Why Gadi Eisenkot is rejecting the haredi political embrace that once helped Netanyahu win

To understand Eisenkot’s tepid reaction - and how what would have been a political asset in the 1990s has become an electoral liability today - is to understand how profoundly Israeli politics has changed.

“Due to our many sins, we are in a secular, non-haredi state,” Yosef bemoaned during his weekly religious sermon. “We pray that everyone repents. There are those who will repent; there are those who won’t.”

Then came the surprise.

Yosef went so far as to suggest that Shas could support Eisenkot as the next prime minister.

“Gadi Eisenkot is a good person, a warm Jew; he loves those who study Torah,” Yosef said, gleaning personal anecdotes from an interview Eisenkot had recently given the haredi website Kikar Hashabbat. “His grandmother voted Shas and wanted him to be a rabbi; while that didn’t happen, you could trust him.”

By contrast, Yosef blasted Netanyahu, who spent the week pushing through highly controversial legislation demanded by Shas leader Arye Deri to freeze the arrest of haredi draft evaders. “Netanyahu cheated us on the conscription law,” he said. “He cannot be trusted; he’s a liar.”

Electoral gold, right? The spiritual leader of a party projected to win eight seats – enough, according to many polls, to push an Eisenkot-led coalition over the 61-seat threshold – was publicly signaling openness to replacing Netanyahu.

In another era, prime ministerial aspirants would have celebrated.

When Shimon Peres battled Netanyahu in the 1990s, a public blessing from a leading haredi rabbi was the sort of breakthrough campaign strategists dreamed about. Labor and Likud leaders alike made highly publicized pilgrimages to the homes of haredi rabbis, donning kippot, asking for blessings, and treating an endorsement as a massive political victory.

But not today.

Asked on Channel 12 on Wednesday about Yosef’s remarks, Eisenkot quickly distanced himself from them.

“I saw them in the media,” he said coldly, adding that he hadn’t met Yosef in a decade.

He was even more emphatic in dismissing reports of contacts with the haredi parties. “I am not flirting with them,” he said. “I haven’t seen a single Shas MK over the past year. I haven’t seen one, and I haven’t spoken to one.”

This response reflects the profound shift in the issues shaping Israeli elections.

In the 1990s, many centrist and left-wing voters prioritized the Oslo Accords and the peace process; they grumbled about “religious coercion” and funding for yeshivot, but those concerns generally took a back seat to diplomacy. Coalition math was coalition math, and if Shas was needed to advance the peace process, many accepted the necessity.

Today, however, the defining fault line has moved.

Much of Eisenkot’s potential electorate – including many of the soft-right voters he hopes to attract – view haredi conscription as a top priority, often because they and their children are paying a high personal price for this lack of conscription.

Against that backdrop, any hint of a deal would fuel accusations that Eisenkot is ready to trade away IDF draft reform for political gain.

This is especially true given Yosef’s own record. He has argued not only that yeshiva students should remain exempt from military service, but that even haredim who are not studying full-time should not be drafted. He has urged recipients of draft notices to throw them into the toilet and suggested that if ultra-Orthodox men are forced into the army, they should emigrate.

For a candidate whose campaign revolves around the need to repair Israel after October 7 - including addressing the manpower crisis in the IDF - embracing Yosef’s endorsement wouldn’t be a bridge to power. Instead, it would be instantly weaponized by political rivals as a modern-day “stinking maneuver” - a callback to Peres’s infamous, failed 1990 attempt to bring down a unity government through secret, backroom deals with the haredi parties.

Yet distancing himself from Shas is not the same as ruling it out, and that distinction lies at the heart of Eisenkot’s political strategy.

Eisenkot said in the Channel 12 interview that he would rule out as a coalition partner any party that rejects the principle of military, national, or civilian service. But that means the converse is also true: he would form a government with parties that accept those principles, including the haredi and Arab parties if they accept those rules of engagement.

That position immediately distinguishes him from one of his most natural coalition partners, Yisrael Beytenu chairman Avigdor Liberman, who has repeatedly declared that he will not sit with either the haredi or Arab parties.

Eisenkot, by contrast, is being extraordinarily careful not to box himself in.

For instance, in the Kikar Hashabbat interview, he was asked directly whether he would establish a government dependent on Arab parties.

“We will establish a Zionist, statesmanlike government,” he said, sidestepping the issue.

Pressed three separate times, he dodged the issue three separate times. Finally, the interviewer, Yishai Cohen, asked: “If you have to choose between relying on the Arab parties or on the haredi parties, which would you prefer?”

Again, Eisenkot declined the invitation.

Instead, he outlined three principles that, he said, would determine coalition eligibility.

First, recognition of Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people with a solid Jewish majority. Second, acceptance of the principles embodied in the Declaration of Independence. Third, acceptance of the obligation to serve – whether in the IDF or through National Service.

“I say this both to the haredim and to the Arabs,” he added.

The answer was revealing not because it answered the question, but because it didn’t. It left every political door open.

The same pattern emerged in the Channel 12 interview when Dana Weiss asked if he would unequivocally say he will not sit with Netanyahu.

Netanyahu, Eisenkot said, along with “all the other members of his security cabinet,” is “not fit to hold any leadership position” in Israel. Pressed to give a “yes or no answer,” he demurred. “It’s a question I don’t even need to answer.”

Wrong, it’s less a question he doesn’t need to answer than one he does not want to answer.

And for understandable reasons. Why voluntarily reduce your coalition options months before an election whose outcome remains impossible to predict?

Naftali Bennett provides a cautionary tale.

Before the 2021 election, Bennett repeatedly promised not to form a government with Yair Lapid or rely on Mansour Abbas’s Ra’am Party. He even signed a written pledge to that effect.

After the election, political reality forced him to do precisely that. Five years later, many voters on the soft Right still cite that reversal as evidence that he cannot be trusted.

Eisenkot appears determined not to repeat the mistake. He is allowing himself maximum flexibility before Election Day, knowing that the coalition math after the votes are counted may look very different from today’s polling.

That strategy also invites inevitable comparisons with the last former IDF chief of staff to enter politics amid enormous public expectations: Benny Gantz.

Much has already been written comparing Eisenkot to his erstwhile ally, and the similarities are obvious.

Both reached politics after serving as IDF chief of staff. Both entered public life carrying enormous reservoirs of public trust. Both benefited from an electorate inclined to view senior generals as competent, responsible national leaders.

And both saw their parties surge almost immediately in the polls.

But there is also an important difference. When Gantz burst onto the political scene in 2018, much of his appeal rested on ambiguity.

Few voters knew where he stood on many of the central issues confronting the country, and for months he revealed remarkably little. Whether by instinct or by design, he allowed voters to project their own views onto him.

Eisenkot has been considerably less opaque.

For starters, he is not entering politics from scratch, having served three years in the Knesset as a National Unity MK and eight months in Netanyahu’s national-emergency government after Oct. 7.

The public knows considerably more about him than it knew about Gantz in 2019.

Still, Nahum Barnea captured something when he wrote last month in Yediot Aharonot that Eisenkot’s rise is being driven largely by emotion; by an emotional affinity with a former chief of staff, a bereaved father (Eisenkot’s son and two of his nephews were killed in Gaza), a man from the periphery (Eilat), and someone of Moroccan descent.

These are, for many, important emotional markers. But they don’t tell the whole story.

Eisenkot’s appeal may ultimately rest on something deeper than emotion alone.

For three decades, Netanyahu has assembled a political coalition built not only around ideology but also around identity.

His was always a coalition rooted in the periphery, among Mizrahi voters, among traditional Jews, among Israelis who often felt culturally dismissed by the country’s old Ashkenazi Labor establishment and elite.

Eisenkot arrives possessing many of those same cultural credentials. He is Moroccan. He comes from the periphery. He speaks respectfully about Jewish tradition. He served as chief of staff.

Yet politically, he offers something very different from Netanyahu. That may explain why he has focused so much of his campaigning outside Tel Aviv and in the North and South.

It may also explain why, despite his harsh criticism of the government’s performance, he has generally avoided the personal invective against Netanyahu that has become commonplace elsewhere in the opposition.

Eisenkot seems to understand that voters who might consider crossing over from Likud are unlikely to respond to relentless attacks on the man they have supported for years.

The question his campaign appears to be testing is whether identity politics on the Israeli Right can be weakened by a candidate who shares much of that identity while offering a different style of leadership.

Regardless of how the electorate answers that question, Yosef’s embrace – and Eisenkot’s determination to escape it – already tells an important story.