Eisenkot rules out Ra’am while the polls show neither bloc can reach 61
The challenger’s sharpest attack on Netanyahu yet came with a coalition constraint that the arithmetic does not obviously permit — and with a record of his own on Qatari money.
Gadi Eisenkot, chairman of Yashar and the former IDF chief of staff, called Netanyahu a “pathological liar, in Hebrew and English” in an interview reported by the Times of Israel on Saturday. “That’s Netanyahu’s whole problem,” he said. “He belittles the value of strategy, he extends the war [and] he views a forever war as a tool for political survival.” He accused the prime minister of instilling a “culture of dishonesty” in Israeli public discourse and described Netanyahu’s approval of Qatari funds that reached Hamas as somewhere “between breach of trust and treason.” ToI put to him his own remarks from January 2019, at the end of his term as chief of staff, when he publicly backed the transfer of Qatari money to Gaza. The treason line and the 2019 endorsement belong in the same paragraph or neither belongs in print.
The consequential part of the interview was procedural: Eisenkot said Ra’am will not be in his government. Yoav Segalovitz, the former Yesh Atid MK who is the first Jewish candidate on Ra’am’s list, responded on X that “Whoever wants to lead the State of Israel to genuine change needs to display leadership and not bow to Likud’s scare campaign.” Haaretz’s poll write-ups note that in all recent surveys the non-Arab opposition parties cannot form a coalition on their own. A Channel 13 poll published on 23 September gave the Eisenkot bloc 52 seats to Netanyahu’s 51; a Channel 12 poll reported the same week gave Eisenkot’s bloc 54 to the coalition’s 50, with Yashar the largest party on 23, Likud on 20 and Naftali Bennett’s Beyahad on 13. Neither snippet carried a sample size or field dates. Sixty-one seats is a majority; neither network has either bloc there.
Assessment: Two televised polls from the same week disagree by three seats on the gap, which is a reminder that the story here is not the lead but the ceiling. Eisenkot ruling out Ra’am at bloc parity is either a real red line that caps him below 61, or a pre-election feint he intends to walk back during coalition talks — and Segalovitz’s “scare campaign” line is an accusation that it is the second. Watch whether Eisenkot repeats the formulation in Hebrew to Israeli audiences as precisely as he gave it in this interview. Separately: the reported non-aggression pact among Zionist opposition leaders, headline-only so far, is the more concrete coalition signal and deserves chasing.