Different reasons why Eisenkot is good for Israel

On Sunday, November 8, following President Isaac Herzog’s declaration, we will see the new lawmaker who will try to put together Israel’s next coalition. In last week’s consultations after the October 27 vote, 67 of the 120 members of the Knesset had backed Gadi Eisenkot, and both Arab-led factions, Ra’am and the Joint List, were part of that number.

For the first time in a long while, the man trying to build a government in Jerusalem is someone other than Benjamin Netanyahu. Half the country is losing its mind; the other half is popping champagne. I did not vote for Eisenkot. I still think his rise is a true gift to Israel.

Friends here and overseas keep asking, “How can you say that?” My reply always catches them off guard: the name on the prime minister’s door counts for far less than people imagine. The same goes for whoever runs defense or the treasury. That’s the beauty of this country.

Here is why.

My first rule in life is: “If you can fix it, why worry? If you can’t fix it, why worry?”

Plenty of Western democracies behave like software: their sense of self lives in leaders, ideologies and slogans, so a change at the top rattles everything. Israel behaves like hardware. What holds us together is the soil, the nation, the IDF, Hebrew and three millennia of memory. Governments and cabinets are applications running on that machine. We install new ones in wartime if we have to, and the machine keeps running.

So what is the real risk? Eisenkot has never held the top job, and he replaces a man who held it for most of the past twenty years. That’s it. That’s the whole downside. Everyone else in the government is basically the same people – not the Knesset – but everywhere (government offices, permanent roles, committees, etc.). And if you do not know what I am talking about – then this is your first sign to stop talking about Israeli politics, Israel or actually anything that doesn’t have to do with food.

Every Israeli can recite the exam Eisenkot now faces. Withdraw from Lebanon and let the north burn again? He flunks. Leave Gaza in a way that invites the next massacre? He flunks. Make moves in Judea and Samaria that fill our cemeteries? He flunks. Lean on the Arab-led parties after pledging not to? He comes out a liar who flunked, and will probably never win an election again.

We Israelis also remember 2021, when Ra’am became the first Arab party ever to join an Israeli coalition. Ten months later it suspended its participation, lawmakers from several factions walked out, and the Bennett-Lapid experiment was dead by June 2022. And we remember an older, bloodier lesson from the years when Hamas and Islamic Jihad turned our buses into coffins: peace software does not run on jihad hardware.

Yet the hardest question on the paper is Iran. If Tehran is allowed to rebuild what this year’s war, launched on February 28, destroyed, or if Eisenkot puts his faith in the preliminary US-Iran agreement of June that so many Israelis rejected, nothing else will matter.

If Eisenkot passes the exam and proves he is a good prime minister, the country is in good hands. Now here’s the twist for everyone mourning Netanyahu’s exit: he wins no matter what. If Eisenkot succeeds, especially on Iran, it will be because he stayed on the road Netanyahu paved. If he fails, every warning Netanyahu ever issued gets stamped “correct.” The new man’s choices, good or bad, can only write the old man’s legacy. And Netanyahu isn’t going home. He keeps a 53-seat bloc in the Knesset, an opposition big enough to make every misstep hurt. And if Eisenkot cannot build a 61-seat government within the given time frame? It will go to Netanyahu, and if he fails as well, well, everyone will be annoyed, and we will have to go to elections again, unless both Netanyahu and Eisenkot decide to put their differences aside and find a way to build a unity government. Until then, Netanyahu is still the acting prime minister, and either way, everything will be fine.

Timing here also adds another layer. Whoever holds the mandate has 28 days, plus up to 14 more, to form a coalition, and Netanyahu stays in office until then. A new cabinet will probably be sworn in close to New Year’s. On November 3, the morning Americans went to the polls, President Trump said the roughly $4 billion in yearly US military aid to Israel would stop: “By the end of this year, we won’t be paying Israel.” If that statement holds, 2027 opens with a new Israeli premier and no American grant. Two historic shifts at once, and the whole world will watch them unfold online.

That is where the fun starts. Eric Hoffer, the American longshoreman-philosopher, observed in 1951 that “mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a God, but never without belief in a devil.”

The campaign against Israel has fed on four easy devils for years: Netanyahu, a “far-right government,” “apartheid” and “our tax dollars.” Every Israeli action, from guarding a border to rescuing hostages, was answered with one of them. Zero knowledge of Israel required.

Now all four are on life support. Netanyahu won’t be running the cabinet. The new government is being assembled by his rivals. The man forming it had the backing of every Arab-led faction in the Knesset, and that endorsement stays on the record even though Eisenkot says he won’t bring them into his coalition. And the grant is ending. The online outrage machine is about to blow a fuse, and the reason is simple: it has run out of ammunition.

Critics will reply that “apartheid” refers to the territories. Fine, let’s play it out with the scenario Eisenkot has ruled out. The Arab-led parties have long described the Palestinians beyond the Green Line as their brothers, and many of their voters call themselves Palestinian citizens of Israel. If those parties joined the coalition, they would co-sign every budget, every security policy and every military operation affecting Judea, Samaria and Gaza. The tale of Jews ruling over Palestinians is hard to tell when the self-declared voice of Palestinians is voting inside the cabinet. If war comes again, those parties would be sitting in the government that sends in the army, and the activists abroad would have to choose: drop the word “apartheid,” or aim it at Arab lawmakers and brand them, in the activists’ own vocabulary, traitors to the cause. And if those same parties ever brought the government down to stop Israel from answering another massacre, they would show every Israeli that they are unreliable when our children’s lives are on the line, and no Zionist party would touch them again.

I will expand on this a bit. If we are attacked again, Israel goes to war, as it must. Only this time, if Arab-led parties are in the coalition, they are part of the government that sends the army in. Another October 7, missiles from Lebanon, rockets from Gaza, or any major attack anywhere: if the Arab-led parties then break the government to stop Israel from defending its citizens for the sake of their proclaimed “Palestinian brothers,” they will have proved, in front of the whole country, that they cannot be trusted with the security of the people they were elected to serve alongside. No Israeli party will ever sit in a government with them again. They will lose every partner, every seat at the table, and every ounce of credibility they ever had. In a way, the biggest losers of these elections are actually the Arab parties. Either they will be hated by the Arab world and the pro-Palestinian crowds around the world, or they will destroy their own reputation in Israel forever.

Now, let’s talk about the world and the rising waves of antisemitism. Will the hostility vanish if Eisenkot successfully forms a government? Of course not. Jean-Paul Sartre warned in 1946, “If the Jew did not exist, the anti-Semite would invent him.” Expect brand-new slogans within weeks. That is the real test. If the rage survives a new prime minister, a coalition built by his opponents, and the end of US grants, none of them was ever the point. The point was always simply Israel. And when the target is the one Jewish state on earth, we all know what that means: the real target was simply the oldest one in the book — the Jews.

The same test applies to many different Jewish communities abroad. For years, the “As a Jew” crowd built careers on the idea that they need to be anti-Zionist, so Eisenkot will not change anything. For them, it is about Israel. But there is one interesting crowd I know personally (even some members of my family are in this group): the ones who always repeat the same line, “I love Israel, I just can’t stand Netanyahu.” Others promised to make Aliyah the day he left office. So now he is leaving. The El Al planes still land at Ben Gurion, and the Aliyah offices are open. What will their excuse for not making Aliyah be now? That “Eisenkot isn’t tough enough”? That “Israel is too expensive”? One friend of mine made Aliyah this year at the age of 47, with no money and no recognized profession, and guess what? She’s doing great.

She’s not alone. Thousands of Bnei Menashe have made Aliyah and are doing great too. None of them is a rocket engineer or a high-tech star. They are all regular, everyday, normal blue-collar people, but simply Zionist to the bone. So we know it is not the money. If the excuses simply change names, though, we know Netanyahu was never the obstacle. He was just the alibi, and the real problem was the “dinner invitations.” As for those on the right who fear “Israel is lost without him”: I would like to remind you that a country is not one man, and ours never was. We are Israel.

People abroad love to call our politics “chaos.” I call it “nerve.” You know: chutzpah. We have no problem swapping leaders in the middle of a war, or on any other occasion, because we dare. And we always do it at the ballot box.

Also, here’s another gem for you: if anything goes wrong — another October 7, another war, a coalition that implodes — nobody, internal or external, will be able to blame a “far-right” cabinet, Netanyahu, or American money at this point. These excuses will be gone, and the world will have to look at who is screaming and simply agree that they (the screamers) actually want us dead, and that nothing we do will ever be good for them. For years they simply accused us of their own crimes. Now they’ll be holding the mirror. I can live with that. We know how to handle them.

If Eisenkot does well, Israel gains. If he stumbles, Israelis will vote him out, and Israel will still win the argument and, if it comes to that, the war, because we have no other option. The price in blood will just be higher. Either way, the software gets updated, the hardware endures, and the haters end up exposed for exactly what they are.

Israel isn’t going anywhere, and as I said: “Why worry?”

P.S. I wonder what nickname the haters will try to pin on Gadi.