Israel Holds Tight National Election as Netanyahu Faces Eisenkot

Israelis are being asked to treat Tuesday’s election as a morality play about Benjamin Netanyahu: the divisive incumbent against the bereaved general and his call for unity. It is a flattering story. It is the wrong one.

The country is voting inside a war that began with the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. What matters is not who speaks more gently about healing. It is who can form a government that will decide, and stand by the decision, while Hamas’s future, the northern border and Iran’s axis remain open. Gadi Eisenkot’s Yashar campaign offers unity and an inquiry. Both words are serious. Neither is a plan.

Eisenkot has a claim on respect. He was chief of staff. His son was killed fighting in Gaza. A formal commission on October 7 is not a radical thought; Israel seated one after 1973, and the reckoning did the country good. An inquiry planted in the middle of a campaign, before that war has been brought to a conclusion, is something else. It is a verdict looking for a courtroom.

Containment was not forced on Netanyahu by generals acting against his will. He adopted it: Hamas managed rather than destroyed, Qatari cash as a substitute for a decision, a barrier in place of a strategy, a northern border entrusted to the hope that Hezbollah liked its Lebanese base more than it liked a war. The high command adopted it too, including in the years Eisenkot stood at the top of that command. A campaign that investigates the politician and crowns the institution is not a full reckoning. It is a plea bargain for the professional class that designed the policy and called it sophistication.

In coalition life, “unity” means the hard call dies in a cabinet built to block its own majority — whether that call is finishing Hamas as a governing force, holding ground allies will pressure Israel to trade away, or passing a budget and a draft law in the same year. Israel already lived the period when “anyone but Bibi” was mistaken for a program. It produced five elections, caretaker cabinets, and a political class better at vetoes than at victory. Israel’s enemies know how to read a deadlock. They have had practice.

The right should make this argument and still flinch at its own offer. A nationalist camp that keeps one set of families in the reserves for months, then trades a real conscription law for ultra-Orthodox seats, is not defending the state. It is leasing it. October 7 ended the fiction that mass exemptions are a quaint communal arrangement. They are a broken covenant, paid by religious Zionists and secular draftees. If this bloc wins and again spends military service as coalition currency, it will have answered its own voters with contempt. That failure will outlast any speech about the Supreme Court.

No one needs a shrine to Netanyahu to see the alternative clearly. He has been prime minister too long. The trials are a national drag he never had the discipline to close. Corners of his alliance confuse provocation with strength, and a serious right would be preparing a successor rather than a myth. A successor is not on offer from the other side. Restoration is: the old security and legal veto back in possession, the elected majority back in the dock, the pre-2022 arrangement renamed unity. People who lived under that arrangement are not required to remember it as either safe or united.

The judicial fight was mishandled — rushed, personalized, radioactive — and patriots were among its opponents. What remains is simpler than the protest slogans. A self-perpetuating legal class claimed the last word on security policy and on who may sit in government, and called the claim the rule of law. A wartime cabinet that must litigate its way to a decision is not a democracy in good health. It is a government advertising weakness.

If Tuesday yields no majority — months of auction, a minority cabinet living from confidence vote to confidence vote — that is the outcome Israel’s adversaries should most want. It is not proof the system is vibrant. It is a pause they will use.

The defensible right-wing case is narrow and should stay narrow. The prime minister is not innocent of October 7. No prime minister is. Guilt, however, is not a program. Unity is not a decision. An inquiry is not a substitute for ending the war that made an inquiry necessary. Elect a government that can govern. Then make it stop excusing its partners from the country it says it is trying to save.