16 Days to Elections – Why I Will Vote for Yashar  

By now most people know that I am leaning heavily to voting for Eisenkot in the upcoming election for three reasons:

• I believe he has the vision and capability to move Israel away from the far right to the center.
• 19 years in office is too long for anyone to serve as Prime Minister if the country wants to remain a democracy.
• I believe Eisenkot has the possibility of winning, something no other candidate seems to have at this juncture, 16 days from election day.

In a wide-ranging interview conducted by the Times of Israel last week, Eisenkot came across as someone who has a good sense of what challenges face Israel and how they can be addressed. You can see the full interview here…..

https://tinyurl.com/34ufum7n

A key response of his to the overall question of how he sees things, is summed up in the following statement early in the interview when he said:

“If, God forbid, the current right-wing coalition wins again, it will lead Israel in dark directions that we can already see unfolding before us: a less democratic, less liberal country, and in my view, also a less Jewish one.”

And he continued: “Anyone who wants to impose full sovereignty over all of Judea and Samaria [the West Bank] and bring another 2.8 million Palestinians into Israel is endangering the Zionist enterprise and the Jewish demographic majority. Anyone who wants to weaken the Supreme Court and crush the judiciary is endangering democracy. So, this election is fundamentally about the future of the State of Israel. That is what drives me from morning to night to do everything I can to win, and to not allow Netanyahu and his coalition to build a state based on the concept of ‘a people that dwells alone’.”

While at this point in time the polls show that Eisenkot would be challenged to form a governing coalition, in my opinion, his answer to how he would achieve a 61-seat majority is instructive and workable.

He says: “The foundation is our four parties: Naftali Bennett’s B’Yachad, Avigdor Liberman’s Yisrael Beytenu, Yair Golan’s Democrats, and my party, Yashar. There are four strict conditions for any additional parties to join our coalition: acceptance of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state, recognition of the foundational values of the Declaration of Independence, mandatory national service (whether military or civilian), and recognition that Hamas is a terrorist organization. Anyone who accepts those things can be a partner.”

The current polls show that there is potential for him to be successful with this approach. On this topic he added an additional point of interest when he said: “It would be enormously significant if a Haredi party accepted those conditions and said, let’s now see how we practically implement enlistment. Then we could sit down and discuss the ‘how.’ ”

Regarding the rise in Jewish settler terrorism in Judea and Samaria, Eisenkot proposes that: “The first step will be to reconnect the system that actually governs Judea and Samaria: we will dismantle Smotrich’s ministry [within the Defense Ministry], which currently enables the anarchy, and we will return the Border Police to operate under the IDF.  The second step will be to restore administrative orders in order to legally remove Jewish terrorists from Judea and Samaria. The next stage is to continue fighting Palestinian terrorism while carefully distinguishing between the terrorists and the broader civilian population.”

As for his approach to judicial reform, he takes a balanced approach when he says: “First, we’ll immediately cancel the law changing the Judicial Selection Committee [which is to take effect after the election]. It is a corrupt law designed so that politicians will select judges according to a partisan key. We will immediately cancel the measures aimed at weakening the attorney general, and we will repeal the law that transferred the department for investigating judges into the political hands of the justice minister.”

On the subject of Electoral Responsibility and a State Commission of Inquiry which the current government has consistently delayed, Eisenkot promises: “We will pass a law preventing a criminal defendant from forming a government, we will limit a prime minister’s tenure to eight years, and we will cap the size of the cabinet at 24 ministers.  In addition, we will immediately pass a government decision establishing a formal State Commission of Inquiry into the October 7 massacre.”

Disappointingly, none of the candidates seem to be willing to commit to massive electoral reform, truly representative government or expanding the size of the Knesset. Perhaps we can make this a bigger issue at the next election.

As for universal military service, Eisenkot says: “Another thing we will do is pass a universal service law for all Israeli citizens: military, national, or civilian service, including national service for Arabs.”

He is facing an uphill battle for sure but towards the end of the interview he poses two scenarios and is asking all of us to choose: “Israeli citizens will have to imagine, when they stand at the ballot box, a government with Gadi Eisenkot as prime minister, with Liberman and Bennett in the positions of foreign minister, defense minister, finance minister, versus a Netanyahu government in which Ben Gvir is defense minister, Smotrich is foreign minister, Tally Gotliv is justice minister, and [Likud propagandist Yaakov] Bardugo is communications minister.”

As I have written many times before, I give full credit to Netanyahu for what he has accomplished. However, it simply is illogical to re-elect someone who was prime minister when Israel experienced the greatest security failure in the history of the state, along with all of the others who were in office at that time. This is the same coalition that is responsible for perpetuating society’s social divide, permitting draft-dodging, approving state funds going to the most unproductive people in Israeli society rather than the battered communities of the north and, worst of all, refusing to use the country’s legal institutions to investigate how October 7^th’s security breach occurred?

It is clearly time for a change and my vote on October 27^th will go for Eisenkot.