Israel Elections 2026-Gadi Eisenkot

The 2026 Israeli elections are unfolding under conditions unlike any previous national vote in the country’s history.

Israel enters the campaign after the trauma of October 7, the war in Gaza, growing regional confrontation, deep domestic polarization, battles over democratic institutions, and an ongoing crisis of political legitimacy. Questions that once belonged primarily to academic debate or ideological movements have moved into the center of Israeli public life: the relationship between security and democracy, religion and state, national cohesion, military power, political extremism, and the future structure of the Zionist project itself.

Against that backdrop, former IDF Chief of Staff Gadi Eisenkot entered national politics carrying unusual weight even before fully defining his political identity. By the time the 2026 campaign began, the former chief of staff had already become one of the central figures of the post-October 7 political landscape: a wartime cabinet member, one of Benjamin Netanyahu’s most prominent critics from within the security establishment, founder of his own political movement, and a figure consistently placed near the top tier of Israeli national leadership in public polling.

The central political question surrounding Eisenkot is therefore no longer whether he is a national leader, but what kind of national leader he may ultimately become — and whether the traits that gave him credibility during crisis can also sustain a successful path to the premiership inside one of the most fragmented and performative political systems in the democratic world.

Eisenkot is the first figure in a series of profiles examining the major personalities likely to shape the 2026 elections and the political future of Israel’s Third Jewish Commonwealth.