The strange case of Gadi Eisenkot, a candidate for prime minister born in Tiberias to parents who immigrated from Morocco, a former IDF chief of staff and retired lieutenant general, a member of the security cabinet during the war, a bereaved father to his son Gal, who was killed in Gaza, an honest and decent man, a local hero who rose from the ground up and is now placing on the table a proposal to unite forces for the good of the Israeli public, yet barely scrapes together 10 Knesset seats, says far more about the Israeli public than about Eisenkot himself.
In a functioning society, he would already be setting out with a guaranteed promise of at least 40 seats: young women and men from the northern and southern periphery; residents of Tiberias; Israelis of Moroccan descent; second and third generation immigrants from the Maghreb; impoverished women living on welfare; exhausted men after nine-hour shifts in factories; career soldiers and reservists; parents worried about their children in uniform. Someone who lost a son in war is unlikely to rush to send other people’s children to die. Responsible citizens who saw him sit in the security cabinet and welcomed the moment he entered it. In practice, there is no politically engaged Israeli who should not at least seriously consider the unique possibility of a worthy candidate for prime minister.
More than anything else, the Eisenkot case has exposed, day after day since he announced his candidacy, the double standards of Likud voters. These are the same voters who, through opinion polls, are paving their leader’s path back to the prime minister’s chair after the elections. They voluntarily provide him with political tailwinds and supply him with the power to stitch together future coalition agreements in which they themselves will be discriminated against and left carrying the burden of service at best, or rendered invisible and left alone to demand accountability for the murder of their children and the establishment of a state commission of inquiry at worst.
This is a dangerous voting ethic, composed of fragments of imagined ancestral tradition and splinters of an irrelevant restoration of past glory, represented by a leader of Ashkenazi origin who desecrates the Sabbath and violates religious law, for whom the Western Wall is merely a place to harvest votes and rabbis are vote contractors.
Out of a desire to cling to fragments of an imagined ancestral tradition, Likud voters are represented by a leader of Ashkenazi origin who desecrates the Sabbath and violates religious law, for whom the Western Wall is merely a place to gather votes and rabbis are nothing more than vote brokers.
A coherent, thinking public that managed to score 65 in high school civics would have long ago identified the democratic fraud Benjamin Netanyahu is selling. A leader aging without grace, who has lost the ability to vacate his seat for one of the Barkats or at least one of the Katzes, symbolizes more than anything the Likud’s stone age. A party incapable, under any circumstances, of refreshing the Netanyahu column. This is called one-man rule, and there is nothing in it that allows for new growth. This, incidentally, is why elections are held every four years. The political blood is on the hands of everyone who sat in Israeli governments and failed, as a first step, to limit the prime minister’s tenure to two terms.
They have long forgotten what it means to be Jewish
Likud voters and their captive appendages, voters of Shas and United Torah Judaism, as well as those appendages who would not secure a seat in any other coalition, voters of Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir, have long forgotten what it means to be Jewish. Two consecutive years of committing the sin of failing to redeem captives; three years of public deception, in which they received a mandate in democratic elections only to attempt to assassinate democracy; and nearly five years of following a criminal suspect who has not recently visited the land of the 613 commandments and the 365 prohibitions, where laws carry real meaning. From a bloc characterized across all metrics as older, mostly age 50 and above, identified with the religious and traditional sectors, largely from the northern and southern periphery and with a higher proportion of men, one might have expected a bit more loyalty to God and a bit less devotion to life under Jewish authoritarian rule.
The Likud voter daily tolerates the rioting representatives of Judaism, who rampage over imaginary fears of dissecting schoolchildren and burn trash bins on the road to the coalition. They accept the violent provocations accompanying the growing threat of “we will die rather than enlist,” the tangible danger posed to ultra-Orthodox children whose parents and rabbis failed to protect them and who may be trampled under a raging crowd in Meron, without anyone ever being held accountable.
Merav BetitoAnyone who has already decided to prefer Netanyahu over Eisenkot likely no longer remembers what standard of leadership is possible. They have forgotten that they truly deserve something beyond the shrieking performances of Knesset members Galit Distel-Atbaryan and Tali Gotliv, the official torchbearers of the Netanyahu regime. After 20 years on the winning side, they no longer mind swallowing the “draft law” with enthusiasm. Some are patiently waiting for the next serving of lies, prepared to die in war if necessary, suffering from political amnesia that causes them to forget that this is the most draft-dodging government in Israel’s history.
The strange case of Gadi Eisenkot, the only candidate for prime minister currently focused on what is good for the public rather than on what he needs to do to get elected, tells the story of Netanyahu’s victory more than anything else. Not only at the ballot box, but in the warped and chaotic value system he offers his voters, a world with no Jewish tradition or Zionist values, only mandates and control of Knesset committees.