Mehdi Hasan: Foreign media crowns Gadi Eisenkot as anti-Netanyahu

Mehdi Hasan’s target is not Gadi Eisenkot’s platform but the way it is packaged. In recent profiles and headlines, the former Israeli military chief is framed as an “anti-Netanyahu” figure: a man who “lost a son in Gaza” and now “comes for Netanyahu”, as the Times of London and the Daily Telegraph put it, while the New Yorker and the Economist cast him as a fresh national chance.

According to Hasan, that branding works because it offers an easy narrative hook for foreign audiences: Israeli politics becomes a morality play about replacing one man, rather than a dispute over what Israel will do in Gaza and the occupied West Bank. Eisenkot’s biography supplies the kind of details that travel well—military gravitas, personal tragedy, a break with the prime minister—while the harder parts of his record and positions sit behind the paywall of attention.

Eisenkot served in Benjamin Netanyahu’s war cabinet during Israel’s military campaign in Gaza from October 2023 to June 2024, Hasan writes, a period when Israeli airstrikes destroyed apartment buildings and hit schools, hospitals and refugee camps, and when more than 30,000 Palestinians were killed. Hasan notes Eisenkot resigned in 2024 over what he viewed as strategic failures, not over the death toll, and that he has been reluctant to condemn Netanyahu for the severity and duration of the war.

The column also revisits Eisenkot’s earlier command roles. Hasan points to his tenure as Israel’s chief of staff during the “Great March of Return” protests in 2018 and 2019, when Israeli soldiers, mostly snipers, killed over 200 Palestinians, including dozens of children. A UN commission of inquiry concluded Israeli security forces killed and maimed demonstrators who did not pose an imminent threat, and found reasonable grounds to believe some were shot in violation of their right to life.

On policy, Hasan argues the “anti-Netanyahu” label obscures that Eisenkot is not an “anti-occupation” figure. He opposes the far-right government’s annexation plan, Hasan writes, but also opposes Palestinian self-determination and statehood; in a June interview, Eisenkot said he has never supported “two states for two peoples” and voiced support for settlement in “Judea and Samaria”, the occupied West Bank. International court of justice findings and multiple UN resolutions consider those settlements illegal under international law.

Hasan’s broader claim is about how international media converts a complex conflict into a leadership story with a built-in protagonist. The result is a candidate whose appeal abroad is amplified by contrast—someone who is not Netanyahu—while the underlying commitments that shape daily life for Palestinians and Israelis remain largely unchanged.

Eisenkot’s party, Yashar, is described as leading in polls ahead of Israel’s October 2024 elections. The headlines have already been written; the policies are still there.