Gadi Eisenkot gets first shot at forming Israel's next government

Jerusalem: Gadi Eisenkot, an unassuming former army chief of staff, has a pathway to Israel's top job after President Isaac Herzog tapped him to form the next government.

Should he succeed, he would take over as prime minister from Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel's longest-serving premier whose inflammatory style has earned him as much admiration as it has outright hatred.

Eisenkot, by contrast, is a reserved man, and some voters tired of Netanyahu see his rival's relative lack of charisma as one of his greatest assets.

His wide-ranging opposition bloc won 48 of the Israeli parliament's 120 seats in October elections, while Netanyahu's camp secured 53, leaving neither with a majority.

During party consultations with Herzog, 66-year-old Eisenkot received the endorsements of both Arab-majority lists, who could now play kingmakers after making unprecedented gains in the vote.

But it remains unclear if Eisenkot's bloc would accept support from the Arab lists in forming a government.

Serious and unassuming, he is in many ways the opposite of Netanyahu, who has flawless American-accented English and is ever ready with headline-grabbing soundbites for US television and social media.

Eisenkot, the military chief of staff from 2015 to 2019, has set out to unite Israelis after Netanyahu's divisive tenure, under which the country moved sharply to the right.

He has vowed to crack down on extremist West Bank settlers who have attacked Palestinians with impunity, decrying recent incidents as "Jewish terror" abetted by Netanyahu's government.

But the military man is no peacenik. He opposes the creation of a Palestinian state and vowed to end Hamas's rule in Gaza and destroy the Islamist movement's military wing.

Commanding the military during the 2006 war with Hezbollah, Eisenkot devised the so-called "Dahiya doctrine". The idea, named after a Beirut suburb heavily damaged in that war, involves Israel vowing to use massive force against civilian infrastructure in areas controlled by Lebanese militant movement Hezbollah.

Israel has adopted the doctrine again in Gaza, causing destruction that critics say amounts to war crimes, an assertion disputed by Israel.

On international relations, he vowed to deepen Israel's ties with its closest ally, the United States, where once bipartisan views on Israel have been soured by the wars in Gaza, Lebanon and Iran.

Eisenkot has garnered broad public sympathy after his son Gal and two of his nephews were killed fighting in Gaza.

His working-class roots constitute another element of his appeal. He would be the first prime minister who is Sephardic - Jews who mostly trace their recent origins to the Middle East and North Africa.

Unlike Netanyahu, who comes from an elite family and whose father was a prominent professor in the United States, Eisenkot is the son of Moroccan Jews, and grew up on Israel's geographic periphery.

Courting opposing sides of Israeli society during his campaign, Eisenkot has promised greater protection for Israel's LGBTQ community, and defended Israeli control over the West Bank to religious Jews.

But he rejected outright annexation of the territory, as well as the establishment of unauthorised settlement outposts of the sort Netanyahu's government has enabled and which have fuelled a recent rise in violence against Palestinians.

On Gaza, he has vowed to end Hamas's rule within 18 months, either through the implementation of US President Donald Trump's ceasefire plan of gradual disarmament of Hamas and a transfer of power, or through "creative operations" aimed at destroying the movement's military wing.

Addressing a key source of resentment among Israelis following three years of war, Eisenkot has promised to curb exemptions from military service for religious students.

He promised a "universal national service law" requiring ultra-Orthodox Jews and Arab citizens to perform either military or civil service.

He has sought to appeal to centrist and liberal voters by pledging to protect judicial independence, the rule of law, minority rights and a free press.

These issues are key to Eisenkot's positioning as a middle-of-the-road politician, with many Israelis concerned by what they see as an erosion of democratic institutions after years under Netanyahu.