A detailed profile of Benjamin Netanyahu’s key political rivals, including Gadi Eisenkot, Naftali Bennett, and Yair Lapid, ahead of Israel’s general election.
JERUSALEM: Israel will hold a general election on October 27, with veteran Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu locked in a tight race to stay in power.
Here are his main rivals:
Gadi Eisenkot: The general
The son of Moroccan immigrants, ex-army chief Gadi Eisenkot, 66, has emerged as Netanyahu’s main rival, with polls putting the two neck and neck in the final days before the vote.
While he lacks his opponent’s political experience, he enjoys public sympathy following the death in combat of his son Gal and two of his nephews during the Gaza war.
Seen as belonging to the centre-right, Eisenkot has expressed some public positions on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that maintain the current government’s tough line — for instance, vowing to prevent the creation of a Palestinian state and to end Hamas’s rule in Gaza within 18 months if elected.
He has also expressed support for Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank, but has promised to crack down on settlers who have attacked Palestinians with impunity under Netanyahu’s staunchly pro-settlement government.
Eisenkot resigned from Netanyahu’s war cabinet in 2024, and has become a scathing critic of the premier’s leadership.
He founded his own party Yashar, meaning “Straight”, in 2025. He would be the first prime minister of Middle Eastern or North African descent.
Naftali Bennett: The right-wing alternative
Former prime minister Naftali Bennett, 54, leads the centre-right Beyahad party, which is polling in third place.
The former tech entrepreneur and son of American immigrants established himself as a leading figure in the nationalist right and settler movement, but has since presented himself as a secular centrist.
Bennett caused a stir in 2021 by forming a diverse coalition government spanning the Israeli political spectrum, with the unprecedented support of an Arab party.
It brought an end to Netanyahu’s 12 uninterrupted years in power, but Bennett’s government only lasted a year.
Israeli commentators believe he can attract right-wing voters who are disappointed with Netanyahu but do not want to move leftward.
Despite his fierce criticism of him, Bennett has voiced openness to including Netanyahu in an opposition-led coalition government.
Yair Lapid: The former TV journalist –
Once a star television journalist, Yair Lapid, 62, swiftly established himself as one of Netanyahu’s main opponents when he founded the centrist Yesh Atid party in 2012.
Lapid has served as finance and foreign minister and briefly took over as prime minister in 2022 as part of a power-sharing deal with Bennett, with whom he is again allied.
An avowed secularist, Lapid has the polish of a TV star and is ever-present on social media, routinely taking Netanyahu to task with biting commentary.
But few observers see him winning on his own as he struggles to win voters beyond his core base of urban and secular Israelis.
Avigdor Lieberman: The secular nationalist
Born in Soviet Moldova in 1958, Avigdor Lieberman moved to Israel in the late 1970s and is a veteran of the political scene, taking a hardline nationalist stance on national security while staying staunchly secular.
The founder of the Yisrael Beiteinu party, Lieberman initially relied on the Russian-speaking electorate before gradually broadening his base.
He was once a close Netanyahu associate, with some crediting Lieberman with helping engineer the premier’s razor-thin upset victory in 1996 that first brought him to power.
Lieberman now regularly criticises Netanyahu in heated terms, calling him a failure on security.
Lieberman is one of the few politicians to have headed three of Israel’s key ministries — foreign, defence and finance.
Mansour Abbas: The potential kingmaker
Arab-Israeli party leader Mansour Abbas is seeking to mobilise his community, which makes up 20 percent of the population, to prevent Netanyahu’s return to power.
Abbas’s Raam became the first Arab party to join an Israeli government in Bennett’s 2021 coalition and he could again be a kingmaker if the opposition agrees to rely on his lawmakers to oust Netanyahu.
In a recent interview with AFP, the former dentist vowed to bring out voters to replace Netanyahu’s “racist, fascist right-wing government”.
Netanyahu has tried to tarnish Jewish opposition leaders by constantly raising the spectre that they would team up with Abbas, whose roots are in political Islam.
Seeking to broaden support, Abbas has taken the unprecedented step of tapping an Israeli Jew, former police official Yoav Segalovitz, as a candidate on his party’s slate.
Yair Golan: The remaining liberal
After years of Israel shifting to the right, Yair Golan’s party The Democrats represents what remains of the mainstream left, including remnants of the Labour Party that led Israel without interruption for the country’s first three decades.
Golan is the only major Israeli political leader who still explicitly backs a two-state solution with the Palestinians.
He is also liberal on social issues, calling for Israel to allow gay marriage and to let public transportation run on the Jewish Sabbath.
A former senior military officer, Golan volunteered to return to duty immediately when Hamas attacked on October 7, 2023, picking up a gun and within hours personally rescuing people in his car.