The General’s Dangerous Question

Perhaps the General Has Begun Asking the Right Question

Gadi Eisenkot has spent most of his adult life inside Israel’s security apparatus. He commanded the army, assessed threats, and worked within a system capable of translating almost every political problem into a security problem. That is precisely why his recent language deserves attention: not because he has abandoned the security paradigm, but because he has begun speaking about something the security apparatus itself cannot guarantee.

Netanyahu has long organized politics around one question: Who can protect Israel? Eisenkot increasingly seems to be asking another: What must Israel be if it is to remain a state?

The distinction is fundamental.

Eisenkot speaks of the “soul of Israel,” accountability, personal example, reciprocal obligation, and social repair. He has also attacked what he calls the “curse of the right and the left.” This should not be reduced to another complaint about polarization. The deeper problem begins when right and left cease to name positions and begin to name types of people. At that point argument becomes secondary because classification arrives first.

Right. Left. Arab. Haredi. Settler. Secular. Elite. Periphery.

Israel has become remarkably efficient at identifying the category before encountering the person. That is the pathology: before someone speaks, the political meaning of what they are about to say has already been partially assigned.

This is why Eisenkot is more interesting than the usual language of the political center suggests. The center is often little more than empty geometry: stand between two camps and call the position moderation. A more serious move is to question the axis itself.

The decisive distinctions may no longer run between right and left. They may run between responsibility and exemption, reciprocity and extraction, institution and faction, citizenship and clientele, political disagreement and political classification.

A state can survive profound disagreement. It becomes more fragile when different groups encounter different states.

Some serve while others are exempted. Some finance while others negotiate exceptions. Some carry the costs of security while others build political power around avoiding those costs. At that point the problem is no longer simply inequality. It is the erosion of a shared political form.

This is where Eisenkot’s insistence on universal military, national, or civic service matters beyond manpower. Its design can and should be disputed, especially with regard to Arab citizens, Haredim, and communities with legitimate objections to particular forms of service. But the political intuition beneath it is serious: membership cannot indefinitely mean protection without obligation for some and obligation without equal recognition for others.

A political community cannot remain coherent if belonging becomes a menu of unequal responsibilities.

The contrast with Netanyahu is sharper here. Netanyahu’s most consequential political achievement has been to fuse existential danger with political legitimacy. Israel is threatened, therefore it needs strong leadership. The leadership is strong because it recognizes the threat. Those who challenge the leadership can then be presented as people who fail to understand the threat.

The structure is circular, but powerful. Crisis legitimizes leadership, failure demonstrates the depth of the crisis, and dissent becomes evidence of irresponsibility.

The deeper result is the conversion of politics into necessity.

There are no decisions, only “no choice.” There are no failures, only “the price of war.” There are no alternatives, only “realism.” Responsibility recedes because everything is presented as if it had to happen exactly as it did.

This is not merely defensive rhetoric. It is a political technology.

Eisenkot attacks this mechanism when he argues that the present leadership produces division and then presents the resulting disorder as if no alternative were possible. That accusation goes much further than incompetence. It suggests that disorder itself can become politically useful.

Division then ceases to be a consequence of government and becomes a technique of government.

Netanyahu needs a political world in which the alternative can always be made to look like a threat. Eisenkot, at his most interesting, tries to recover the possibility that an alternative is the precondition of politics itself.

This is also why he is a difficult opponent to absorb into the familiar map. He cannot easily be portrayed as naïve about war, detached from security, or unfamiliar with sacrifice. He comes from inside the apparatus.

And that is precisely what makes him dangerous.

The most difficult critic of a machine is not always the person standing outside it. Sometimes it is the person who knows exactly how it works and has begun asking what it is for.

Eisenkot should not, however, be romanticized. His language still contains exclusions, and his thinking about Gaza remains deeply embedded in the grammar of control, deterrence, and security management. If his idea of reciprocity is to mean more than a disciplined version of the same security state, it has to survive a test Israeli politics often avoids.

Can Arab citizens appear as co-authors of the political order rather than as coalition arithmetic? Can Haredim be confronted over unequal obligations without being reduced to a population requiring administrative correction? Can Palestinians appear as political subjects rather than primarily as security variables? Can a state that demands service remain answerable for the purposes to which that service is put?

The last question is decisive because reciprocity can easily become an elegant name for obedience.

Real reciprocity runs in both directions. Citizens have obligations toward the state, but the state has obligations toward citizens. Governments answer to the governed. Majorities answer for how they use power. Institutions answer for their decisions. Security institutions answer not only for the efficiency of defense but for the political order they are defending.

Perhaps this is what Eisenkot’s “soul of Israel” should mean if the phrase is to have political substance. Not national essence, not ethnic mysticism, and not another ceremonial invocation of unity, but the capacity to preserve a common political world without turning difference into disqualification.

Israel does not suffer from too much conflict. It suffers from the repeated conversion of conflict into classification.

Right and left increasingly cease to represent competing arguments and begin to function as moral categories. Secular Israelis and Haredim encounter different regimes of obligation. Jewish and Arab citizens formally share citizenship while repeatedly discovering that political legitimacy is not distributed according to the same rules.

This may be the deeper meaning of Eisenkot’s “curse of the right and the left.” The problem is not simply that two camps hate each other. It is that the category arrives before the encounter and political identity before the person.

If Eisenkot understands this, he may be proposing more than a change of government. If he does not, his language will turn out to be a more disciplined rhetoric for the same system.

That is what makes his candidacy intellectually interesting.

A former chief of staff has begun speaking in a language suggesting that Israel’s most serious crisis may no longer be military. A state may remain capable of defeating enemies while losing the capacity to reproduce a common citizenship.

That is a paradox no military victory can solve.

For decades Israel has asked how much force it needs in order to survive. The harder question now emerging is what kind of relations among citizens make survival politically sustainable.

If Eisenkot can answer that question, he may offer something genuinely different.

If he cannot, Israel will merely replace the operator of the same machine.

Yochanan Schimmelpfennig