Eisenkot Calls for Opposition Summit, Excludes Gantz

Yashar party leader Gadi Eisenkot called on opposition leaders to convene following the announcement of Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid’s new joint slate, as the anti-Netanyahu camp tries to determine whether it can build a viable majority ahead of the next election.

According to a statement from Yashar, Eisenkot is reaching out to leaders of all Zionist opposition parties, including former prime minister Bennett, Opposition Leader Lapid, Avigdor Liberman’s Yisrael Beytenu and Yair Golan’s Democrats. The goal, according to Eisenkot, is to coordinate a path toward a Zionist majority in the next Knesset.

Bennett and Lapid announced their joint “Together” slate Sunday, reviving the political partnership that led the 2021 change government. Bennett has publicly invited Eisenkot to join the alliance, but Eisenkot has so far kept his own political framework separate.

The move comes as the opposition is attempting, once again, to solve the ancient Israeli riddle of how to unite everyone who agrees on replacing Netanyahu but disagrees on almost everything else. Humanity invented the wheel faster than this bloc manages to arrange a meeting.

Notably absent from Eisenkot’s call is Blue and White, led by his former political partner Benny Gantz. Eisenkot left Blue and White last year after his relationship with Gantz deteriorated and later formed Yashar. Gantz has also resisted efforts to place him firmly inside the opposition bloc, and has suggested he could join a Netanyahu-led government under certain circumstances.

Also excluded from the proposed meeting are the Arab-majority Hadash-Ta’al and Ra’am parties. Several opposition figures have said they will not sit in a government with an Arab party after the October 7, 2023 attacks.

When announcing the new Together slate, Bennett said the alliance would seek to form a government based only on Zionist parties, rather than repeating the 2021 arrangement that relied on Mansour Abbas’s Ra’am.

That position may make political sense for parts of the electorate, but it leaves the opposition facing a basic arithmetic problem. Even after the Bennett-Lapid merger, it remains unclear how the anti-Netanyahu camp could reach the 61 seats needed to form a government without outside support from Arab parties.

Eisenkot’s proposed summit is therefore less a victory lap than an attempt to clarify whether the opposition’s many moving pieces can actually become a governing alternative.