Israel Election: Netanyahu’s Trojan Horse Targets Eisenkot

Israel’s prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, has put a Trojan horse at the centre of a campaign video for the parliamentary election on October 27th. The ad shows an AI-generated Gadi Eisenkot, a former general who now leads the polls, riding the horse, with Mansour Abbas and Yair Golan, two other opposition leaders, hidden inside.

What the Trojan-horse video claims

Mr Netanyahu’s message is blunt — and unmistakable: Mr Eisenkot can only win by joining forces with Mr Abbas’s Arab-Israeli Ra’am party and Mr Golan’s Zionist-left Democrats. Yashar, Mr Eisenkot’s centre-right party, has overtaken Mr Netanyahu’s Likud in The Economist’s poll tracker. But he will need to attract a range of partners to form a government — as will Mr Netanyahu.

Mr Eisenkot’s rising appeal among centre-right voters, Likud’s own constituency, is rattling Mr Netanyahu’s party. Hence the attempt to taint Mr Eisenkot by association. Smearing the Arab parties, which represent over 20% of Israel’s population, is an old tactic. Mr Netanyahu has repeatedly branded them “terror supporters” and accused Ra’am of being an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, though he has not hesitated to seek Mr Abbas’s support when desperate.

Why tainting Golan is a new tactic

Efforts to do the same to a Jewish and Zionist party are new. A decade ago, when Mr Golan was deputy chief of staff of the Israel Defence Forces, he compared what was happening in Israel to “horrifying processes that occurred in Europe” before the Holocaust. More recently, during the war in Gaza, he said that “a sane state does not wage war against civilians, does not kill babies as a hobby, and does not set goals for itself like the expulsion of a population.”

Mr Golan’s opponents are now using these quotes to portray his party as radical and non-Zionist, and therefore unfit for government. But so far the polls are not moving in Mr Netanyahu’s favour, and none of the main opposition parties has ruled out governing with the Democrats.

The split over an Arab party in government

When it comes to including an Arab party in the next government, however, Likud has managed to split the opposition. Mr Golan is the only one openly in favour. All his potential partners are either adamantly opposed to working with the Arab parties or have been evasive. In public Mr Eisenkot has said he will consider governing with any party that accepts a vague set of principles. But he would rather lead a minority government, however unstable, than include Israel’s Arab representatives.

Though his alliance of hard-right and religious parties may not be capable of winning a majority, Mr Netanyahu is already dictating the terms by which his rivals will try to form a coalition. His campaign is pushing Mr Eisenkot towards harsher nationalist positions; the latter recently ruled out the possibility of accepting a Palestinian state if he were to govern. He may struggle to form anything better than a short-lived government bound to policies not unlike those of the outgoing one.

How Abbas wants to ride the horse

Mr Abbas, one of the canniest politicians in Israel, is the only Arab-Israeli leader to have ever joined a ruling coalition. In 2021 he supported a government led by Naftali Bennett, a right-wing politician who is running again this year. Mr Abbas claims the other Arab-Israeli parties, which are running together on a joint list, are refusing to make the necessary compromises to be in government and effect change.

To boost his chances of joining a government again, Ra’am will field its first Jewish candidate this year. Yoav Segalovitz is an unlikely pick for a party dominated by conservative Islamists. A secular centrist, Mr Segalovitz’s main attraction is his former career as a police investigator. One of Mr Abbas’s priorities is to get the police, currently under Itamar Ben-Gvir, the leader of the ultranationalist Jewish Power party, to take seriously the bloody wave of gang violence afflicting Israeli Arabs.

But he also wants to make Ra’am more palatable to Jewish parties. Mr Segalovitz could help. Like Mr Netanyahu, Mr Abbas is not only trying to win votes, but to change the terms of coalition-building. Rather than languish as a hidden passenger within the Trojan horse, Mr Abbas wants to ride it.

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