Gadi Eisenkot’s office is small and sparsely furnished. There are no medals on display, no photographs with foreign dignitaries or political luminaries, none of the trappings of a decorated general who rose to become chief of staff of Israel’s military. The space, tucked inside a commercial building in the Tel Aviv suburb of Ramat HaSharon, is conspicuously devoid of ostentation.

Beside his desk sit three photographs. One is of his son Gal, who was killed fighting in Gaza in Dec. 2023, two months after the war began. Another is a family portrait taken during a visit to Washington, D.C., years earlier, a picture of a family still whole, before the war shattered it. The third shows Gal next to one of his closest friends from their military unit, who was also killed in combat. “He was a settler,” Eisenkot says of his son’s friend.

The image conveys a snapshot of contemporary Israel: the son of a centrist military commander and a young man from a West Bank settlement, products of different worlds, serving and dying alongside one another.

As we speak, Eisenkot, dressed in his trademark black polo and black pants, pauses to pick up the photographs. He recalls the days after his son’s death. After three nights of sitting shiva, the Jewish mourning ritual, he left his grieving family to attend a meeting of Benjamin Netanyahu’s war cabinet. “I decided to go forward,” he says.

Now Eisenkot hopes to move not only himself forward but his country. The former general has emerged as a leading challenger to Netanyahu, Israel’s longest-serving prime minister. Polls suggest a close contest, with Eisenkot seeking to assemble a coalition capable of ending Netanyahu’s rule three years after he presided over the worst security failure in Israel’s history, launched the war in Gaza, and led the country into deepening international isolation.

Eisenkot has cultivated a reputation for integrity, competence, and personal rectitude, forging relationships across Israel’s fractured political spectrum. But perhaps his most powerful political asset is his devastating personal loss. In a country scarred by the trauma of Oct. 7 and the war that followed, Eisenkot’s grief is familiar to countless Israelis. His effort to persevere mirrors a nation’s struggle.

The Oct. 27 election will be more than a referendum on Netanyahu. It will test whether Israelis are prepared to chart a different course after three years of bloodshed, recriminations, and cultural fracture. The country is deeply polarized, increasingly castigated by the rest of the world, and confronting a resurgence of antisemitism. Voters will determine not only who governs Israel but what kind of nation Israel will become—and whether its next leader can begin to heal the divisions that have left the world’s only Jewish state facing one of the gravest crises in its history.

Netanyahu, of course, can never be counted out. The consummate political survivor, he has weathered scandals, electoral defeats, and corruption charges. His credibility has suffered, but many Israelis still regard him as the only leader who can protect them in a dangerous region. Eisenkot could assemble a coalition with other opposition figures, including former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, Yair Lapid, Avigdor Lieberman, and Yair Golan. Netanyahu would depend on the far-right parties led by Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, whose ultra-nationalist politics have found a receptive audience among younger right-wing Israelis.

Israel’s fragmented parliamentary system offers no guarantee of a decisive outcome. Negotiations could drag on for weeks, or fail altogether, sending Israelis back to the polls. Eisenkot tells me he will not serve in a unity government with Netanyahu under any circumstances. He has framed his ambitions around nothing less than the sustenance of the Zionist enterprise: the ability of Jews to live safely in a state of their own in their ancestral homeland.

In his telling, that means confronting the threat from Iran; restoring Israel’s standing in the world; preserving the country’s character as a Jewish democracy; and finding an accommodation with the Palestinians, who lay claim to the same land and have their own aspirations to self-determination.

“What holds the country together is the Jewish and democratic ethos of the majority of Israelis,” says Yossi Klein Halevi, a bestselling Israeli author and senior fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem. “That's what we're going to have to try to repair. That is really what Eisenkot is offering the country.”

For Eisenkot, the challenge is not merely to replace Netanyahu but to lead Israel beyond the trauma that has consumed it since Oct. 7. He sees a country caught between the imperative to protect itself and the need to recover the democratic values, national solidarity, and international legitimacy that are essential to its survival. “I feel like it’s a historic mission—to save the state of Israel,” he says , invoking his son and the many others who died defending the nation. “We owe it to them to be worthy of the sacrifice they made.”

On Oct. 7, 2023, Eisenkot awoke shortly after 6 a.m., stirred by nothing more than his circadian rhythm. When he turned on the television, he saw the first images of a catastrophe unfolding a short drive south of his home. Thousands of Hamas-led militants were pouring into southern Israel by land, air, and sea. They rampaged through kibbutzim and the streets of Sderot, descended on the Nova music festival, where they murdered civilians, raped women, desecrated the bodies of the dead, and dragged hundreds of hostages back into Gaza.

Many filmed themselves carrying out the atrocities, celebrating the carnage as it unfolded. Desperate Israelis called the authorities, pleading for help that would not arrive for hours. By the time security forces regained control, entire communities had been devastated by the worst slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust.

A couple embraces while visiting memorial markers honoring victims at the Nova music festival site as Israel marks the third anniversary of the Oct. 7th 2023 attacks on October 7, 2026 in Re'im, Israel. —Erik Marmor—Getty Images Eisenkot’s son Gal, 25, was staying at the family home in Herzliya, outside of Tel Aviv, rather than his apartment near Tel Aviv University, where he was studying bioinformatics. He had come home for the holiday of Simchat Torah. Eisenkot woke him. “Gal, come to see the TV,” he said. “There are trucks of Hamas inside Sderot. This means war. Where is your military equipment?”

Gal had completed his compulsory service and was now a reservist, trained as a combat medic. Eisenkot drove him to his unit’s base, where lines of cars were already forming as reservists converged. “I knew right away that Israel, that the world, would never be the same,” Eisenkot says.

Four days later, with a ground invasion of Gaza looming, Netanyahu asked Eisenkot to join a small war cabinet. Eisenkot had served under Netanyahu as chief of the general staff from Feb. 2015 to Jan. 2019, but the two men were now political adversaries. Netanyahu had hoped to project unity to a divided public, much of which had come to distrust or despise him. After months of mass demonstrations against his efforts to curtail the power of the judiciary, he sought to rally the country behind the coming war.

One of Eisenkot’s first priorities in the war cabinet was to prevent the opening of a second front against Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed Shiite militant group in Lebanon. Some of Netanyahu’s senior ministers, particularly Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, favored launching a preemptive offensive against Hezbollah, despite objections from the Biden Administration. Eisenkot argued that Israel needed to concentrate its military resources on defeating Hamas in the south before embarking on another major conflict. On that question, he prevailed.

On another matter, one he considered even more urgent, Netanyahu was less receptive. Hamas had abducted 251 people on Oct. 7, and Eisenkot believed securing their release should take precedence over a full-scale military campaign. It was, in his view, a fundamental obligation of the state, part of the covenant between a country and its citizens. Once Israel plunged into a prolonged ground war, he feared, the prospects of recovering the hostages alive would diminish. “My idea was to do the hostage deal, and after that, defeat Hamas,” Eisenkot tells me.

Netanyahu chose a different course. Israel launched a ground invasion following an extensive aerial bombardment of Hamas’s military infrastructure, including its vast network of subterranean tunnels. Hamas had embedded military facilities and weapons in densely populated areas, deliberately exposing civilians to grave danger. The military campaign that ensued has killed more than 70,000 Palestinians, according to Gaza’s health ministry, which does not distinguish between civilians and combatants.

Two months into the war, Eisenkot suffered a catastrophe of his own. He was at a military headquarters, studying a satellite map showing the positions of Israeli battalions near some of the fiercest fighting in Gaza. Fifteen minutes later, a major general who had once served under his command approached him.

“Gadi, come to me,” the officer said. “Gal is critically injured. Go home”

Eisenkot had spent more than four decades in the Israeli military. He knew what those words meant. If his son were still alive, he would have been told to go to the hospital, not home. “I understood he was dead,” he tells me.

Gal died in combat alongside his friend Eyal Berkowitz, a young man from a West Bank settlement. It was Berkowitz whose photograph Eisenkot had shown me in his office, standing beside Gal.

Thousands attended Gal’s funeral, which was broadcast on national television. Across the country, Israelis watched one of their most decorated commanders mourn the loss of his own son. Eisenkot delivered a eulogy, his voice trembling. “I promise you that we will continue to be a united and happy family, so that your sacrifice and that of the other fallen will not be in vain and that we will be worthy of it,” he said. “I salute you, beloved son.”

Three days later, Eisenkot returned to Netanyahu’s war cabinet. He watched as Netanyahu’s prosecution of the war turned Israel into a pariah state. Images circulated daily on social media of children killed as collateral damage in strikes on Hamas targets. Netanyahu resisted allowing aid into the Strip. The world accused Israel of using starvation as a weapon of war and committing war crimes against a trapped population of 2 million.

Israeli soldiers load tank shells in Be’eri, near the Gaza border, on Oct. 14, 2023, as tens of thousands of troops prepared for a ground offensive aimed at capturing Gaza City and destroying Hamas’s leadership. —Sergey Ponomarev—The New York Times/Redux A view shows widespread destruction and displacement shelters in Gaza, Palestine on October 21, 2026. —Faiz Qreqa—Middle East Images/AFP/Getty Images He recalls his final meeting with Netanyahu, in late June 2024, when the prime minister appeared before a special intelligence committee in the Knesset.

Eisenkot pressed him on how he intended to end the war. “What is your exit plan?” he asked. Netanyahu offered none, Eisenkot says, insisting instead that Israel would continue fighting until it achieved “total victory.”

Eisenkot reached into his briefcase and pulled out a book: Master of the Game: Henry Kissinger and the Art of Middle East Diplomacy , Martin Indyk’s 2021 study of Kissinger’s statecraft. Indyk, who served in senior diplomatic roles under Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, was a friend of Eisenkot’s and a longtime critic of Netanyahu. “Have you read this?”Eisenkot asked. Netanyahu said he had not. Eisenkot urged him to do so, arguing that military force without a diplomatic strategy could not deliver a lasting victory.

“Gadi,” Eisenkot recalls Netanyahu replying, “I have a different view about the meaning of the word strategy.”

Eisenkot was enraged by Netanyahu’s refusal to prioritize the hostages. The suspicion among Netanyahu’s critics was that he feared a deal would fracture his coalition, potentially forcing elections that could remove him from power and trigger an inquiry into the failures of Oct. 7––much like the Agranat Commission, established after the 1973 Yom Kippur War, that led to the downfall of Golda Meir. In Eisenkot’s telling, Netanyahu put the preservation of his own power above the lives he was entrusted to protect. “He neglected them,” Eisenkot says. A spokesperson for the prime minister did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

On June 9, 2024, Eisenkot resigned from the emergency government, ending his eight-month effort to influence the war from within. His departure, alongside that of Benny Gantz, effectively ended the national unity arrangement and precipitated the dissolution of the war cabinet. But the war was not finished exacting its toll on Eisenkot’s family. One nephew had already died fighting in Gaza on the same day of his son’s funeral. Another was killed 11 months later.

Over the next two years, Netanyahu presided over a succession of extraordinary military operations. Israel killed Yahya Sinwar, the Hamas leader who helped mastermind the Oct. 7 massacre, and Ismail Haniyeh, the group’s longtime political chief. It assassinated Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah and dealt devastating blows to the Iranian-backed militia in Lebanon, including through an audacious operation that turned thousands of its members’ pagers into explosive devices. After Donald Trump returned to the White House, Netanyahu persuaded the president to join Israel’s 12-day war against Iran in June 2025, with U.S. forces striking three of Iran’s principal nuclear facilities.

But the military triumphs told only part of the story. For two years, the war in Gaza devastated the Palestinian enclave, killed tens of thousands of people, and left Israeli hostages languishing in captivity. In October 2025, under intense pressure, Netanyahu agreed to a ceasefire and hostage-exchange deal that halted the fighting and secured the release of the remaining living hostages. “Netanyahu dragged it” out, Eisenkot says. “President Trump pushed him to do it.”

Months later, the confrontation with Iran entered a more perilous phase. Netanyahu helped persuade Trump to join a broader war against the Islamic Republic, a conflict that grew difficult to end and intensified criticism of Israel in the United States, including among elements of the American right. Around 60% of U.S. adults now hold an unfavorable view of Israel, according to a 2026 Pew survey.

Now, for the first time since Oct. 7, Netanyahu must face the electorate. Eisenkot thinks Netanyahu has done little to help Israel recover, instead perpetuating the trauma, cultivating a siege mentality and an atmosphere of never-ending conflict that allows him to cast himself as the indispensable wartime leader. “I don’t know how Netanyahu wants to close the story,” Eisenkot says. He decided he would try to write the ending himself.

Eisenkot photographed in Jerusalem on Oct. 22. —Ofir Berman for TIME Eisenkot’s strategy has been to assemble a broad coalition. To his right, he envisions Bennett and the secular nationalist Liberman; to his left, Golan, leader of the Democrats, the successor to the historic Labor Party, and Lapid, the former television host who briefly served as prime minister. “I told them, let’s build a big party,” Eisenkot says.

He held a series of talks with Bennett about the prospect of running together, but ultimately declined, calculating that separate campaigns would give the opposition bloc a better chance of expanding their support. Instead, Eisenkot chose to lead his own party, Yashar. Bennett subsequently joined forces with Lapid. “I thought I had the ability to unite Israel, unite this divided country,” Eisenkot says, citing his military experience and relationships across the political spectrum. “It’s not from arrogance but from deep commitment to bring change and defeat Netanyahu.”

Eisenkot’s background also carries significance. Born in Tiberias to Moroccan Jewish immigrants and raised in the southern port city of Eilat, he belongs to Israel’s Mizrahi community, Jews of Middle Eastern and North African descent who have long faced discrimination from the country’s predominantly Ashkenazi establishment. If elected, he would become Israel’s first Mizrahi prime minister.

Eizenkot has campaigned on restoring public trust in government, strengthening Israel’s security, and preserving its foundation as a Jewish democracy. He has pledged to dismantle illegal outposts in the West Bank and crack down on extremist Jewish settlers who terrorize Palestinians, expand military or civilian national service across Israeli society, confront the threat from Iran, pursue a political resolution to the Palestinian conflict, repair Israel’s frayed relationships abroad, and restore national unity.

Travel through the country and the psychological scars of Oct. 7 are difficult to miss. They surface in the impatience of drivers, the intensity of political arguments, the restless energy of a society still living in the shadow of a nightmare. The country seems suspended in its aftermath, unable to separate the horrors of the past from the anxieties of the present. In some ways, it is still Oct. 8, 2023.

During our interview, Eisenkot and I discuss Bessel van der Kolk, the Harvard psychiatrist whose bestselling book, The Body Keeps the Score , explores how overwhelming experiences can leave people psychologically trapped in the past. Trauma, van der Kolk argues, can persist long after the danger has passed, disrupting the ability to integrate painful memories and move forward.

Eisenkot believes Netanyahu has purposefully made that process harder. Nearly three years on, Israel has yet to establish a state commission of inquiry into the failures that allowed the attack to happen. Without an authoritative accounting, Eisenkot argues, the country cannot fully reckon with the catastrophe. He pledges to establish such a commission within his first 14 days in office, with a mandate to investigate not only Oct. 7 but the decade of decisions that preceded it, including his own tenure leading the military.

He points to widespread suspicions that the attack involved some form of betrayal from within, a belief he attributes partly to Netanyahu’s efforts to shift responsibility onto military and intelligence officials. Netanyahu and members of his family have promoted disputed allegations that security officials deliberately withheld warnings before the Oct. 7 attack, including the claim that they failed to wake the prime minister as Hamas launched its assault—part of a broader effort by Netanyahu and his allies to shift responsibility for the security failures onto the military and intelligence establishment.

Recent polls show a close contest, with Yashar running ahead of Likud. But neither Netanyahu’s right-wing alliance nor the parties seeking to replace him appear assured of the 61 seats required for a majority in the 120-member Knesset.

“I think the chances for a unity government are high because we will be more than happy to have Eisenkot joining our coalition,” says Ohad Tal, a Knesset Member running with Smotrich’s Religious Zionism party. “If the other side will have a majority with the Arabs, God save us.”

Forming an alternative majority could require support from Arab parties, a fraught prospect in Israeli politics. Eisenkot will not commit to bringing them into his government. Instead, he has set four conditions for any coalition partner: recognition of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state; adherence to the principles of its Declaration of Independence; acceptance of a national-service obligation for all citizens, with civilian alternatives to military service; and agreement that Hamas is a terrorist organization that must be dismantled. None of the Arab parties has yet to accept the latter tenet.

“I understand that in the Israeli system we must have a big bloc,” Eisenkot says. “It’s a huge challenge. I’m doing my best from morning till night. I’m convinced we’ll defeat Netanyahu.”

People walk past election campaign flags and a car plastered with images of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, ahead of the upcoming elections, in Jerusalem on October 16, 2026. —John Wessels—AFP/Getty Images If Eisenkot succeeds , he says, he will break with Netanyahu’s defining political method: cultivating a siege mentality that pits Israel against the world. “The main challenge is to break Netanyahu’s method with them and us,” Eisenkot tells me. “This is poison to our society.”

Nowhere is that more consequential than in the United States, where support for Israel has deteriorated, particularly among younger Americans. “Netanyahu knows the United States better than all of us, but today he can’t improve Israel’s relationship with the U.S.,” Eisenkot says. “He may have a good relationship with the administration today, but the situation in universities, with American Jewry, with the bipartisan relations, are at their lowest.”

One of Eisenkot’s proposals is to gradually wean Israel off American military assistance. He believes the dependence has become a source of friction in Washington, and runs counter to the Zionist ideal of a Jewish state capable of guaranteeing its own security. “Maybe it will take five to 10 years,” he says, “and it is our interest to do it.”

Eisenkot opposes the establishment of a Palestinian state, a goal long championed by much of the international community. But he also recognizes the profound danger of a one-state future: Israel would face a choice between granting millions of Palestinians citizenship and voting rights, which would end its Jewish majority, or denying them those rights, which would undermine its claim to be a democracy. He wants to prevent the vision of permanent Israeli control advanced by Smotrich and Ben-Gvir. “Smotrich’s vision for one state will be the end of our country,” Eisenkot says.

To avert that outcome, Eisenkot tells me he favors some form of separation in the West Bank, with a reformed Palestinian Authority assuming greater responsibility for Palestinian self-government while Israel retains military control over the territory. His approach to Gaza is different. He endorses the framework of Trump’s 20-point peace plan, which calls for a technocratic Palestinian administration to govern the enclave and envisions a conditional pathway to Palestinian statehood.

“We have two options: the 20 points of President Trump, or to use force,” Eisenkot says. “I prefer the diplomatic option—and I believe I can do it. But if not, I know how to dismantle Hamas with force.”

For all his confidence in working with Trump, Eisenkot and his advisers were surprised when the president endorsed Netanyahu. Trump had previously passed up opportunities to do so, including in an interview with TIME. Some of his closest Middle East advisers, including his son-in-law Jared Kushner, had grown frustrated with the Israeli leader. According to people familiar with the discussions, Fox News host Mark Levin and U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee urged Trump to back Netanyahu in the closing days of the campaign. “Israeli society is independent and will make its own decision,” Eisenkot says. “I have no doubt Trump will accept every democratic choice in Israel.”

Netanyahu’s political operation has circulated a stream of AI-generated videos attacking Eisenkot, including one depicting him in a field approaching a young Israeli soldier who bears a striking resemblance to his dead son. Instead of embracing the soldier, the figure resembling Eisenkot pushes him aside and embraces Mansour Abbas. “I felt contempt,” Eisenkot says when we discuss the video. “That is the lowest he could go.”The invective has only continued. Yinon Magal, a Channel 14 host and pro-Likud commentator, called Eisenkot a “monkey” on air. Netanyahu waited days before describing it as “highly inappropriate.”

Eisenkot sees the election as a test of whether Israel can preserve the democratic and national ideals of the Zionist movement or drift further from them. “My goal is that the Israeli people will be united and proud of their country,” he says. “That global Jewry will be proud of Israel as the national home of the Jewish people.”Many fear an exodus of Israelis should Netanyahu hang on. A Channel 12 poll in July found that 23% said they or any of their relatives would leave if the Israeli premier is reelected.

Eisenkot lacks Netanyahu’s rhetorical flair, polished English, and decades on the world stage. But he argues those advantages have grown less useful as Netanyahu grows increasingly polarizing, at home and abroad. For many critics of Israel, particularly younger ones, the distinction between the country and its longtime leader has become difficult to discern. “We need to return to speaking about sharing the same values,” Eisenkot says. “Nobody speaks about values right now. Everything is about interest, power, more power, and more power.”

As our interview draws to a close, Eisenkot returns once more to the subject of trauma, the force that has shaped his own life and, he believes, the fate of his country. “Netanyahu is unwilling to show the courage needed to end the war from a position of strength,” he says. “It will take years to close the trauma, but we must start now.”- With Reporting by Liam Forberg