On October 27, Israel will hold its first legislative elections since the start of the war against Gaza and the wider regional conflict it has sparked. Despite this having been the first time since 1988 that an Israeli government has served out its full term, a sign that in any other state would be taken as a signal of sustainability, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is in trouble.

Already Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, having served for nearly 19 years out of the last 30, the 76-year-old leader of Likud is gunning for another term in office. This, despite a widely publicized bribery trial against him and his wife, unending controversy over the issue of conscription of the Haredim into the military, and a war with Iran that remains without an end in sight and has left its greatest adversary in control of arguably the world’s most important waterway. (The genocide and subjugation of Palestinians, something supported by Jewish Israelis across the spectrum, is not one of the major political problems Netanyahu is contending with.)

Many politicians, such as former prime ministers Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid, and longtime former minister Avigdor Lieberman, are looking to succeed Netanyahu, to dispense with his legacy, and to bring Israel back into the good graces of the world. But for an increasing segment of the anti-Netanyahu crowd, there is one truly formidable candidate emerging to take his place: former Chief of the General Staff of the Israel Defense Forces Gadi Eisenkot.

Eisenkot’s party Yashar (Hebrew for “Honest”) has skyrocketed in the polls since April, and is now neck and neck with Likud as the country’s most popular political force. Eisenkot has been sold to the Israeli public as the “complete opposite” of Netanyahu, with commentator Raviv Drucker writing in Haaretz in June, “His honesty, thoroughness and seriousness would be the ultimate remedy for us.”

Some outside Israel are beginning to take notice as well. A recent David Remnick profile of Eisenkot in The New Yorker presents the former IDF leader as the “anti-Bibi” in both “manner and character”—a “humble soldier” fighting for a “Jewish, democratic, progressive, and liberal state.”

Heavily downplayed amid these sanguine thoughts about what kind of leader Eisenkot could be is the issue of the kind of military leader he has already been. While this may be of little concern to the Israelis, to the Arabs who have been on the bombarded side, Eisenkot is primarily known as the architect of the strategy of collective civilian punishment known as the Dahieh Doctrine.

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Before becoming chief of the General Staff, Eisenkot was the leader of the IDF’s Operations Directorate during the 2006 Lebanon War, and believed that the only way to effectively achieve deterrence against Hezbollah was to heavily bombard Dahieh, the southern suburbs of Beirut. In a 2008 interview, Eisenkot acknowledged that this policy deliberately used disproportionate force against the civilian population, “causing great damage and destruction.” The goal was to make the threat of extraordinary harm to the local population a deterrent against future attacks, and to send a message to other countries that the same could be done to them.

It was not the first time that the IDF had carpet-bombed cities or even aimed to demolish neighborhoods, but Eisenkot worked to bring the doctrine out of the shadows and into mainstream discourse. He succeeded; the Dahieh Doctrine would be utilized again and again with even greater intensity, destroying entire communities that the IDF now declared to be instead “surface-to-surface rocket villages” and “military bases.”

The regional conflict that came in the aftermath of October 7 has seen the Dahieh Doctrine used not only on a massive scale in Gaza, where critical infrastructure and civilian dwellings have been endlessly targeted. It has also been utilized yet again in both Dahieh itself and across Lebanon’s south. Still unsatisfied, calls have emerged from the Israeli right to apply the doctrine to Yemen as well as Iran. During the most recent outbreak of war in Lebanon in March, Eisenkot declared that the “Dahieh Doctrine has never been more relevant…and it must be implemented,” and that the Israeli war that had demolished wide swathes of southern Lebanon had not been powerful enough.

Eisenkot has differentiated himself by arguing for what he deems a much more cautious approach in conflict, an end to the endless wars without objectives that Netanyahu has been engaging in. Eisenkot had advocated against a unilateral strike against Hezbollah early on in the war, arguing that Gaza was supposed to be the primary focus and that Lebanon could wait. Eisenkot has placed particular criticism on Netanyahu’s handling of the war on Iran, saying that its main objectives could have been achieved “in the shadows,” and that overthrowing the Islamic Republic was not possible.

But Eisenkot has still lavished praise on other aspects of the destructive wars Netanyahu’s government has waged, such as unilaterally assassinating Hassan Nasrallah and Ali Khamenei and imposing military dominance over Gaza. In some respects, Eisenkot has gone even further than Netanyahu. He criticized the original ceasefire agreement in Lebanon that still allowed Israel almost total freedom of action, and in March, advocated “maximum force in minimum time,” hoping to cause religious strife in Lebanon by “humiliating” the Shia population by forcing them into Christian areas.

With regards to the Palestinians, Eisenkot has done the minimum in acknowledging Arabs are indeed citizens of the state, but has said that he will only accept a party representing Arab citizens if they support the nature of Israel as a Jewish ethnostate, something no party representing that demographic has ever agreed to. Eisenkot has also reiterated his opposition to a Palestinian state and his support for maintaining settlements in the West Bank, opposing full annexation not because it is against international law or morally wrong, but because the new Arab population would endanger the Jewish majority in Israel. When Trump proposed the “Gaza Riviera” plan that would see the entire population expelled, Eisenkot called it a “blessing for Israel,” but only if the national leadership “knows how to make use” of it.

Eisenkot’s focus, in a dynamic perhaps familiar to Americans, has been on advocating a return to norms and restoring Israel’s international image. Eisenkot may differ from Netanyahu on some domestic matters, but on the issues that are central to Israel’s identity and place in the world—namely, the continuation of apartheid and genocide against Palestinians and constant wars in the Middle East—there is no functional difference between him and his opponent. Instead, he promises only that the execution of the wars he launches, their displacement of populations and annihilation of societies, will simply be done with more thought and long-term planning.

Eisenkot believes that after opening Pandora’s box, he can wrangle Israel back from the brink, easily managing all that has spewed out from within it—that a state bent on subjugating the region can in fact conduct that subjugation with honor, respect, and the approval of the world, if only it tried. With the approval of the domestic liberal commentariat and, if he continues to gain momentum, the inevitable hopeful hearts of Americans looking to fall back in love with Israel, Gadi Eisenkot may attempt to do just that.