According to the 1970s anarchist slogan, ‘No matter who you vote for, the government always gets in’. That’s certainly true for the election in Israel this month (27 October), even if the winner is not Prime Minister Binyamin (‘Bibi’) Netanyahu himself. All the other party leaders, says Israeli journalist Anshel Pfeffer, are just ‘wanna-Bibis.’
Or rather, all the rest except one. Former general Gadi Eisenkot, the main opposition candidate, is the ‘anti-Bibi,’ says Pfeffer. He’s a working-class hero who joined the army as a private and worked his way up to chief of staff of the Israel Defence Forces (IDF). He retired and went into politics only four years ago, he’s modest and honest, what’s not to love?
Eisenkot certainly stands out among the party leaders in terms of style, but not so much in terms of actual policies. He was realistic enough to know that ‘total victory’ over Hamas was not likely, but his ‘Dahiya’ strategy of causing “immense damage and destruction” (in Lebanon in the 2006 war) foreshadowed the cataclysm that the IDF has inflicted on Gaza since 2023.