deal with it. He could certainly use administrative detention for the most violent settlers, for example, and begin to enforce accountability, with the police and Shin Bet investigating serious attacks. It seems unlikely at this point that he and his partners would purge the military’s top brass or remove officers who have collaborated excessively with violent settlers. Unlike the United States, Israel has no tradition of removing high-ranking government officials when political power changes. And since Eisenkot previously commanded many of these officers as chief of staff, he probably believes he can restore his authority over them rather than replace them entirely.
The "Trump" factor
A new Israeli leadership would have options on other fronts as well. In Gaza, an Eisenkot-led government would be less constrained by concerns about image and national pride. Eisenkot never promised a "total victory" over "Hamas", as Netanyahu did, and he has publicly criticized the prime minister for the illusions he has created among the Israeli public about what can be achieved. Since he was not directly responsible for the October 7 disaster and has never declared all-out war on the Palestinian Authority, he would likely have more room to maneuver in discussing the agreements that Trump and the international Peace Council are trying to reach for Gaza.
It is reasonable to assume that Eisenkot would not veto a more active role for the Palestinian Authority in Gaza. This could eventually—albeit slowly and cautiously—pave the way for the emergence of an alternative Palestinian leadership. Like Netanyahu, however, he would have difficulty accepting a military presence for "Hamas" in the Strip and would likely allow only a limited political role for the organization, even if it were fully disarmed—in itself a formidable challenge. And like any other Israeli leader, he would have extreme political difficulty justifying a complete withdrawal from the Strip, which would leave Israeli communities along the border relatively vulnerable to renewed infiltration from Gaza. The most plausible scenario would therefore be, at best, a reduced but still significant Israeli zone of control in Gaza, accompanied by phased plans for some form of internationally monitored Palestinian Authority participation in the unoccupied part.
In both Lebanon and Syria, the new Israeli government would also have more flexibility than Netanyahu has allowed himself. Eisenkot would almost certainly set strict conditions for Hezbollah's disarmament. But unlike Netanyahu, he recognizes the benefits of ending military confrontations and prefers this to keeping fronts open indefinitely. And there may be some scope for diplomatic progress in this regard, if Trump so desires.
Syria is already a real possibility: as has been reported in recent months, al-Sharaa is interested in reaching a security agreement that would include an Israeli withdrawal from territories captured by Syria by 2024 in exchange for a partial normalization of relations. Eisenkot could see this as a reasonable interim arrangement with limited inherent risk. It is also possible that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman might view an Eisenkot government as a chance for a fresh start after Israel’s toxic right-wing rule and be more willing to begin talks to normalize relations.
In all of these cases, however, what is actually achieved will depend largely on the relationship between the next Israeli prime minister and the US president. During his first term and early in his second, Trump enjoyed a close relationship with Netanyahu, but things have since soured. At Netanyahu’s urging, the US administration has been embroiled in a war with Iran that has been going on for almost six months — in complete contradiction to everything Trump has preached for years. The US president and his entourage have rejected Netanyahu’s repeated calls for a return to full-scale war with Tehran — although such a possibility remains — and have periodically blamed the Israeli leader for the failure of the war.
Amid this chaos, Trump is seeking a diplomatic victory in one of the other arenas in the Middle East — Lebanon or the Gaza Strip. In both cases, he is exerting partial pressure on Netanyahu to limit offensive operations against "Hezbollah" and "Hamas". It is impossible to rule out more dramatic steps at some point — including American demands that the Israel Defense Forces withdraw from some of the territory they have seized in southern Lebanon and Gaza, without simultaneously insisting that promises to disarm Hezbollah and Hamas be fulfilled in the near future. For now, these scenarios seem unlikely. Such pressure from Trump would be a political disaster for Netanyahu and would further underscore the extent to which his promises of "total victory" were empty fantasies.
For an Eisenkot government, however, the right kind of U.S. pressure could provide an opportunity to gradually wind down some of the fronts, especially if there is a narrower issue on which Trump can take credit for success, and Israel's interests are also protected. More ambitiously, there may be an opportunity to limit Netanyahu's strategy of perpetual war. But much will depend on whether the new prime minister can find common ground with the US president. Compared to Netanyahu, Eisenkot has scant diplomatic experience and, with the exception of the chiefs of staff, has met almost no high-ranking foreign officials. Unlike Netanyahu, he also completely lacks the demonstrative charisma that appeals to Trump in his dealings with other leaders. And if the US president withdraws from active engagement with the region, there is a risk that any significant change in Israeli policy will be blocked.
The first meeting at the White House between the president and the new Israeli prime minister could be an awkward experience. Trump may miss Netanyahu's polished American English and his partisan involvement in American politics. (In Washington political circles, Netanyahu is jokingly called the "Republican senator from Jerusalem"). If necessary, however, the American president could cope with the more reserved Eisenkot and his more ordinary English. After all, Trump likes political winners. Eisenkot will earn his respect — as long as he can win the election.