ByZVIKA KLEINJUNE 26, 2026 06:01Gadi Eisenkot is not a man in a hurry.Watching the polls make his Yashar party the largest in the opposition for the first time this week, I kept thinking that his patience will either be the asset that carries him into the prime minister’s office or the flaw that costs him the election.He does not perform. He weighs his words like a man unsure he can carry them because he has paid in a currency that the rest of the field has not.His son Gal was killed in Gaza in December 2023, while Eisenkot sat in the war cabinet; his nephew was killed in the same war. He quit that cabinet and said the government was not worthy of his son, of the fallen, or of the hostages who died in captivity.That is not a biography you can manufacture, and it is the one credential Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu cannot answer.Gadi Eisenkot, head of the Yashar party speaks during a conference at Tel Aviv University, May 12, 2026. (credit: AVSHALOM SASSONI/FLASH90)For a year, the camp that wants Netanyahu gone had no address. Bennett surged the moment he and Lapid unveiled their Together slate, then bled seats almost as fast, and the voters peeling away went not to Lapid but to Eisenkot.This week, a Maariv poll put Yashar level with Likud at 21 apiece, the first time any opposition party has caught Netanyahu this Knesset, and more Israelis now rate Eisenkot over the prime minister as the better fit to lead.Yet leading the opposition does not lead to power. The bloc reaches 61 in only a poll or two, and otherwise only by leaning on the Arab parties that Bennett refuses to count. The durable majority comes only from pulling a particular kind of voter out of Netanyahu’s own bloc.I have called them “the homeless Right,” national-religious and traditional Israelis who served, or whose children did, and buried people while other communities did not.They will not vote Likud, the party that spent this Knesset writing a law to keep haredi (ultra-Orthodox) men out of uniform to hold its coalition together. They will not follow Bennett, who took equal conscription, the cause they care about most, and folded it into a package with Lapid.Six seats of them, perhaps more, have been standing in the cold. Eisenkot can bring them inside, and not because of his platform.He came from Eilat, the son of Moroccan immigrants, a traditional Jew with family in the settlements, one of the very voters the opposition has never known how to reach.Which is why the Channel 14 campaign to brand him a leftist should be named for what it is, a wall built by the Right’s own broadcaster to keep these voters from the man who could take them.Even the party’s name rebukes the smear: MK Matan Kahana, a member of Eisenkot’s party (previously Bennett’s right-hand man), says it came from freed hostage Eli Sharabi, who said freeing the captives was not a matter of Right or Left but of being yashar, straight.Yet the team Eisenkot has gathered exposes the problem he has not solvedYet the team Eisenkot has gathered exposes the problem he has not solved.His most senior recruit is Yoram Cohen, the former Shin Bet chief who wears a kippah and carries real security weight.Around him are economists, retired generals, even the former director-general of Netanyahu’s own Prime Minister’s Office; the two religious-Zionists, Matan Kahana and Orit Farkash-Hacohen, sit on its moderate wing.It is a serious list, secular and technocratic in its center of gravity and nearer Tel Aviv than the hilltops. Nowhere on it stands a face the homeless-right voter instantly claims as his own, someone who reads as right-wing in the tribal grammar that decides Israeli elections.Eisenkot knows this. He is a strategist first and is moving to close the gap.He is in early talks with Avigdor Liberman, whose fiercely secular Yisrael Beytenu shares his rage at the draft exemptions, and circling former Likud names near the threshold, such as Gilad Erdan and Yuli Edelstein, who broke with Netanyahu from the Right over that very law.The same merger that lifts him toward governing size would hand him the signal he cannot generate alone. Here is the trap beneath the arithmetic.Everything that makes Eisenkot attractive to these voters is his refusal to perform, and acquiring a right-wing identity is itself a performance.The moment he is seen to bolt on a hardliner for the appearance, he stops being the one politician in Israel who does not do exactly that. The product is integrity. Spend it to buy the Right, and the shelf is bare. He cannot win them without auditioning, and I am not certain anyone can, him included.Whether he manages it is the question of this election.What I am certain of is that we are lucky to have the argument at all. In Israel, the fight over who counts as a real Jewish leader stays a family argument, with a bereaved general among the options on the ballot. That is a luxury, and this week two other countries showed how fast it can vanish.In Britain, Keir Starmer resigned, calling his cleanup of Labour antisemitism his proudest achievement.It was smaller than it sounds: He cleaned the party while the country grew more dangerous for its Jews, who now suffer the highest rate of religious hate crime of any group, with antisemitic incidents at double their pre-October 7 level.His likely successor, Andy Burnham, is no Corbyn, and he stood with Manchester’s Jews after the Heaton Park murders. He is foggy all the same, unable to say whether Gaza is a genocide “from where I am as mayor [of Manchester].”For British Jews, the danger has stopped being a hostile party and become something quieter, the draining away of the assumption that they belong in a friendly one.In New York, the warning was blunterIn New York, the warning was blunter. Brad Lander beat Dan Goldman in the 10th district.Both men are Jewish, and that is the point. Goldman is the moderate who defends Israel and took AIPAC’s backing, everything the American Jewish establishment trained its children to be. He is the one they discarded.Lander, who calls Gaza a genocide and faults Democrats for “paying for Netanyahu’s wars with our tax dollars,” advanced.Moderation did not protect Goldman. Moderation is what marked him. The federations that found their voice against Jeremy Corbyn – safely British and in the other party – have lost it now that the danger wears the colors of the party they vote for, because to name it is to name a home they will not leave.Not every race went that way, but the test is hardening, and Mamdani, who drove the slate, was not talking about one city when he said it starts now.So here is what I want the synagogue rabbis in New York and the board member in Toronto to carry into Shabbat: The British Jews now losing the assumption that they belong did not lose it by being too loud.They lost it while being moderate, while insisting the trouble was with the fringe, while every alarm was in another city, never at the school their grandchildren attend.“It can’t happen here” was never a wall around them. It was an anesthetic, administered while it happened. You still believe the result in New York cannot reach your children. So did they.Follow us on Google