Herzog Taps Eisenkot to Form Israel's Next Government, a Fresh Blow to Netanyahu

On Saturday night, Israeli President Isaac Herzog announced that he was giving Gadi Eisenkot, the leader of the opposition, the first chance to assemble a governing coalition after the elections held on Oct. 27. It is another setback for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel's longest-serving leader.

Eisenkot is a former military chief who ran as the main challenger to Netanyahu, heading a bloc of parties that wants to remove him from power. He now has up to six weeks to build a coalition. The job comes in a country deeply divided and still reeling from the Hamas-led attacks of Oct. 7, 2023, and from the three years of wars in Gaza and beyond that followed.

Herzog's choice followed consultations this week. Representatives of most of Israel's main parties told the president they recommended that Eisenkot be given the task. A recommendation is not a majority, though, and assembling one remains complicated.

Netanyahu and his allies lost their majority in the Knesset in last month's vote. Eisenkot's bloc did not win one either. That leaves the Arab-led parties, which made historic gains in the election, as potential kingmakers, though a politically fraught kind. An Arab party has joined a governing coalition only once in Israel's history, and doing so again could be especially divisive for Eisenkot after more than three years of war in Gaza.

Netanyahu has campaigned to head off any such alliance. That has included unsubstantiated claims that Arab parties "stole" the elections. Shortly before Herzog spoke, the prime minister issued a video statement calling for a "national unity government." He warned against "hastily swearing in a government with terrorist supporters," language he uses for the Arab-led parties. He and his allies have repeatedly portrayed those parties as a threat to national security. Eisenkot has signaled he is willing to partner with them under certain conditions, among them calling Hamas a terrorist group that must be destroyed.

There are other paths. Eisenkot and Netanyahu, whose Likud remains the single largest party in the Knesset, could try to form a broad unity government with the major Jewish parties. But the two men differ sharply on issues that would be hard to bridge. Netanyahu relies on religious parties that demand draft exemptions for ultra-Orthodox men, and he opposes a formal investigation into the failures surrounding the Oct. 7 attacks.

Eisenkot could instead try a minority government, propped up from outside by Arab parties that would not formally join the coalition. Other members of his own bloc have said they would reject that arrangement.

Eisenkot's party, Yashar, answered Netanyahu's video with a statement on X. It urged Likud members to disavow their alliance with "radical parties," an apparent reference to the more extreme parties in Netanyahu's religious-nationalist base. The party added that Eisenkot would include only parties and lawmakers who support its principles.

The six-week clock now frames the question: whether Eisenkot can find a majority among partners who disagree about Arab parties, or whether a unity arrangement with Netanyahu's camp becomes the only option on the table.