The Two Faces of Gadi Eisenkot, Who Could Be Israel’s PM

By Dr Dan Steinbock

In international media, PM Netanyahu’s adversary Gadi Eisenkot has been portrayed as a centrist voice. That’s part of his track-record. But he is also the architect of the Obliteration Doctrine that decimated Gaza.

As expected, the early Israeli exit polls indicate that Prime Minister Netanyahu and his prime adversary former chief of staff Gadi Eisenkot face deadlock.

In the past 10-15 years, the country’s political center of gravity has shifted sharply toward security and military power, documented in my The Fall of Israel (2024).

Unsurprisingly, the election aftermath set the stage for coalition-building and wheeling-and-dealing because in the 120-member Israeli parliament the Knesset, neither Netanyahu nor Eisenkot has an absolute majority.

What was also expected is the ongoing white-washing of Eisenkot’s military record. In the mainstream media, Netanyahu’s rival is portrayed as a centrist, security-oriented but moderate. Typically, both CNN and TIME, which now offer features on Eisenkot, tend to depict his role in Netanyahu’s war cabinet as a voice of reason. Yet, the fact that he remained in the cabinet through the worst obliteration of Gaza is effectively sidelined.

Neither mentions the word genocide even once in the context of their features. The neutral language is the norm, not an exception.

Complicity in war crimes

Though born in Israel, Eisenkot is of Jewish Moroccan descent. He grew of age in Tiberias and Eilat, outside the country’s centers of political power. His story contrasts sharply with Netanyahu’s deep U.S. roots and elite Jerusalem upbringing in the circles of power. And unlike Netanyahu, Eisenkot doesn’t have an Eastern European Ashkenazi background. With his family history in Casablanca, he would be Israel’s first Mizrahi prime minister.

After high school, Eisenkot was drafted to the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and served in the legendary Golani Brigade. As the chief of staff, he prepared Israel for forever wars with the formalization of the Campaigns Between the Wars (CBW) doctrine: covert operations designed to weaken enemies, degrade capabilities, and postpone future conflicts between major engagements.

Eisenkot’s tenure saw numerous clashes with the Palestinians. At the same time, he contributed significantly to US-Israel strategic cooperation.

Eisenkot made his name as Israeli general, politician, and leader of the Yashar party. He served from 2015 to 2019 as the chief of staff of the IDF. Five days after October 7, 2023, he was sworn in as a minister without portfolio after his party joined the government following the outbreak of the Gaza war.

Eisenkot left the government in June 2024. While he served as an observer in Israel’s emergency war cabinet for the first eight months of Gaza’s genocidal atrocities, the official actions of the International Criminal Court (ICC) initially primarily focused on other senior figures.

But in July 2024, an advocacy group called the March 30 Movement officially submitted a comprehensive complaint to the ICC prosecutor. The petition requested that the court expand its investigation and issue warrants for former war cabinet members, including Gadi Eisenkot. Various Palestinian human rights organizations have similarly sent letters to the ICC Prosecutor urging for the prosecution of all decision-makers within the war cabinet

Even as a minister without portfolio, Eisenkot shares complicity for the genocidal atrocities that Netanyahu and his defense minister Gallant initiated in late fall 2023.

Militarizing genocidal atrocities

In a recent book on the Gaza genocide (and the West’s reluctance to prevent them), I concluded that Israeli military actions were fueled by the Obliteration Doctrine, which was first outlined in 2005 by Gadi Eisenkot.

Interestingly, he is no extremist. Officially, he supported Israeli democracy and a two-state solution, which he downplayed during the election campaign.

Eisenkot was appointed head of the Northern Command following Maj. Gen. Udi Adam’s resignation amid criticism over the latter’s conduct in the 2006 Lebanon War. At the time, many Israelis were frustrated that the military had failed to secure a comprehensive victory over the Hezbollah militia or retrieve the two soldiers whose capture had triggered the conflict. It was this popular frustration that set the stage for “tougher measures.”

Eisenkot’s strategy was based on the idea that to create effective deterrence against Hezbollah, the IDF would have to severely damage Dahiya, a densely populated Shia southern suburb of Beirut that served as a Hezbollah stronghold and was heavily bombed by Israel in 2006.

After all, his predecessor had been compelled to quit for having been “too cautious.” Hence, Eisenkot’s new strategy of disproportion. It was this strategy that paved the way to Gaza’s inferno in 2023:

With an outbreak of hostilities [with Hezbollah], the IDF will need to act immediately, decisively, and with force that is disproportionate to the enemy’s actions and the threat it poses. Such a response aims at inflicting damage and meting out punishment to an extent that will demand long and expensive reconstruction processes.

… Israel again will not be able to limit its response to actions whose severity is seemingly proportionate to an isolated incident. Rather, it will have to respond disproportionately in order to make it abundantly clear that the State of Israel will accept no attempt to disrupt the calm currently prevailing along its borders.

A gross violation of international law

UN Emergency Relief authorities called Israel’s offensive “disproportionate” referring to the “horrific” leveling of “block after block” of buildings in Beirut. They regarded it as a violation of international humanitarian law. A third of the killed were children, while 900,000 Lebanese were displaced.

When the IDF embraced the nascent Obliteration Doctrine, the Genocide Convention was in the ICC’s Rome Statute, ad hoc tribunals had been set up, UN organizations had many references to it and the UN even had its special adviser with a mandate for warning the UN on the prevention of Genocide.

So, ostensibly, things were in place to deal with a military doctrine that explicitly targeted civilians and civilian infrastructure. Yet, when Eisenkot stated publicly that Israel would embrace the military doctrine in the future, there was no consequential international outcry, not to speak of intervention.

Following the 2006 Lebanese War, the same doctrine was deployed in the 2008-09 Gaza War, or Operation Cast Lead, as Israel called it. This was a three-week armed conflict between the Gazan Palestinian groups and the IDF. It caused 1,200-1,400 Palestinian and a dozen Israeli deaths, over 46,000 homes were destroyed, making more than 100,000 people homeless.

As Eisenkot saw it:

What happened in the Dahiya quarter of Beirut in 2006 will happen in every village from which shots will be fired in the direction of Israel. We will wield disproportionate power and cause immense damage and destruction. From our perspective, these are military bases…

The Obliteration Doctrine had been developed by Israel’s military leaders in close cooperation with the country’s cabinet and political leaders. Civilian devastation was no longer unfortunate collateral damage, but the very focus of a new military doctrine.

“In the next clash with Hezbollah, we won’t bother to hunt for tens of thousands of rocket launchers and we won’t spill our soldiers’ blood in attempts to overtake fortified Hezbollah positions,” Eisenkot warned. “Rather, we shall destroy Lebanon and won’t be deterred by the protests of the ‘world.’”

Replace the terms “Hezbollah” with “Hamas” and “Lebanon” with “Gaza,” and the implications are unambiguous.

Obliteration as legacy

Subsequently Eisenkot co-authored the Guidelines for Israel’s National Security Strategy (2019) – barely four years before October 7 – urging Israel’s security establishment to ensure effective deterrence because “once deterrence collapses, it is imperative to stop the threat as rapidly and clearly as possible to renew deterrence, return to routine life, and allow an extended period of calm based on security strength.”

That was the objective of the Netanyahu war cabinet in 2023; one that thoroughly failed. After just one month of the Gaza War, Eisenkot charged the Netanyahu cabinet for “near-criminal behavior” as the PM tried to hide protocols, leak lies to media and sway war goals to appease the Messianic far-right.

During the Israeli obliteration of Gaza, Eisenkot lost his own son and two nephews in a war he now opposed. Yet, the doctrine that was foundational for Gaza’s obliteration was to a great extent his own handiwork.

There is abundant irony in the fact that Eisenkot is now portrayed as a moderate alternative to Netanyahu, and a reasonable champion of change. As a politician, he doesn’t have far-right background. But as a military leader, he perfected the Obliteration Doctrine.

This article was originally published on Informed Comment (US) on October 28, 2026.

Dr Dan Steinbock is the founder of Difference Group and has served at the India, China and America Institute (US), Shanghai Institute for International Studies (China) and the EU Center (Singapore). For more, see https://www.differencegroup.net/  He is also the author of The Fall of Israel (2024), and The Obliteration Doctrine (2025)