The battle for Israel: As Netanyahu rallies the Right, Eisenkot makes his move for power

As the election nears, Netanyahu targets right-wing alternatives, while Eisenkot seeks the commanding lead that would make him the opposition’s undisputed PM candidate

Think of Israel as one big cruise liner. Considering the country’s hyper-stressed reality, that may require some imagination, but bear with it for a moment.

On the starboard side of the ship, the right side, are all the voters in the pro-Netanyahu camp, split into different halls and ballrooms.

The Likud occupies the biggest hall, with smaller rooms for Shas, United Torah Judaism, Otzma Yehudit, and the Religious Zionist Party.

On the port side, separated from starboard by a hallway with doors leading to both sides, are the rooms of the anti-Netanyahu camp.

Gadi Eisenkot’s Yashar has the biggest room there, followed by Naftali Bennett’s B’Yachad, with smaller rooms for the Democrats and Avigdor Liberman’s Yisrael Beytenu.

In the hallway itself stand Ofer Winter’s People of Israel party and Yoaz Hendel and Yaron Zelekha’s reservist-economist party. Behind the ship, in a separate tugboat, sail the two Arab parties.

As the cruise liner steams toward its destination, Election Day, just 11 days away, representatives of the two sides shout the expected accusations across the hallway.

From one side: “You are responsible for the worst disaster in Israel’s history and are leading the country toward catastrophe.” From the other: “You will join forces with those in the tugboat and establish a Palestinian state.”

But the more consequential action is taking place on each side of the ship.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu looks down the hallway, trying to persuade Winter’s and Hendel’s voters to abandon them and come to his side of the ship. Over on the port side, Eisenkot is trying to expand his already large ballroom at the expense of the rooms occupied by those sharing his side of the liner.

Netanyahu intensifies campaign to consolidate right-wing voters

Those two maneuvers are dominating the final stretch of the voyage to Election Day. And what is a sure sign the campaign has entered that final stretch? Netanyahu’s sudden ubiquity on the airwaves.

After months when the prime minister’s interviews were largely reserved for foreign media, ABC, CBS, Fox News, and various podcasts, he showed up in Israeli studios this week, and not only on Channel 14.

Granted, on Tuesday he was, again, on Channel 14, where a “home crowd” greeted him rapturously. But the next day he was on Channel 11, and in between he appeared on Army Radio.

His message had two parts: the election is perilously close, and right-wing voters cannot afford to gamble.

The first is familiar. Netanyahu has sounded the same alarm in numerous campaigns, warning his voters that victory is slipping away. On Channel 14, he anticipated the obvious response: people would dismiss this as his traditional gevalt campaign. This time, he insisted, he really is worried. The race is tied, he said.

And where, precisely, did he see right-wing voters gambling?

Once you cut through the familiar warnings about Eisenkot joining forces with Ahmad Tibi and the election determining whether a Palestinian state will be established, a much smaller target comes into view: Winter’s party.

Netanyahu’s relentless attacks on the retired brigadier-general stand out in this final stretch. At a time when he might be expected to concentrate his fire on Eisenkot and Bennett, he is devoting considerable energy to a small party standing in the hallway.

Netanyahu said he had tried to persuade Winter to join the Likud and, when that failed, to team up with another small right-wing party. That, too, failed, so now he is going after him mercilessly.

In one of the anti-Winter messages he put out this week, Netanyahu charged that Winter would take right-wing votes and carry them over to Liberman on the port side of the ship.

“It’s no coincidence that a senior figure on Liberman’s list, Yulia Malinovsky, says that ultimately Winter will join a government with Liberman. That’s what will happen. That’s the plan,” Netanyahu said.

Then came a blistering comparison with Bennett, who formed a government in 2021 with Yair Lapid’s Yesh Atid and Mansour Abbas’s Ra’am.

“If he walks like Bennett and talks like Bennett, he’s Bennett. Vote Likud, vote Right. Winter is not right-wing. Winter is Bennett 2. We mustn’t squander the Right’s votes. Don’t vote for Winter.”

Winter's coalition conditions complicate Netanyahu's election strategy

Netanyahu’s concern is twofold.

First, Winter’s party will fail to cross the 3.25% electoral threshold, sending votes cast by people on the Right down the drain. Of the 19 major polls taken since October 1, the party crossed the threshold in 11, including four of the seven taken in the last week.

That is enough to keep Winter in the race, but hardly enough to reassure Netanyahu that the votes will count.

The second concern is that Winter will cross the threshold, then peddle his seats elsewhere.

Winter and others in his party say they will recommend Netanyahu to the president as prime minister. But they also say they will not join a government in which the haredi parties hold the balance of power unless those parties agree to a widespread haredi conscription law.

But what if Netanyahu does not accept those conditions? Asked precisely that in a Channel 12 interview on Saturday night, Winter replied, rather inelegantly, that Netanyahu could essentially “go take a hike.”

Nobody owns me, he declared

Winter did not explicitly rule out joining an Eisenkot or Liberman government. He did, however, rule out sitting with Yair Golan, because “he smears Israel abroad.”

For Netanyahu’s campaign, that left an opening wide enough to drive a campaign bus through.

A recommendation is one thing; a commitment to join a government is another. Winter is offering the former, with conditions attached to the latter. Netanyahu wants right-wing voters to hear that distinction and draw the conclusion he is supplying: Winter could be Bennett all over again.

The pressure has extended to billboards and signs in areas where candidates on Winter’s list live. Davidi Ben-Zion, eighth on the list, withdrew, reportedly telling colleagues that pressure on his family, including negative posters strategically placed near the bus stops his children use, had become too much.

Netanyahu’s concerns also extend to the other party in the hallway: Hendel and Zelekha’s.

In the Channel 14 interview, Netanyahu went after Zelekha, whom Netanyahu – as finance minister – appointed accountant-general in 2003. Despite the party’s appeal to right-wing voters, Netanyahu charged that Zelekha had voted for Meretz in the past and participated enthusiastically in anti-government protests on Balfour Street in Jerusalem and Kaplan Street in Tel Aviv.

He also attacked Zelekha on his home turf, the economy, challenging his credentials as a free-market champion.

Hendel and Zelekha’s party crossed the threshold in all seven major polls taken this week. But unlike Winter, they have not pledged to recommend Netanyahu. Hendel says the party will use its leverage to establish a broad Zionist government without the Arab and haredi parties.

Given the coalition arithmetic, how that government would come together remains an enigma. Like Winter, Hendel is clearer about his conditions than about how he would assemble a government that meets them.

But Netanyahu doesn’t need their coalition plans fully worked out to worry about them. He needs the voters attracted to those parties back in his camp.

Eisenkot seeks commanding lead to establish opposition leadership

Across the ship’s hallway, Eisenkot has a different calculation.

His campaign to make Yashar the largest party is aimed, in part, at voters already on his side of the boat. He wants them to leave the other rooms and enter his ballroom.

For Netanyahu, the immediate task is to consolidate the camp. For Eisenkot, it is also to establish who commands it.

That is why the leaders of the other parties in his bloc are less than enthusiastic about his strategy. A voter moving from Bennett, Liberman, or Golan to Eisenkot does not enlarge the bloc. It enlarges Eisenkot.

The bigger Yashar is, and the wider its lead over the Likud, the stronger his claim to form the next government – even if his bloc falls short of 61 seats.

Eisenkot repeated one phrase this week: Netanyahu must not be allowed to win by losing. By that, he means Netanyahu must not remain caretaker prime minister through another cycle of inconclusive elections simply because no one else can form a coalition.

In a Yediot Aharonot interview this week, Eisenkot said, “If you [Netanyahu] think you will do to me what you did to others in the past – meaning, remain in office at the head of a caretaker government – that will not happen.” When Israel held five elections in under four years, from April 2019 to November 2022, Netanyahu served 19 months as caretaker prime minister over two stretches.

Eisenkot considers minority government to prevent Netanyahu remaining in office

One route Eisenkot envisages to prevent a repeat of that scenario is to bring a minority government to the Knesset for approval and secure the support of a majority of those voting.

A government does not need 61 members to win such a vote; it only needs a majority of those in the plenum casting a vote. This scenario would be made possible, for instance, if the Arab parties simply don’t vote.

Once this minority government is approved, Eisenkot can then attract defectors from the other side of the ship. A substantial lead over the Likud would give that effort greater public legitimacy.

There are other considerations, too.

First, in the unlikely event that a rotation agreement with the Likud became a serious possibility, a decisive lead in seats would bolster his claim to go first as prime minister.

More immediately, the larger Yashar becomes, the harder it would be for Bennett or Liberman to argue that someone else should lead the bloc.

The four parties in the “change bloc” have yet to agree on a mechanism to determine their prime ministerial candidate after the election.

Eisenkot has said, logically enough, that the leader of the party that wins the most votes should be the bloc’s candidate. Since Yashar currently leads the bloc by a considerable margin, that formula would obviously favor him.

It remains unclear, however, whether the others are prepared to accept this. But the wider the gap, the harder it would be to explain why the leader of a much smaller party should get the top job.

Eisenkot is campaigning both against Netanyahu and for an outcome within his own bloc that would make his leadership hard to challenge.

Both Netanyahu’s and Eisenkot’s maneuvers make sense.

Netanyahu wants to prevent right-wing votes from being lost or carried into another government. Eisenkot wants to ensure that, if there is an opportunity to replace Netanyahu, he will be the one to seize it.

But both maneuvers have their limits. For Netanyahu, keeping his passengers together does not guarantee enough support to retain command. And for Eisenkot, having the biggest ballroom on one side of the ship does not guarantee enough support to become captain of the whole vessel.